“Once I take heed to the Lord, I at all times have pleasure and hope. If I compromise to get out of right here, then the struggling I'm experiencing would solely result in despair.”
Preacher Li Jie and his spouse Li Shanshan had been among the many first members of the Covenant Residence Church (“Shengyue Jiayuan”), which was based in early 2018, the identical 12 months the revised Spiritual Affairs Rules went into impact and the Chinese language authorities launched a large-scale crackdown. on unregistered “home” church buildings similar to Covenant Residence, which continues to this present day.
Will probably be a number of years earlier than Lis experiences this process first hand; in January 2021 – on one of many coldest days of winter – a pair and their two younger songs had been evicted from their residence after native police pressured their landlady to take action. Purpose? Li Jie added his identify to a press release signed by greater than 400 Chinese language pastors and church leaders calling on the federal government to respect the essential freedoms and human rights of non secular residents.
Regardless of such harsh remedy, Covenant Residence Church resisted the strain and insisted that it will perform as a neighborhood of religion. The church, primarily based in Linfen in northern China's Shanxi province – a area with a wealthy Christian historical past – continued to host occasions for households in the course of the summer season college holidays to cater for the big variety of youngsters in its congregation.
It was throughout one such occasion that every little thing modified for Covenant Residence Church and as soon as once more for Lis specifically.
Trip interrupted
On August 19, 2022—the second day of the church's summer season camp in a nationwide park two hours' drive from Linfen—police raided a gathering of about 70 church members, together with about 40 youngsters, who had been having fun with household video games.
Li Jie was handcuffed and pinned to the bottom, as was one other preacher Han Xiaodong, to the questions 'who’re you?' and what are you doing?' they had been ignored by the police, who proceeded to confiscate the telephones and laptops of everybody gathered, demanding passwords from their homeowners and ordering everybody to maintain their palms on the desk.
The whole group was positioned in buses and police vehicles to be taken again to Linfen, the place they had been held in a single day and interrogated in separate places.
Church members later stated they had been requested questions particularly designed to incriminate Li, with police pressuring them to say Li was the primary organizer of the church and that they’d donated cash to him.
Whereas most had been launched the next day, Li Jie, Li Shanshan and Han Xiaodong had been detained and interrogated for 4 days earlier than all three had been positioned in a secret detention facility generally known as Residential Surveillance in a Designated Location (RSDL) on 23 August. Li Shanshan's letter to Li Jie, written on March 9, 2023, the day of their tenth marriage ceremony anniversary, later described how the trio had been pressured to sit down within the hallway and subjected to a few days of sleep deprivation.
A torn household
Lis and Han had been all held till September 6, 2022, after which Li Shanshan was launched on bail and finally returned residence to care for their two sons.
That was the final time she noticed her husband.
Li Jie and Han had been taken to the Yaodu District Detention Middle and each had been formally arrested in September. The 2 preachers refused to plead responsible to the fully baseless “fraud” fees leveled in opposition to them by the authorities, prompting the police to resort to a relentless pursuit of Covenant Residence Church members to strain them to indict their chief.
Church members had been phoned, visited and summoned for questioning for months, and in some circumstances the police even approached their employers and family members in an try and get them to “cooperate”.
In a single notably surprising incident, on November 1, 2022, one other church member, Wang Qiang, was forcibly arrested and subsequently tortured for refusing to present false testimony in opposition to Li and Han. He has since joined the 2 of them on the Yaodu District Detention Middle, the place he has been separated from his spouse, younger daughter and son, whom he has not seen for almost a 12 months and a half.
Pattern concerning
Li, Han and Wang had been all formally charged with “fraud” in June 2023, with prosecutors in Linfen accusing them of forming a felony “clique” and acquiring “unlawful earnings” of 780,000 yuan (round £85,000). All three are nonetheless awaiting trial.
This has turn out to be too widespread in China in recent times. Many church leaders who signed the identical assertion as Li Jie in 2018 had been equally convicted on fees of “fraud” or “unlawful enterprise operations.”
Such efforts are supposed not solely to justify the detention or imprisonment of non secular leaders, but in addition to undermine their repute and credibility. However Li Jie and lots of like him didn’t lose hope; as is obvious from the quote on the prime of this text – shared by way of his lawyer, who he has now a minimum of been in a position to meet – Li stays dedicated to the reality that he’s harmless of the costs in opposition to him.
In return, the worldwide neighborhood should honor this dedication by refusing to simply accept China's lies about Li and numerous others like him, and certainly by holding the Chinese language Communist Social gathering accountable for its gross mistreatment of home church buildings and different religion or spiritual communities that adhere to its coverage of whole and full management over all elements of the corporate.