China’s closure of a dozen churches in Hainan Province while threatening to close many more strongly suggests that the Communist government has a clandestine plan to eliminate all unregistered house churches, according to the China Aid Association.
Incidents of Christian persecution in China rose by 42 percent last year as compared with 2011, according to a report by China Aid, a Texas-based human rights group.
Visitation rights for the family of a prominent Chinese house church leader incarcerated in Xinjiang have been severely curtailed, according to International Christian Concern.
The secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission said China would end the practice of sending its citizens to labor camps without the benefit of a trial, but critics remain skeptical.
A high profile house church Christian in Shanghai who has been continually targeted for government harassment was just handed an extra-judicial sentence to a forced labor camp.
The government of Mengka Township in Yunnan Province has a long history of suppressing the spread of Christianity by persecuting missionaries and banning personal Bibles.
Police in Xinjiang recently raided a house church Sunday School, holding 70 children and their teachers for questioning while detaining seven other teachers.
Authorities in China’s Sichuan province have asked a large house church to stop all its activities, the church’s pastor told Radio Free Asia.
A blind Chinese activist who was supported by Christians in fighting against forced abortions and defending the disabled has left China for the United States, ending a near month diplomatic standoff between the two nations, witnesses said.
A church in Zou Gang, Feixi county, was illegally demolished last month by government-backed real estate developers, according to ChinaAid.
Blind activist Chen Guangcheng now wants to go into exile in the United States rather than remain in China on account of fears for his safety and that of his family.
A blind activist who became a symbol of the fight more religious and political rights in China has fled to the United States embassy in Beijing after escaping from house arrest, but others close to him have been detained, Christian rights activists told Worthy News.
In Xilinhot, officials from the Religious Affairs Bureau, the Public Security’s Domestic Security Protection Squad, the United Front Work Department as well as local police raided a house church, confiscating its property and arresting the pastor and several of his congregation.
Chinese authorities have stepped up their “longstanding opposition to Christianity” in China last year, an influential human rights group said in comments monitored by Worthy News.
One of China’s largest house congregations planned to hold its last outdoor worship service on Christmas Day in the capital Beijing after months of detentions, while elsewhere several congregations were raided by Chinese security forces as part of a Christmas season crackdown, local Christians and activists said.
China has unexpectedly released a prominent house church leader from prison amid international concerns about his health, his family and rights activists confirmed Monday, September 19.
Last Sunday five members of a house church in Fangshan tried to worship with members of the embattled Beijing Shouwang house church in a public square in Beijing.
Fifteen house church leaders from remote regions of China are being detained while local police attempt to extort money from their families for their release.
Pastor Shi Enhao, deputy chairman of the Chinese House Church Alliance, has been sentenced to two years of “re-education through labor,” an extra-judicial punishment handed out by police that requires no trial or conviction of a crime, Worthy News has learned.
A leader in China’s growing underground church movement who disappeared last month was actually in police custody.
Held on “suspicion of using superstition to undermine national law enforcement,” Shi Enhaoi is one of 150 million Chinese Christians who refuse to join the Communist Party’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement: the only officially sanctioned Protestant church on the mainland.