In late May, Christian journalist Zhang Zhan attended a daily Zoom prayer meeting organized by members of Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC). The former lawyer and activist had spent four years in prison for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
“To be honest, I am truly afraid,” she told the prominent Reformed house church in Chengdu, China, through tears. “I am actually not tough, but a person who cries often. … It is painful because it is inconvenient for me to attend a church since I am being surveilled. But I long to see my brothers and sisters [in Christ], yet I dare not visit anybody.”
A week and a half later, she shared on WeChat that she was being questioned and threatened by local police, who warned that if she crossed the “red line” again, they would send her back to prison. Zhang wrote: “Whose red line are you all protecting? Is the life of the people the red line? Or is it ‘the opinion of superiors’? I don’t want to go [to jail], and I’m not the one who should go in.”
A few days later, a scheduled interview with Zhang with Christianity Today was canceled after her encrypted messaging app account suddenly disappeared.
“She is still in the eye of the storm, bearing a lot of pressure, [including] endless interrogation or police visits to her residence,” Wang Jianhong, the UK-based founder of the Zhang Zhan Concern Group, told CT. “She has to be discreet when she circumvents [China’s Great Firewall]. Being connected to overseas [people] poses great risks for her.”
Zhang’s post-jail sustained surveillance is not unique among Chinese Christians who have served their sentence and are released. Missionary John Cao, ERCC elder Li Yingqiang, and Guizhou pastor Yang Hua also continue to live under scrutiny as authorities monitor their whereabouts, their social media posts, and who they meet. Once officers spot “suspicious” activities—such as speaking out about their time in prison or connecting with fellow believers—they threaten to return them to prison.
Speaking out for the voiceless
Zhang started to get involved with human rights and political activism after becoming a Christian in 2015. Before that, she had worked as a financial advisor at a securities firm in Shanghai, until the firm fired her for refusing to falsify financial data. Her conversion further changed her life trajectory.
“As a Christian, I do things based on the gospel,” Zhang told Radio Free Asia in 2019. “I hope Christians can push for this country’s peaceful reform or change in politics. I hope to push for some breakthrough.”
Authorities suspended her lawyer license in 2016 in retaliation for signing a petition against new rules that would prevent Chinese lawyers from forming groups, gathering signatures, or issuing open letters. In 2019, she was detained for 65 days after she held up an umbrella in downtown Shanghai in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and called for an end to the Communist Party’s rule.
When Zhang read an online post in early 2020 about the government’s silence on the newly discovered coronavirus, she took a train to Wuhan, arriving on February 1, 2020, before the city went into lockdown. Initially, she tried to pass out gospel tracts. But she quickly realized she needed to let the rest of the world know how dire the situation had become. As a citizen journalist, she walked around Wuhan with her smartphone capturing the city’s empty streets and crowded hospitals, exposing the Chinese government’s inadequate response to COVID-19.
In May 2020, authorities detained and accused Zhang of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” making her the first of four citizen journalists jailed for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak.
A month after Zhang’s imprisonment, she started a hunger strike to protest her detention. In December 2020, the image of her frail body in a wheelchair during her trial worried international human rights groups. Zhang pleaded not guilty, rejecting an offer for more lenient punishment if she admitted her “offense.”
“She barely spoke except for saying citizens’ speech should not be censored, to protest against the ‘illegal trial,’” her lawyer, Zhang Keke, told CBS News. The Shanghai court sentenced her to four years in prison that day.
To avoid punishment and force-feeding, Zhang decided to go on intermittent hunger strikes in the following months. In July 2023, her weight reportedly dropped to 82 pounds, almost half her normal weight. Zhang’s deteriorating health sent her to the hospital for digestive diseases linked to malnutrition.
With months left until her expected release in May 2024, supporters worried that Zhang would die in prison and called on the Chinese government to release her. Their fears were only abated on May 13, when fellow activist Peng Yonghe filmed a video of the newly freed Zhang clad in pajamas at her brother’s house, thanking everyone for their support.
Two weeks later, she showed up on Early Rain’s “5 p.m. in China” Zoom prayer meeting. In an oft-rambling monologue, she spoke of how she prayed for a fellow prisoner’s runny nose and another’s toothache and saw God heal them both. She also revealed that she felt God calling her to persist in her hunger strike, even if her loved ones didn’t support her actions.
“I really struggled to see my family members under tremendous pressure,” she said on the Zoom call. “They do not believe in Christ. I cannot bear to see them constantly frightened as I continue to share statements that would upset them as well as the police. But I feel like this is what God wants me to do: to offer my body as a living sacrifice.”
