The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has decided that certain fundamental tenets of Christianity make the world’s largest religion a sect that must be vigorously suppressed. This includes sentencing a 77-year-old man imprisoned, in part, for helping young Christians find spouses and for believing that faith in Jesus takes people to heaven. According to the CCP, these were the “heretical” activities of a “cult.”
Pastor Yang Zhijin was sentenced to three years in prison. along with 30 of his followers, for “using a sectarian organization to undermine the application of the law”. The CCP was referring to Yang’s House Church, a non-state-sanctioned Chinese church congregation in Henan province that prosecutors say was part of the banned Full Range network of churches.
Whether it is or not – under threat of prison, Yang denied it – Full Range itself would hardly be considered a cult outside of China. Based in 1984 by Pastor Peter Xu, it fits perfectly into the “born again” Christian movement.
And yet, the CCP has listed Full Range as a cult since 1995. At the time, the label was less of a precise legal definition that a CCP designation for religious movements that the state deemed politically dangerous, socially disruptive, or doctrinally “heterodox.”
The Full Range designation was somewhat of an aberration. House church networks generally do not receive this label, especially not those following major branches of Christianity. Full Range, at that time, was one of the Chinese products the biggest house church networks, with approximately tens of thousands of followers geographically dispersed across hundreds of different individual groups. The size of the church may have angered the communist authorities; but that was definitely not the case because their beliefs or practices deviated from fundamental Christian principles.
While China’s legal system is largely opaque, Christian advocacy group ChinaAid got the transcript of Yang’s court decision.
The Zengdu People’s Court revealed in its verdict the extent to which xie jiao The (sectarian) law is now being used against even fundamental Christian beliefs. The prosecution claimed that Full Range “spreads and promotes heretical teachings,” including: “believing in Jesus leads to heaven, not believing leads to hell,” “everyone is a sinner and must confess and repent,” “believing in Jesus can cure diseases” and “crying to be reborn.” The court found Yang guilty, saying his “conduct constitutes the crime of organizing and using a sectarian organization to undermine law enforcement.”
The court also determined that Full Range “interfered[d] with freedom of marriage” – a serious accusation in a country where birth rates hit a new low in 2026 and a declining population threaten demographic collapse. How did Full Range interfere? This made it possible to resolve the Beijing problem by create a “marriage youth group” where he introduced “partners to young people of marriageable age in the Church.” In other words, a voluntary matchmaking scheme qualified as a crime.
As Yang’s conviction shows, Beijing can imprison believers who act according to the most fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.
The designation of religious groups as cults has a long history of being political rather than spiritual – not just in China, of course – and anti-cult laws predate both communism and the CCP. In 1725, the Qing Dynasty branded Christianity xie jiao, fearing Western influence.
When the CCP took power in China in 1949, it renamed from “sect” to “counter-revolutionary” and excluded Catholic and Protestant missionaries.
Today, China and its leader Xi Jinping attempt to control religion with the same iron fist used for everything else, by dictating beliefs and banning “sects.”
How does the CCP decide which groups are cults? The Supreme People’s Court of China proposed a definition for a sect in 1999: “illegal organizations established under the guise of religion, qigong, or other names, deifying their leaders, fabricating and propagating superstitious heresies, and recruiting and controlling their members.”
This definition is deeply ironic coming from the communist sect that rules China. Xi has put its own “thought” on the constitution, the party charter, propaganda applications and children’s school textbooks, where students are taught that “grandpa Xi Jinping always took care of us.” Xi even inherited Mao’s nickname as the “helmsman” of the CCP. The object of worship has changed; This is not the case with politics. Few have cultivated a cult of personality more assiduously than Mao, and Xi seeks his level of deification.
Yet the party fails to see the irony of the situation. From 1998 to 2016, Chinese courts accepted 23,000 sectarian cases and only 69 acquitted.
The court’s widespread use of the term “heretic” in Yang’s case to describe core Christian values only reinforces this point: The religious orthodoxy that his church’s beliefs challenged was Chinese communism. As the People’s Court said, Yang was found guilty of using “a cult organization to deceive the masses who did not know the truth.” The implication being, of course, that the CCP has a monopoly on the truth.
As Yang’s belief shows, the core tenets of Christianity can be legally considered sectarian by the CCP, if it is convenient. Believing in Jesus, in heaven and hell, in the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, or in original sin can end in prison time. If Yang Zhijin and his house church can be called criminals, so can any mainstream church.