Beijing underground church pastor arrested on fraud charges over member offerings, wife says 100 police joined raid that ended 200-strong congregation
Squeeze tightens while Xi courts Trump and Putin
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A pastor at a Beijing underground church has been arrested, his wife says
independent.co.uk
Pastor Xianfeng Edward Cui, founder of Beijing Jiaquan Church, was formally arrested on October 23 on charges of fraud, according to his wife Jin Young Gu, who lives outside China and spoke to the Associated Press. The fraud allegations concern the offerings collected by his congregation.
The arrest followed a September 4 raid on the church involving roughly 100 police officers. Cui's congregation has been squeezed for years: authorities sealed off its worship space in 2019, forcing members into scattered small groups, and in 2023 officials interrupted a Sunday class to tell the pastor his church had grown too large — he should lead only one congregation, with fewer than 100 people. Jin, a Korean national, has been denied a visa to return to China as a family member since 2023.
The pattern is systematic. In October 2025, authorities arrested 30 leaders of Zion Church, one of the country's largest underground church networks, in overnight raids across several cities. Its founder, Jin Mingri, was freed in July after a personal request from President Donald Trump to Xi Jinping during Trump's Beijing visit — a release that worked like a tradable token between heads of state rather than a change in policy. Beijing's Shijingshan district police declined comment; the Foreign Ministry did not answer questions.
China permits religious practice only inside state-administered bodies — the official Protestant church is a government organ — and the house churches keep growing precisely because they are the one context the party does not administer. Beijing is meanwhile preparing to host Trump and possibly Putin at Apec in Shenzhen, casting itself as a stabilising great power. Both things are the same policy: the detente buys the crackdown its margin, and the crackdown shows what the detente is for.