The Struggle for Freedom: The Christian Pastor Convicted of Subversion Against the Chinese Regime

The following article by Ellen Bork was originally published on BushCenter.org on April 2 2024. You can read it in it’s entirety here.

Wang Yi, the pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China, anticipated his imminent arrest in the fall of 2018. He deliberately gained weight to help him withstand prison conditions and drafted an essay setting forth his posture toward the Chinese Communist Party. 

In “My Declaration on Faithful Disobedience,” he accepted that “this communist regime has been allowed by God to rule temporarily” but vowed to “use nonviolent methods to disobey those human laws that disobey the Bible and God.… [M]y savior Jesus Christ also requires me to joyfully bear all costs for disobeying wicked laws.”   

At his direction, the essay was posted on the internet 48 hours after he, his wife Jiang Rong, and 200 Early Rain parishioners were arrested during a raid on his church on Dec. 9, 2018.  

Jiang and the parishioners were eventually released, but Wang was convicted of “incitement to subversion of state power” and sentenced to nine years in prison at a closed trial in December 2019. His wife last had contact with Wang in 2021. She and their son are under house arrest. 

Repression of Christianity and other religions is a hallmark of Chinese Communist Party rule. However, the intensity of persecution has fluctuated, declining after the extreme repression of the Mao era from 1949 to 1976 and then gradually increasing again over the past two decades.  

With the ascent of China’s leader Xi Jinping in 2012, repression of human rights has intensified, fueled by Xi’s hostility verging on paranoia toward universal values of democracy, human rights, and constitutional government. The party portrays these as a Western subversion plot rather than the inalienable rights of individuals.  

With regard to religion, Xi launched a campaign to “Sinicize” China’s religions in 2014, leading to arrests of clergy, removal of crosses, demolition of churches and confiscation of Bibles, according to Human Rights Watch.  

“Sinicization” is an inapt and misleading term for what Xi and the party are trying to do.  

“All the religions that came from outside of China, including Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, had long been Sinicized,” Lian Xi, the David C. Steinmetz Distinguished Professor of World Christianity at Duke University told me. “Christianity first entered China in the Tang dynasty [between 618 and 907] and became Sinicized more than a thousand years before the CCP was born. The issue is really dominance, absolute control of the church [more akin to] `party-ization.’”