When Pastor Ezra Jin appeared at Washington’s Ronald Reagan Institute on Oct. 21, his presence represented a significant, if incomplete, victory for religious freedom. The founder of China’s influential Zion Church had spent nearly nine months in detention before President Donald Trump’s personal intervention with Xi Jinping helped secure his release in July. Yet eight of his fellow church leaders remain imprisoned in China.
Their continued detention illustrates both the possibilities and limitations of American diplomacy with Beijing. Trump demonstrated that direct engagement with Xi can produce tangible results. The more difficult question is whether Washington can translate such individual successes into sustained pressure against the systematic persecution of Christianity in China.
The distinction matters because China’s treatment of Christians is not simply a collection of human rights violations. It reflects something fundamental about the Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of political authority.
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Five years ago, I argued in Foreign Policy that Christianity represented one of the greatest ideological challenges to communist party rule. Not because Chinese Christians necessarily opposed their government, but because religious institutions offered an alternative source of moral authority that the party could neither manufacture nor fully control.
The developments since have reinforced that assessment.
Under Xi Jinping, religious persecution has evolved from periodic repression into an increasingly comprehensive system of institutional control. The government’s policy of sinicization requires religious communities to align their doctrines, leadership, and activities with Communist Party ideology.
Chinese authorities have expanded restrictions on religious education, surveillance of places of worship, and online religious activity, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 Annual Report. Regulations introduced in September 2025 prohibited clergy from conducting religious activities online outside approved platforms.
The objective is not necessarily to eliminate Christianity. It is to ensure that Christianity exists only on terms established by the Communist Party.
This is an important distinction. Beijing recognizes officially sanctioned Protestant and Catholic institutions. What it increasingly refuses to tolerate are congregations that insist on choosing their own leaders, organizing independently, or conducting religious activities without political supervision.
Zion Church exemplifies this conflict.
Founded by Jin in 2007, the church developed into one of China’s most prominent independent Protestant networks. In 2018, authorities closed its Beijing premises after the congregation refused to install surveillance cameras. Rather than disappear, its members reorganized into smaller gatherings and expanded their activities online.
The church’s survival demonstrated the organizational resilience that makes independent religious communities particularly troubling to authoritarian governments.
In October 2025, Chinese authorities detained Jin and numerous other Zion Church leaders in a coordinated crackdown. His eventual release followed Trump’s intervention during his May 2026 meeting with Xi.
But the detention of eight remaining leaders shows that Beijing’s underlying policy has not changed.
Indeed, the broader regulatory environment has become more restrictive. In May 2026, USCIRF published an assessment of China’s expanding legal framework for religious control. The report identified new legislation that further entrenches the subordination of religious and ethnic identities to the state’s conception of national unity.
These measures reveal the political logic behind the persecution.
Authoritarian governments are not necessarily threatened by religious belief itself. They are threatened by institutions capable of sustaining loyalties, moral principles, and networks of solidarity beyond the government’s control.
A congregation that organizes independently establishes relationships that do not depend upon state approval. Religious leaders possess authority derived from spiritual conviction rather than political appointment. Religious teachings establish moral obligations that can, under certain circumstances, conflict with government demands.
None of this automatically makes Christianity a political opposition movement. Indeed, many Chinese Christians have historically sought to reconcile their faith with patriotism and political stability.
That is precisely why Beijing’s approach may prove counterproductive.
The Communist Party has studied the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, including the role played by religious institutions in sustaining independent civil society. Poland’s Catholic Church, for example, helped preserve social networks and moral authority outside communist political structures.
Yet the lesson Beijing appears to have drawn is that independent religious institutions must be brought under state control before they become politically consequential.
This creates a paradox. By treating peaceful religious independence as a possible political threat, the state risks turning communities that might otherwise remain politically disengaged into enduring sources of alienation.
There is also a broader dimension that Washington should recognize.
China’s campaign against independent Christianity forms part of a larger system of religious repression. Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and other religious communities face varying forms of coercive assimilation, surveillance, and restrictions on religious practice.
The underlying principle is consistent: no institution, identity, or system of belief should command an allegiance that the Communist Party cannot ultimately subordinate to itself.
For American policymakers, this is not merely a question of religious freedom. It provides important evidence about the character of China’s political system and the limits of accommodation with it.
Trump deserves credit for securing Jin’s freedom. His intervention demonstrated that personal diplomacy, backed by the influence of the American presidency, can achieve results that years of conventional diplomatic representations sometimes cannot.
There is also a practical opportunity to build upon that success.
In September, a bipartisan group of senators, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC), and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), urged the administration to prioritize the release of detained religious leaders during Trump’s engagement with Xi.
Their intervention points toward a policy that can transcend Washington’s political divisions.
The administration should maintain a specific list of religious prisoners whose release it seeks, beginning with the remaining Zion Church leaders. Their cases should be raised consistently in senior diplomatic discussions, rather than reserved for occasional human rights dialogues.
Washington should also work with allies to document abuses, protect threatened religious communities, and consider targeted measures against officials directly responsible for serious violations.
But policymakers must recognize the limits of what prisoner diplomacy can accomplish.
Securing individual releases is valuable. It restores freedom to those unjustly imprisoned and demonstrates that international pressure matters. Yet it does not necessarily alter the institutional machinery responsible for their imprisonment.
The ultimate measure of progress would be whether Chinese Christians can worship, educate their children, organize congregations, and appoint religious leaders without fear of state retaliation.
This is not a demand that China adopt an American political system. Freedom of religion is recognized under international human rights law and, at least formally, in China’s own constitution.
Nor does defending religious freedom require abandoning engagement with Beijing on trade, technology, or security. On the contrary, a credible U.S. foreign policy must be capable of pursuing strategic interests while remaining clear about the nature of the government with which it is negotiating.
Trump has already demonstrated that Xi is prepared to respond to American pressure in individual cases. That is an achievement worth recognizing and extending.
But the deeper challenge remains.
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China’s Communist Party fears independent Christianity because it represents something that authoritarian power struggles to accommodate: the conviction that ultimate moral authority does not belong to the state.
Until Beijing accepts that distinction, the release of one pastor, however welcome, will remain an exception rather than evidence of genuine religious freedom.
Azeem Ibrahim, Ph.D., is an officer of the Order of the British Empire, a senior director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, and the author of Authoritarian Century: Omens of a Post-Liberal Order.