For now, Zhang is still able to post on the social platform X. On July 6, she uploaded a video of herself walking in a Shanghai park, asking if anyone would like to come meet her and have a Bible study together. “This city is beautiful, the park is pretty, but the freedom of religion is not allowed,” she lamented.
“These people are absolutely lawless”
Meanwhile, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, another recently released Christian, John Cao, is also being monitored. Cao served a seven-year sentence for “organizing illegal border crossings”—a fabricated charge targeting his Christian ministry—and was finally freed this March. Though he is back in his hometown, he is unable to freely move around or apply for a passport, as authorities refuse to give him a Chinese ID. His wife and two adult sons live in the United States.
Cao wrote on a Christian blog that on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, police detained him for more than 20 hours without reason. (Often, people regarded as “sensitive” in China are rounded up on that day.) Two days later, he saw “two worker-like individuals installing a high-definition camera” pointed at his mother’s house, where Cao is temporarily staying. Authorities also installed two more cameras at the entrance of the apartment complex.
He noted that the cameras not only track his movements but also monitor who comes to visit. “The police have let it be known that they will not go after people who only visit me once, but people who come to visit me a second time must enter the public security’s records.” He believes the goal is to completely isolate him.
Cao told CT that police detained him for more than 10 hours a second time in June. When he asked if he had committed any crime, the public security officer said no, but that it was a directive from their superiors. “These people are absolutely lawless,” he said. “The reason I stopped writing [on a blog] is because they hinted at me that if I continue to write, they will ban me from leaving [the country] and not grant me my personal identification. I told them, ‘Fine.’ Hence, I will stop writing for now.”
Pastors “fakely released”
The harassment that released prisoners face don’t have an expiration date. Li Yingqiang, an elder at ERCC, is still experiencing surveillance and repeat detentions after officials released him in 2020. Authorities first arrested Li in December 2018 during a crackdown on the church and its outspoken pastor, Wang Yi. Because the church broached sensitive topics like speaking out against President Xi Jinping’s persecution of churches, it found itself in the government’s crosshairs. In 2019, a Chengdu court sentenced Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power.”
Li spent eight months in prison before authorities released him, sending him back to his hometown in Hubei Province, where he was on bail pending trial for a year. Since then, he has returned to Chengdu, where he continues to lead the church as it meets in smaller groups and online.
Because Li continued his ministry, authorities would often summon him to the police station for questioning and monitor him and his family, at one point following him every time he went out and preventing visitors from coming to their home. Education officials threatened to take his children away because he refused to send his children to public school, choosing instead to send them to the church’s unregistered Christian school. In November, authorities detained Li for 10 days after he conducted a baptism and led Communion at ERCC’s church plant in Dazhou, Sichuan Province.
Police in Sichuan warned him in 2020 that, because Chengdu authorities have officially disbanded ERCC, they will not allow the church to continue gathering and worshiping. As long as Li remains in Chengdu, they vowed to stop him from doing ministry.
“From an eternal point of view, is there any other threshing floor that is more worthy for you to invest your whole life in than China?” Li asked his congregation in a recent sermon to encourage them to persevere. “From a secular standpoint, ‘the garbage time of history’ may be the time for the church to excavate hard soil, ready hearts, and experience trials, preparing for the great spiritual harvest ahead.”
Over in Guizhou Province, authorities are also tracking Yang Hua, pastor of Guiyang Livingstone Church, whom authorities released from prison in 2019 after he spent two years behind bars for “divulging state secrets.” Authorities cracked down on his house church because it had grown rapidly and purchased a larger gathering space in an office building, all the while refusing to join the government-sanctioned Three-Self church.
Yet even after his release, Yang “remained imprisoned as police kept him under their relentless scrutiny,” China Aid reported. During major political events, sensitive anniversaries, or official visits to Guizhou by foreign diplomats, authorities either placed him under house arrest or forced him to travel outside of the province.
In 2021, Yang was planning to travel to Qingdao to meet with Christian friends when police took him into the station to prevent him from leaving. An officer interrogated him and began beating him, slapping his cheek “with such force that I could hardly hear any sounds afterward,” the pastor told China Aid. “He then started cursing and said that it is now the world of the Chinese Communist Party.” Once they released Yang, he was rushed to the hospital.
A friend of Yang, who asked not to be named for security reasons, noted that although Yang is no longer behind bars, he was “fakely released.”
“[Yang] has been monitored 24/7,” the friend said. “While he is relatively free in his town, if he goes to other cities, they will dispatch police to watch him closely. From the time he’s on the road to checking into his hotel, they escort him all the way.”
