A member of The Church of Almighty God was arrested at the Shanghai airport after she came back from Japan. On July 18, 2018, Tan Ruihua (pseudonym), a member of The Church of Almighty God, a Chinese Christian new religious movement, who had worked in Japan for the...
The leader of a Chinese religious movement was detained and later imprisoned. The Local Church, also known in China as the “Shouters, which the Chinese authorities listed as xie jiao in 1995. This non-denominational movement was started in 1927 by Ni Tuosheng or...
The CCP authorities detained a number of imams last year and continue to hold them for no reason. An imam is an honorific title in Islam given to a person who is the head of a mosque. It is a role equivalent to that of a priest in charge of a church in Christianity or...
Authorities have kept a close watch on an elderly Christian and harassed him one way or other all his life. On July 27, three officers from the Yongcheng city police station barged into the home of 70-year-old Dong Li (pseudonym). He was not at home, so the police...
South Korean missionaries and pastors in China’s Shandong Province have been arrested and deported, and churches have been forcibly shut down. At two o’clock on the afternoon of May 6, 2018, a police station in Heze city dispatched eight officers to an apartment in a...
Several government efforts are underway to severely curtain religious belief in Linfen, a bustling city in China’s Shanxi Province. Earlier this year, the Chinese Communist Party blew up the Golden Lampstand Church in Shanxi’s Linfen city. The church had more than...
A mother and son in Xinjiang Province were forcibly detained because of their belief and after they had applied for passports; they remain unaccounted for to date. A close friend of the arrested recently recounted to Bitter Winter about the arrest and disappearance of...
Authorities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region arrested a man and put him in prison for merely helping a friend who is a member of The Church of Almighty God. In July 2013, officials from Guyuan city Public Security Bureau detained Liu Cheng (pseudonym) for transporting...
Bitter Winter has accessed an exclusive video of a forced demolition of a Catholic church in Fujian. The church was located in Houxue village in the province’s Fuqing city. Nearly 600,000 RMB or 90,000 USD had already been spent on building the church, and its...
Between the government-controlled “red market” of religion and the banned and persecuted groups of the “black market,” lies the vast area of the religious “gray market,” including churches and temples that are neither legal nor explicitly banned as xie jiao and a...