Xixi hasn’t seen her father Han Xiaodong since he was arrested in August 2022. She was just five years old at the time, and she and her two younger brothers have been afraid to sleep in their own beds ever since.
She told her mother that she has decided to grow her hair like Rapunzel so that one day she can use her hair to get her dad out of the Yaodu District Detention Centre where he is currently being held.
A sudden crackdown
Xixi’s family are members of the Covenant Home (“Shengyue Jiayuan”) Church – a small house church formed in 2018 in Linfen in northern China’s Shanxi Province. Han Xiaodong was a well-respected computer science teacher at Linfen No.1 Middle School, but in 2019 he quit his job to enter full-time ministry as a preacher at the church, right at the time when the Chinese government was increasing its crackdown on house churches across the country.
At first, Covenant Home Church avoided the authorities’ repression. It was able to hold family-friendly events during the school summer holidays to cater for the large number of children in the church like Xixi.
All this changed on 19 August 2022.
At around 7pm on the second day of the church’s summer retreat at a national park a two-hour drive from Linfen, police stormed a gathering of around 70 church members who had met to play family games. Han Xiaodong was placed in handcuffs and pinned to the ground, as was another preacher Li Jie, and the Christians gathered were ordered to place their hands on tables as officers confiscated all phones and laptops, demanding passwords from their owners.
Everyone in the group was searched, including pregnant women and about 40 children, before police placed all of the church members in vehicles to take them back to Linfen, where they were handcuffed, detained and interrogated in separate venues overnight.
One mother recalled: ‘My children were terrified that night. More than a year later, they still suffer from that traumatic experience. They are frightened whenever they hear police sirens.’
During the interrogations, it became apparent to the detainees that the police were attempting to build a fraud case against the church’s leaders, as officers asked questions set up to get them to say that Li Jie was the main organiser of the church and its activities or that they had donated money to him.
Most were released the next day, but Han, Li Jie, and Li Jie’s wife Li Shanshan were held and interrogated for four days during which they were subjected to sleep deprivation. On 23 August, the three of them were placed in Residential Surveillance in a Designated Location (RSDL) – a form of secret detention in which the detainee is cut off from the outside world and their lawyers and family members are not told where they are being held.
Manufactured charges
On 6 September, Li Shanshan was released on bail and returned home to look after the Lis’ two sons aged five and eight, but Han and Li Jie remained in custody. By this point, they had been transferred to the Yaodu District Detention Centre. Both were formally arrested in September.
For months, Linfen police continued trying to build a fraud case against the two preachers, visiting, phoning and summoning church members for questioning time and time again, often threatening to detain those who did not co-operate, and even approaching members’ relatives and employers in an effort to force them to testify against their leaders.
Another church member, Wang Qiang, was violently arrested on 1 November 2022 and later subjected to torture because he refused to incriminate Han and Li. He has been detained ever since, separated from his wife, four-year-old daughter, and a son he has yet to meet who was born in January 2023.
In June 2023, public prosecutors in Linfen brought formal ‘fraud’ charges against Han, Li and Wang, accusing them of forming a criminal ‘clique’ and obtaining ‘illegal income’ amounting to 780,000 yuan (approximately £85,000 GBP).
These charges are completely unfounded; Covenant Home Church has a clear policy of explaining where voluntary contributions made by church members are spent, and there is a financial management system in place to ensure that offering money cannot be misappropriated or lent out privately. The church itself has rejected the allegations, and Han, Li and Wang’s wives have all written articles in defence of their spouses, insisting on their innocence.
Such cases have become increasingly common in recent years. China’s current religious regulations stipulate that only government-approved religious leaders can carry out government-approved religious activities in government-approved sites, which means those that fail to meet these requirements become a target of the state. Accusations of ‘fraud’ and ‘illegal business operations’ have become some of the most frequent charges that the authorities use against religious leaders, not only to justify their detention or imprisonment, but also to damage their reputation and credibility.
Han, Li and Wang are all still awaiting trial, but even when this comes the Chinese judicial system offers no guarantees that such a process will be fair, and as such it falls to members of the international community to share their stories, to call attention to the mistreatment of house churches in China, and ultimately to hold the Chinese authorities to account for these egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief.
