EGN NEWS DESK
‘When I obey the Lord, I nonetheless have pleasure and hope. If I compromise to get out of right here, then the struggling I expertise would solely result in despair.’
Preacher Li Jie and his spouse Li Shanshan had been among the many earliest members of Covenant Home (“Shengyue Jiayuan”) Church which was based in early 2018, the identical 12 months that Revised Regulations on Religious Affairs got here into drive and the Chinese authorities started a sweeping crackdown on unregistered ‘home’ church buildings like Covenant Home which continues thus far.
It can be just a few years earlier than the Lis would expertise this crackdown first-hand; in January 2021 – on one of many coldest days of winter – the couple and their two younger songs had been evicted from their residence after native police pressured their landlady to take action. The motive? Li Jie had added his identify to a press release signed by over 400 Chinese pastors and church leaders calling on the federal government to respect the essential freedoms and human rights of spiritual residents.
Despite such merciless remedy, Covenant Home Church defied the strain and insisted on working as a religion neighborhood. Based in Linfen in northern China’s Shanxi Province – a area of wealthy Christian historical past – the church continued to organise family-friendly occasions through the faculty summer season holidays to cater to the massive variety of kids in its congregation.
It was throughout one such occasion nevertheless that the whole lot modified for Covenant Home Church, and as soon as once more particularly for the Lis.
A vacation interrupted
On 19 August 2022 – the second day of the church’s summer season retreat at a nationwide park a two-hour drive from Linfen – police stormed a gathering of roughly 70 church members, together with round 40 kids, who had been having fun with some household video games.
Li Jie was positioned in handcuffs and pinned to the bottom, as was one other preacher Han Xiaodong, as questions of ‘who’re you?’ and ‘what are you doing?’ had been ignored by officers who proceeded to confiscate the telephones and laptops of all these gathered, demanding passwords from their homeowners and ordering everybody to maintain their arms on tables.
The complete group was positioned into buses and police automobiles to take them again to Linfen, the place they had been held and interrogated in separate venues in a single day.
Church members later reported that they had been requested questions that had been particularly designed to incriminate Li, with the police pressuring them to say that Li was the principle organiser of the church and that that they had donated cash to him.
While most had been launched the subsequent day, Li Jie, Li Shanshan and Han Xiaodong had been held and interrogated for 4 days earlier than all three had been positioned in a type of secret detention generally known as Residential Surveillance in a Designated Location (RSDL) on 23 August. A letter from Li Shanshan to Li Jie, written on 9 March 2023, the tenth anniversary of their marriage, later described how the trio had been pressured to sit down in a hall and subjected to sleep deprivation for 3 days.
A household torn aside
The Lis and Han had been all held till 6 September 2022, upon which Li Shanshan was launched on bail and at last returned residence to take care of their two sons.
That was the final time she noticed her husband.
Li Jie and Han had been transferred to the Yaodu District Detention Centre, and each had been formally arrested in September. Both preachers refused to admit to the fully unfounded allegations of ‘fraud’ that the authorities had made in opposition to them, prompting the police to resort to the relentless harassment of members of Covenant Home Church to strain them to incriminate their leaders.
Church members had been phoned, visited and summoned for questioning for months, and in some case the police even approached their employers and family members in an effort to strain them to ‘co-operate’.
In one notably stunning incident, one other church member Wang Qiang was violently arrested on 1 November 2022 and subsequently tortured as a result of he refused to present false proof in opposition to Li and Han. He has since joined the 2 of them within the Yaodu District Detention Centre, separated from his spouse, younger daughter and a son he has but to fulfill for nearly a 12 months and a half now.
A regarding pattern
Li, Han and Wang had been all formally charged with ‘fraud’ in June 2023, with public prosecutors in Linfen accusing them of forming a felony ‘clique’ and acquiring ‘unlawful revenue’ amounting to 780,000 yuan (roughly £85,000 GBP). All three are nonetheless awaiting trial.
This has develop into far too frequent in China in recent times. Many church leaders who signed the identical declaration as Li Jie again in 2018 have been equally convicted on costs of ‘fraud’ or ‘unlawful enterprise operations’.
The intention of such efforts is just not solely to justify the detention or imprisonment of spiritual leaders, but additionally to undermine their popularity and credibility. But Li Jie and lots of like him haven’t misplaced hope; as is evident from the quote on the prime of this text – shared by way of his lawyer with whom he has not less than been capable of meet now – Li stays dedicated to the reality that he’s harmless of the fees levelled in opposition to him.
The worldwide neighborhood in flip should honour this dedication by refusing to simply accept China’s lies about Li and the numerous others like him, and certainly by holding the Chinese Communist Party to account for its gross mistreatment of home church buildings and different faith or perception communities that don’t conform to its coverage of full and complete management over all features of society.
