When I visited China in Spring last year (2018) house-church leaders told me that new government religious regulations promulgated in February were already beginning to bite.
Sunday School and youth work were particularly targeted and house-churches ordered to register or disband. In the nine months since then, the situation has deteriorated even further with a veritable storm of persecution unleashed against the church.
Programme of surveillance
As Beijing is enforcing even stricter policing of the Internet and unrolling a nationwide programme of surveillance based on face-recognition technology, news of this new persecution is sporadic and partial. Documentary evidence is therefore particularly valuable. Documents and photos sent out by house-church sources in East China in September prove beyond doubt that the present wave of repression is indeed the worst for 40 years since the infamous Cultural Revolution (1965–1979) when all the churches were closed.
