In Depth:  China

Iain Taylor

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reports that authorities in Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan Province, have employed a series of ‘unlawful expedients’ to prevent Christians taking part in an online prayer meeting.

The prayers were held to mark the fifth anniversary of a government campaign against the Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC), when over 100 members were arrested.

Iain Taylor

Christians in China are facing a new digital crackdown by the government, as it seeks to control every type of content that churches post on the internet.

The country’s unregistered house churches have gone online to worship, and to survive the pandemic and persecution. Now they are having even that avenue of support stripped away, according to persecuted church agency Release International. The measure will hit churches, seminaries and many other ministries.

The camera lens homes in and maps the man’s face – measuring the space between his eyes, the distance between the nose and mouth, the angle of his cheekbones, the shape of his chin. Instantly, that data is converted into a string of numbers called a ‘faceprint’. His face is recognised and compared instantly with millions of other images on a database. His identity is confirmed, without him even knowing it.

Open Doors was one of the first to alert the world to the implications of this mass Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that China has developed. It is now one of the most powerful surveillance tools – and potential Christian persecution tactics – ever devised. 415 million high-tech surveillance cameras, linked to China’s police database and eventually its new ‘social credit system’ which monitors the political loyalty of its citizens, have already been installed on streets and in public venues. A recent BBC News report revealed that the authorities now place QR codes outside the doors of people’s homes, so they can easily know who’s supposed to be there – and who isn’t.

It’s not very often a preacher has to scale a cliff to get into his pulpit, but that is the kind of terrain that Pu Zhidui must overcome as he oversees eight churches comprising 2,000 believers.

The area in which Pu preaches, Fugong county, has 360 churches and 80,000 Christians, but just 67 lay preachers and four pastors.

The preacher of a house church in Taiyuan, who was detained last November, has been detained again along with five women after their Bible study at the preacher’s home.

Almost 40 people from the local authority raided the home of An Yankui, the preacher of Xuncheng Church, as he was having an evening Bible study with a small group of church members.

The Zhouguang Church has held a baptism for 60 people from the west pastoral area in Longgang City, Wenzhou, China’s eastern coastal Zhejiang Province.

Those baptised came from six different churches. After they passed a test demonstrating their faith, local pastors baptised them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

A widowed Chinese Christian in her 60s had her government support subsidy terminated after she refused to remove Christian pictures from her home and ‘stop believing in God’, it was reported in June.

The Christian in Fuzhou city, in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi, had received the monthly pension subsidy of 250 Yuan (£28) since her husband died in 2018.