Pastor Ezra Jin was just finishing dinner with his elderly mother-in-law in the Chinese city of Beihai last October when more than a dozen police appeared at the door.
They stormed the apartment, confiscated his phones and computer, and hauled him off to jail.
Since then, he’s been confined to a dank cell at Beihai’s No. 2 Detention Center, cut off from his flock and his family, 8,000 miles away in the U.S. His sin: leading a church that Xi Jinping couldn’t bring to heel.
For years, Jin built a thriving Protestant congregation in the heart of Beijing, known as Zion Church, that operated outside the government’s system of tightly controlled official churches. Authorities once tolerated Jin and others like him, back when China’s economy was thriving and the country was gradually opening up to the world.
Then Xi took power and began tightening the screws. Officials interrogated churchgoers, threatened they could lose their jobs and pressured landlords who rented space to churches. Authorities demanded surveillance cameras be installed at Zion. Some of Jin’s assets were frozen, and he was barred from leaving China.