Zion Church Case: Chinese Authorities Punish and Harass Defense Lawyers, Forcing Them to Withdraw

After 18 pastors and church workers at Zion Church, including senior pastor Jin Mingri, were detained last October, as the case progressed, as many as 40 lawyers joined the defense team. The detained Zion Church members were accused of “the crime of illegally using internet information” and held at the No. 1 and No. 2 detention centers in Beihai, Guangxi.

Lawyers soon met with their respective clients, a right guaranteed by law, and began performing their duties as defense lawyers. Through the lawyers, the outside world learned about the defendants’ circumstances during detention—including their living conditions, medical needs, and requests to obtain Bibles; the lawyers released limited information about the case because they were under pressure to remain silent. They also filed complaints with the procuratorate about police procedural violations. For a while, everything seemed relatively normal. However, not long afterward, Zhang Kai, the lead defense lawyer representing Pastor Jin Mingri, was summoned repeatedly by officials from the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau, during which they issued veiled or direct threats. Community police also found various reasons to visit his home in the middle of the night, intimidating his wife and children. In December, Zhang Kai received notice from the Justice Bureau stating that he had “disrupted court order” while representing another case, and that his law license was to be revoked.

Everyone—the family of Pastor Jin Mingri, the defense team, and those concerned about China’s justice system—understood that the Justice Bureau’s intention was to remove Zhang Kai from this case. Zhang Kai is a well-known lawyer in his forties and a Christian. For more than a decade, he has provided legal defense and services in countless cases involving house churches throughout China. Between 2014 and 2015, the government launched a new round of harsh repression against house churches, including raids, the removal of crosses, and the arrest of pastors. In August 2015, Zhang Kai was arrested while representing a house church case in Wenzhou, Zhejiang. He was secretly imprisoned and tortured. He was released several months later but remained under close surveillance. For the three years after his release, his professional status was marked as “invalid” on the website of the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau, and he was not permitted to resume practicing law until 2018.

In January this year, the Justice Bureau held a hearing according to so-called “procedures,” but the result was unsurprising: lawyer Zhang Kai’s license was revoked. This time, the revocation was permanent. According to a statement issued by the families, six other lawyers in the Zion Church case have recently had their licenses suspended for six months. As the case has entered a critical stage, the workload of the defense lawyers is expected to increase, which has caused the families deep concern.

Five months have passed, and the Zion Church case is still in the so-called “public security investigation stage” and has already been “extended” several times. The arrested pastors and church workers have not yet been formally charged. According to the families, the interrogations have consistently focused on the tithes and donations paid by church believers over the years. It has been reported that the authorities are attempting to frame church leaders and workers for “fraud.”

The authorities have used various forms of pressure and harassment to force members of the defense team to withdraw from the case, and this has already begun to work:

● Justice Bureau officials frequently summon lawyers and explicitly demand that they withdraw from the case, or else face “serious professional consequences”;

● The annual assessment of law firms is held up, effectively freezing the work of all lawyers at the firm;

● Police and unidentified community officials visit their homes, intimidating their spouses and children;

● Police travel to the lawyers’ hometowns in other parts of China to pressure their parents and relatives.

Li Xiaoming is a member of Zion Church and a lawyer. According to information he provided, more than 20 lawyers involved in the Zion Church case are currently facing varying degrees of pressure. Of these, at least a dozen lawyers have been summoned for questioning and ordered to withdraw from the case; in addition, three lawyers have been subjected to financial audits. Lawyer Li Xiaoming himself was ordered to voluntarily surrender his law license. Under pressure, his law firm recently issued a notice terminating his employment contract.

What we are witnessing is not an isolated case, but the norm for criminal defense lawyers in China. The essence of a defense lawyer’s work is to present opposing arguments based on the law and evidence, while China’s judicial authorities are showing growing hostility toward this, attempting to control the entire judicial process completely according to their own wishes and design. As for what the legal provisions say, in China it is almost irrelevant.

In 2015, China launched a large-scale crackdown on human rights lawyers, known as the “709 crackdown,” in which approximately 20 lawyers and their assistants were arrested, and nearly 300 lawyers and human rights defenders were summoned or briefly detained.

Since 2015, more than 40 human rights lawyers have had their law licenses revoked or canceled.

Government-appointed lawyers

From countless past cases, we have reason to fear that the authorities’ plan is to replace the arrested Zion Church members’ own lawyers with government-appointed lawyers, while claiming to respect the detainees’ lawful right to defense. Once the defense lawyers have been forced out one by one, the authorities will next force the detainees to accept government-appointed lawyers.

In China, government-appointed lawyers are not equivalent to public defenders in the U.S. justice system. They are personally selected by the government, not because the defendants cannot afford private lawyers, but because they are willing to assist the public security, procuratorate, and courts—none of the three is independent, and all are under the complete control of the Party/state—in completing a sham judicial process.

These government-appointed lawyers do not communicate with the families, who know nothing about what they are doing. The authorities arrange for these lawyers to meet with the defendants in detention centers. There, they wheedle and pressure them, pretending to be friends of the defendants and persuading them to sign representation agreements. These lawyers collude with police interrogators, prosecutors, detention centers, and judges to achieve the same goal: forcing the defendants to confess guilt. Interrogators threaten, prosecutors deceive, judges plead, prison guards impose various punishments, and lawyers lie. Deprived of any information from outside and of the opportunity to communicate with lawyers they trust, defendants ultimately often give in. In countless cases, defendants who refuse government-appointed lawyers face various forms of pressure, including physical and psychological torture and repeatedly delayed trials. This is what lies behind the high walls and iron gates of China’s judicial system.

Zion Church  March 24, 2026

Background: Zion Church was founded by Pastor Jin Mingri in Beijing in 2007. Over the following decade, it grew into one of China’s largest evangelical house churches, with more than 1,000 congregants, and refused to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, China’s officially recognized and supervised Protestant system.

In 2018, Zion Church was banned and its property confiscated. Following this crackdown, Zion Church tried various forms of online worship. During the pandemic, the church’s online worship services became widely popular throughout China, often attended by thousands of Christians. As the number of congregants grew, branches of Zion Church began appearing in multiple provinces and cities. In mid-2025, a nationwide crackdown on Zion Church was launched, and such a nationwide coordinated crackdown could only have been coordinated, planned, and carried out by the Ministry of Public Security. Zion Church is one of many house churches to have been persecuted in recent years. In January this year, four pastors and church workers from Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church were arrested, and their lawyers have still been unable to meet with them. The authorities’ stated reason was that the case “endangered national security.” At the end of 2018, Early Rain Church pastor Wang Yi was arrested and 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 intended to strengthen control over Christianity: restricting the rental and purchase of worship venues; investigating contact between foreign Christians and Chinese churches; further tightening restrictions on churches, clergy, church finances, and seminaries; strengthening censorship of online content; and imprisoning many church leaders on fabricated charges.

The protracted, large-scale crackdown on Christians is far from over.