CHINA’s stated policy of “sinicising” religion is, in effect, about “about putting Xi Jinping in front of the Church”, the daughter of a detained influential pastor has warned.
Grace Jin Drexel, 31, the daughter of the pastor Jin Mingri, also known as Ezra Jin, spoke to the Church Times on Monday. She was visiting the UK to draw attention to the plight of her father and that of 17 other senior members of his church, Beijing Zion Church, who have been detained since October.
Ms Drexel believes that it is naïve to imagine that China, with its expanding influence, wants to control only what goes on within its borders.
She was due to meet the UK’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief, David Smith MP, this week. She was “desperate” for her father’s release, and hoped that China would realise that, internationally it would be “detrimental to their reputation to keep an innocent pastor in prison”.
Zion Church, which her father founded in 2007, is one of China’s largest unregistered or independent churches — one that refuses state oversight. The head of the US-based advocacy group China Aid, Bob Fu, described the detentions in October as “the most extensive and coordinated wave of persecution against urban independent house churches in China in over four decades”.
No date has been set for a trial. Pastor Jin, 56, was charged — after being held in custody for five weeks — with illegal use of information online. He is not allowed direct communication with his family, who are based in the US. Ms Drexel says that he is being denied medication for his diabetes.
Ms Drexel, a US citizen, said that she and her mother had been trying to draw attention to Pastor Jin’s plight since his detention and had both been targeted in the US by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with threatening phone calls and damage to their property.
Pastor Jin had previously clashed with the CCP in 2018. “We were having around 1500 people weekly, and the Chinese government came to my father’s church and demanded that they install 23 facial-recognition cameras inside the sanctuary,” she said.
She said that they were not saying anything political, but declined to allow cameras in. As a result, officials “still installed facial-recognition cameras in the lobby of our rented space . . . and they still ended up being able to pick out those people who came, and started harassing each individual”. Officials went to church members’ workplaces and landlords to demand that they be sacked or evicted, and also to their children’s schools to demand that the children be expelled, she added.
Zion Church’s gatherings became online-only in 2019 after the CCP ordered it to close and confiscated its assets. When Covid struck a year later, however, it found itself ministering to around 10,000 people in 100 church-plants across China. “Our church exploded in its influence,” Ms Drexel said.
She said that the first use of facial-recognition technology to monitor and control Christian individuals was with the Uyghur minority, in the Xinjiang region.