Her dad was detained in China for leading a church. She hopes Trump can free him in meeting with Xi

By Jessie Yeung, and CNN staff

(CNN) — When Grace Jin Drexel couldn’t contact her father on October 10, she tried not to panic. She had just heard that one of the pastors of his underground Christian church in China had been detained by authorities; maybe he was busy sorting out the situation.

Then her fears were confirmed. Her father, Ezra Jin Mingri, and dozens of other members of Zion Church had been swept up in a mass crackdown across various congregations and Chinese cities – the largest suppression since a similar wave of arrests in 2018.

Chinese authorities have long seen Christianity as an unwelcome foreign influence and a threat to government control, experts say – and this crackdown sends a particularly stark message, targeting a well-known church that has been shut down once before.

But Drexel and her family, all American citizens living in the US while Jin resided in China, hope a major diplomatic meeting this week might change that.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea. While trade is expected to dominate the conversation, there are growing calls for Trump to raise the issue of the crackdown and Jin’s detention.

The summit presents “a very unique timing,” said Drexel, who works as a staffer in the US Senate. “We think that the Trump administration’s prioritization of Americans in this scenario also could be helpful for my father as well, to bring a family member of an American citizen home to be with us in the US and safe,” she told CNN on Monday.

Trump has not publicly commented on the issue, and it’s not clear whether it will be on the agenda on Thursday. Tensions remain high between the US and China, which reached a framework agreement on trade this week ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting, after a series of escalatory tariffs imposed on each other.

But Drexel and her family see this as a rare window of opportunity before Jin’s potential indictment for illegally disseminating information online – which, Drexel said, would make his release much harder to negotiate.

She and Jin have some powerful backers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

“We must make it clear to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) that the persecution of Christians and other people of faith must stop, and that the United States will use every tool, diplomatic and economic, to hold Chinese Communist officials accountable,” Sen. Ted Cruz said in a video shared by the Hudson Institute think tank, where Drexel’s husband works as a fellow.

Earlier this month, when asked about Rubio’s call for the pastors’ release, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “The Chinese government manages religious affairs in accordance with the law, protecting citizens’ freedom of religious belief and normal religious activities. We firmly oppose the US interfering in China’s internal affairs under the guise of so-called religious issues.”

CNN has reached out to the foreign affairs office in Beihai, where Jin is detained, and to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau for comment.

A string of crackdowns

This crackdown is the latest in a long history of religious suppression in China. Religious practice is legal but tightly controlled and surveilled by the government, which registers “official” state-sanctioned churches.

The government only recognizes five faiths: Chinese Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and Taoism. Other local spiritual and religious movements have been subject to harsh crackdowns over the years. But that hasn’t stopped communities from creating their own underground, non-registered churches known as “house churches.”

One 44-year-old Christian in Beijing told CNN she’d attended several “house churches,” and had seen plainclothes police officers entering and asking everyone to register themselves.

During previous crackdowns, “when brothers and sisters were arrested, we would all donate money and send someone to visit them in jail and buy them food and clothes,” she told CNN.

Zion Church is one such “house church” that the 44-year-old recalled attending in previous years. Jin founded Zion Church in 2007 in Beijing while his family was still living in China; it gradually became one of the largest churches in Beijing, Drexel said.

By 2011, Jin was speaking out about crackdowns on other congregations, in the hopes underground churches might become legally recognized. “We are very aware of what we are doing,” he said in 2011, when he granted CNN rare access to film inside his church. “And we are ready to pay the price.”

That price came in 2018. Drexel described a “pressure campaign” that year, with the government installing facial recognition cameras in the lobby of the church’s building after Jin refused to install them inside the church itself.

Hoping to appease the authorities, Jin and his family moved to the US – and when the harassment toward church members in Beijing continued, Jin decided to return to China later that year while his family stayed behind.

That was the last time most of the family saw Jin. The crackdown came soon after; Zion Church was shut down, and Jin was barred from leaving the country. In Chengdu, more than 100 worshipers from a different church were detained, and its pastor, Wang Yi, was jailed for nine years for “inciting subversion of state power.”

Drexel visited her father in 2019 – and she, too, was prevented from leaving China for 11 months, derailing her plans to attend law school. She was eventually allowed to return to the US but hasn’t seen her father since.

After 2018, Jin transformed Zion Church into a semi-virtual network, uploading sermons online and encouraging members around the country to gather and watch sessions together. When the pandemic hit, Zion was quick to adapt to Zoom – and the church’s membership exploded.

“Because of the CCP’s own policy of locking people up inside their house, and there was nothing to do for people, a lot of people went to church (online), and it was the only place where you could interact with people,” Drexel said, referring to China’s stringent zero-Covid and lockdown policies at the time.

The church became a national organization that now reaches 10,000 people each day, Drexel said. But there were also signs that it was once again under threat; authorities were watching Jin’s movements closely, and even blocked him from traveling to other cities within China. Church members reported an uptick in harassment and intimidation.

A fellow Zion pastor asked Jin earlier this month: “What if this is the big thing, that they arrest everyone? What would happen?”

“My dad did not hesitate one moment, and was not scared,” Drexel said. “He just said immediately, ‘Hallelujah, the gospel will spread further.’”

Why now?

The Zion pastors and church leaders arrested in October are now being kept in two detention centers in the southern city of Beihai, according to Drexel.

Though a few have since been released, close to two dozen remain detained, she said.

All the detainees are “innocent Christians,” the church said in a statement on October 12. “Their only ‘offense’ is worshiping God peacefully, preaching the Gospel faithfully, shepherding their flock, and serving their neighbors. These acts of faith are protected under both the Constitution of China and international human rights law.”

It didn’t just happen to Zion, said Drexel – other underground churches have been targeted, too, including Bitter Winter and Early Rain Covenant Church.

The detainees’ families are deeply worried, she said. Some are elderly with health problems, while others have young children at home. Her father, Jin, has severe diabetes – and while he’s now being provided generic medication, he hasn’t been able to receive the prescription issued by his doctor, she said.

And in a rare development that Drexel credits to the international attention on their case, most of the detainees have been granted legal representation.

Jin’s lawyer said he appears in “relatively good spirits,” said Drexel – he even joked that the bad food in detention was good for controlling his diabetes.

But the stakes are high under China’s opaque judicial system, which legal observers say has a conviction rate around 99%. Wang Yi, the pastor arrested in 2018, is still in prison today.

Drexel is still trying to understand why the CCP under Xi – whose grip on power has tightened since 2018 – is so threatened by “this small group of Christians.”

One theory, she said, points to China’s ongoing economic hardships. Wary of growing public discontent, the government may “try to clamp down on everything, including freedom of speech and other civil and society organizations,” she said.

Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology and director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University, partially agreed. While he’s not convinced it has to do with the current economic situation, he emphasized that the churches pose a deep ideological threat to Xi, who has tightened religious regulations since taking office and increasingly emphasized the need to “Sinicize” religions.

“The Chinese authorities always considered Christianity as one of the institutions that pose the greatest challenge – for (starting a) color revolution, for changing people’s attitudes towards the government,” Yang said.

The detainees don’t seem to be a particularly high priority for either Trump or Xi ahead of their meeting, he added.

As the world watches for signs of easing US-China tensions out of their leaders’ high-stakes talks, Drexel has a much simpler wish: she just wants her dad back.

“I just wanted to emphasize that my dad went back to China because he had a deep love for China and Chinese people,” she said. “We want to be able to keep being faithful to our God, as well as to serve our community and serve China.”

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