China detains two leaders of prominent underground church
Two leaders of the Early Rain Covenant Church, Yan Hong and Wu Wuqing, were detained on June 14 after armed police stormed a Sunday service in the south-western city of Jiangyou and took dozens of congregants, including children, for questioning, the church said in a statement. The grounds for the detentions are not yet clear; both men had been summoned by police as recently as January on accusations of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge often used against dissidents.
Early Rain, founded in Chengdu in 2008, is one of China’s most prominent unregistered “house” churches and has long been a target of authorities, who require religious congregations to operate within state-sanctioned bodies. Its founding pastor, Wang Yi, was detained in a 2018 raid and is serving a nine-year prison term for “inciting subversion of state power.” The latest detentions fit a sustained pattern of pressure on independent Protestant groups that refuse state registration, and signal that the congregation remains under close watch years after its founder’s imprisonment.