Members of the self-help group are persecuted. The authorities claim they belong to yet another xie jiao.
by Lyndon Li
Yuan Zhang was a banker at the height of her career in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), when she began to unravel. Weighing over 100 kilograms and prone to violent outbursts that landed her in police stations, she was a woman with no language for what she was experiencing. She found that language in the Chinese body‑mind‑spirit movement founded by Zhang Xinyue on the basis of her book “Create Abundance.” Published in Mandarin in 2012, it spread through the country via wellness centres charging 365 yuan (i.e., 51–52 US dollars) a year in membership fees. “The situation is what it is,” she recalls reading in the founder’s book. “But it can be better.” She describes the sentence as arriving like a shaft of light.
Today she sits in Dublin awaiting asylum. In 2019, Beijing police summoned her, warned that continued involvement with “Create Abundance” would see her arrested as a xie jiao member, and threatened that her two daughters’ future prospects would be permanently damaged. She left for Malaysia within weeks. In March 2025, while visiting Ireland as a tourist, she learned that a PRC court had named her in a judgment under Article 300 of the Criminal Law, which criminalises the “organisation or use of a xie jiao to undermine implementation of the law.” She has not returned.
“Xie jiao” is translated, by the Chinese government itself, as “evil cult.” It literally means “organizations promoting heterodox teachings,” and most scholars of religion do not translate it, as it is inherently different from the English “cult.”
Yuan Zhang’s case is one of several now drawing attention in Western capitals. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has listed multiple Create Abundance members as religious prisoners of conscience, describing the group as a legal commercial network of lifestyle clubs promoting spirituality and personal development, with members sentenced to eight months for “using xie jiao to undermine law enforcement.”
Article 300 is the key to understanding what is happening here. Yuan Zhang only learned of its significance when her Irish solicitor explained it: the statute is administered not by local courts but by the Ministry of State Security. It has historically been used against Falun Gong and Christian new religious movements. Its application to a group whose annual membership fee was less than a Beijing restaurant meal raises serious questions about how broadly Beijing now interprets the concept of xie jiao.
Chinese government experts, commissioned to assess whether Create Abundance qualified as a xie jiao, or “heterodox teaching,” concluded that it did not, though their findings were classified. The group promotes psychological self‑improvement and personal responsibility, with no mandatory belief system and no compulsory donations beyond the annual fee. “I joined the Communist Party at eighteen,” Yuan Zhang says drily. “You want to tell me I then went and joined a xie jiao?”
The picture is not entirely simple. Chinese courts have also convicted certain organisers of pyramid‑selling offences.
But whatever one makes of “Create Abundance” itself, what is being done to its members follows a pattern that goes well beyond criminal prosecution. Yuan Zhang describes a fellow member whose niece, a graduate student visiting the PRC from Canada, was arrested and held while authorities pressured the girl’s uncle abroad to come back and “clarify matters.”
Freezing Yuan Zhang’s property—bought in 1998 by a student’s parents, years before the group existed—is not fraud enforcement. It is expropriation. And when PRC court judgments begin reaching into Dublin, the nature of the group becomes a secondary question. The primary question is what Beijing believes it is entitled to do to its citizens, wherever in the world they happen to be.
Yuan Zhang is philosophical. “I spent years learning to take responsibility for my own life,” she says. “And now a government that takes no responsibility for anyone’s life has decided my life belongs to it.”
Create Abundance members have been listed as religious prisoners of conscience by USCIRF. “Bitter Winter” sought comment from the organisation and from Chinese authorities. No response was received before publication.
Lyndon Li is a Chinese journalist in exile specializing in human rights, transnational repression, and Chinese politics. His work has appeared in “The Guardian,” “The Times,” “Financial Times,” and the Voice of America Chinese Service, writing across English and Mandarin-language audiences on UK-China relations, CCP influence operations, asylum policy, and the experiences of Chinese communities abroad.
