China Change, March 24, 2026
Last October, following the detention of 18 pastors and church workers of Zion Church, including its lead Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), as many as forty lawyers joined the defense team as the case progressed. The Zion Church members were charged with “the crime of illegally utilizing information networks” and detained in Beihai, Guangxi province.
The lawyers soon met with their respective clients, a right the law guarantees, and did their work as defense counsels. From the lawyers, the outside world learned about the defendants’ conditions in custody — including their living arrangements, medical necessities, and requests for Bibles; they posted case information, scant though it might have been as they were under pressure to keep quiet; and they filed complaints with the procuratorate against procedural violations on the part of the police. For a while, everything appeared okay.
However, it was not to be. Before long, the lead defense lawyer Zhang Kai (张凯), who was representing Pastor Jin Mingri, was summoned for several meetings by officials from the Beijing municipal Bureau of Justice, where they issued both veiled and direct threats. Neighborhood police officers found reasons to visit his residence in the middle of the night. In December, Zhang received a notice from the justice bureau stating its intent to revoke his license on the ground that he had “disrupted order in the court” while representing another case.
It was clear to everyone — the family of Pastor Jin, the defense team, as well as observers of the Chinese judiciary — that the intent was to remove Zhang Kai from the case.
Zhang Kai is a well-known lawyer and a Christian in his forties. For well over a decade, he has provided legal defense and services in countless cases involving house churches across China. In August 2015, amidst a fresh wave of intense crackdowns on house churches involving raids, removal of crucifixes, and arresting pastors, he was detained in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, while helping a house church fight against trumped-up charges the government had brought against them. Zhang Kai was held incommunicado and tortured. After being released a few months later, he remained under strict surveillance. For three years following his release, the status of his practice was marked as “invalid” on the Justice Bureau’s website, and it wasn’t until 2018 when he was permitted to resume practice.
This January, the Bureau of Justice held a hearing in accordance with their “procedure,” but the outcome was certain and came as no surprise: lawyer Zhang Kai’s license was revoked, and this time, the revocation was permanent.
According to statements (here and here) posted by families, six other lawyers in the Zion Church case were recently handed six-month suspensions of license. It is a cause of grave concern for the families as the case enters a critical phase and defense lawyers’ work is expected to intensify.
Five months on, the case is still in what’s known as the “phase of police investigation” which has been “extended” a couple of times already, and the detainees have not yet been indicted. According to their relatives, the interrogations have centered on tithes and offerings from the church’s congregants over the years. The authorities are reportedly building a case for “fraud” against the church leaders and workers.
The authorities have used various forms of pressure and harassment with the purpose of forcing members of the legal team to withdraw from the case, and it is working:
- Frequent summons for meetings by Justice Bureau officials who explicitly demand that the lawyers withdraw from the case, or face “severe professional repercussions”;
- Law firms’ annual reviews being put on hold, which effectively freezes the work of all lawyers in the firm;
- Police and unidentified neighborhood committee members visited lawyers’ homes, menacing their spouses and children;
- Police travelled to lawyers’ hometown in other parts of China, pressuring parents and relatives.
Li Xiaoming (李晓明) is a member of the Zion Church and a lawyer. According to information he provided, more than 20 lawyers involved in the Zion Church case have currently faced varying degrees of pressure. Among them, at least a dozen lawyers have been summoned for questioning and ordered to withdraw from their defense work; additionally, three lawyers have been subjected to financial audits. Li himself was ordered to voluntarily surrender his law license, and acting under duress, his law firm has recently issued a notice terminating his employment contract.
What we are witnessing is not an exception but a norm for criminal defense lawyers in China. The authorities regard a defense lawyer’s work, which is inherently adversarial, with ever increasing hostility in order to totally control the judicial process according to their will and design. As for what the law says, it matters little.
In 2015, China launched a large-scale crackdown on human rights lawyers known as the 709 Crackdown, arresting two dozen or so lawyers and their assistants, while summoning or temporarily detaining nearly 300 more for questioning and intimidation. Since 2015, more than 40 Chinese human rights lawyers have been disbarred.
Government-appointed lawyers
From countless past examples, we have reason to fear that the authorities’ plan is to replace Zion Church detainees’ own lawyers with government-appointed lawyers, while claiming to respect the detainees’ right to legal defense. Once the defense lawyers are forced out one by one, next, the authorities will compel the detainees to accept government-appointed counsel.
In China, a government-appointed lawyer is not the equivalent of a public defender in the American judicial system. They are handpicked not because the defendants can’t afford private lawyers, but expressly for their willingness to assist the police, the prosecutors, and the courts — all controlled by the Communist Party — in carrying out the sham judicial process.
They would not establish communication with the families, leaving the latter in complete darkness. The authorities would arrange for these lawyers to meet with the detainee at the detention center. There, they would persuade the detainee to sign a retainer agreement.
These lawyers work in unison with the police interrogators, prosecutors, the detention center guards, and the judges, towards a common goal: get the defendant to admit guilt. The interrogators threat, the prosecutors coax, the judges plead, the wardens dole out punishments, and the lawyers deceive. The defendant, deprived of any information from the outside world and from anyone they have confidence in, often end up submitting. In case after case, those who resist engaging the government-appointed lawyers would face relentless pressure, including physical and psychological torture, and prolonged waiting for trial.
Such are the scenes behind the high walls and iron gates of China’s justice system.
Zion Church
Zion Church was founded in Beijing in 2007 by Pastor Jin Mingri. In the next decade, it grew to be one of the largest evangelical house churches in China with well over a thousand congregants that declined to be absorbed into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the state-sanctioned and supervised system for Protestantism in China.
In 2018, Zion Church came under attack, was outlawed, and the church’s property was confiscated.
In the wake of this setback, Zion experimented with various forms of online services. During the pandemic, the church’s online worship sessions became very popular across China, often with thousands of believers in attendance. As the congregation grew, smaller branches of Zion Church popped up in cities in multiple provinces.
In mid-2025, it became clear that a nationwide campaign against Zion Church was well underway, and it could only have been coordinated by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.
Zion Church is among the many house churches under attack. In January, four leaders of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu were arrested and their lawyers have been barred from meeting them. “The case endangers national security” was the reason given to the families and lawyers. In 2018, its pastor, Wang Yi, was arrested and later sentenced to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.”
Since 2018, China’s religious affairs authorities have introduced a series of new regulations aimed at tightening control: restricting places of worship; investigating contact between foreign Christians and Chinese churches; further regulating religious groups, clergy, church finances, and seminaries; imposing stricter censorship of online religious content; and putting church leaders behind bars on spurious charges.
Related:
A Home in God: The Story of Detained Pastor Jin Mingri and China’s City Churches, Part One, Yaxue Cao, October 30, 2025.
A Home in God: The Story of Detained Pastor Jin Mingri and China’s City Churches, Part Two, Yaxue Cao, November 4, 2025.
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