Commentary: As Refugees Flood into U.S., Chinese Christians Told to Wait

by Susan Crabtree

On Christmas Eve, members of Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, who fled China several years ago, had their celebrations abruptly cut short.

The congregation had initially sought refuge in South Korea, but was denied a haven there after three years of immigration court proceedings. The next port of call was Thailand, which they hoped would be a peaceful, if temporary, home before being granted sanctuary in the United States. But on December 24, the landlord for the apartments where the 64 church members – roughly half adults and half children – were staying suddenly informed them that Thai police had demanded copies of all their passports, IDs, and visas.

Their visas had expired in October after the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok insisted that all the church members present them for “examination” when they attempted to renew them, advocates for the church told RealClearPolitics.

If church members refused to produce the documents, their landlord directed them to leave immediately – within hours – even though their rent had been paid through January. There was a greater worry, too. The church members knew that Thai authorities had a history of working with the Chinese government to draw Chinese nationals out of hiding, arrest them, and send them back to their homeland.

The sudden demand for documents upended the planned religious services or Christmas Day festivities. Instead, the congregation spent the holidays desperately searching for new housing.

“Obviously, they had to run – the apartment owners said they couldn’t stay even though we had already paid for the whole month of January. But on Christmas Eve they had to evacuate,” Bob Fu, a Chinese American pastor who founded ChinaAid, an organization providing legal services to Chinese Christians, told RealClearPolitics. “There were thousands of dollars wasted, and it was very stressful, but they found their way to a safe haven.”

Living at the mercy of their landlords in fear of foreign government authorities is the new daily reality for the small congregation living in legal limbo in Thailand.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, according to human rights and religious freedom advocates. The United States could grant the church members immediate emergency asylum, as it has done for tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their war-ravaged country and the first group of Afghans airlifted into the United States amid the chaotic U.S. evacuation in August 2021.

Just this month, President Biden announced plans to allow Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans fleeing persecution priority asylum status as long as they arrived by plane and had private sponsors ready to help them resettle.

When it comes to Chinese Christians trapped in limbo, the Biden administration is balking, while offering no explanation for the dramatically different treatment of these groups of foreign nationals seeking asylum. Human rights advocates believe they already have the answer: The Biden administration is wary of further rocking the boat with China amid efforts to repair basic lines of communication.

That calculation, even if it proves temporary, is a break from America’s long tradition of standing for religious freedom at home and abroad. Advocates also warn that U.S. indifference to the plight of the exiled Chinese Christians puts them in imminent danger of arrest and deportation back to China.

Crackdown Prompts Congregation To Flee

The Holy Reformed Church, founded in 2012, previously existed relatively peacefully for several years in the city of Shenzhen on the Chinese mainland bordering Hong Kong. Its pastor, Pan Yongguang, was ordained by the Philadelphia Bible Reformed Church  of the Presbyterian Church in America, the second largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S. (PCA is one-third the size of Presbyterian Church USA. Although the more doctrinally conservative, it has been growing rapidly while the venerable mainline PCUSA has been shrinking.)

To add to the American connection, Pastor Pan and his flock were referred to by some advocates as the “Mayflower Church,” inspired by the Pilgrims who left their homeland for the New World four centuries ago. The nickname stuck. “Even the children were familiar with the history of the Mayflower,” Pan noted last year. “Our faith is the same as the Mayflower’s; our experience is also similar to theirs.”

Although Chinese Christians are allowed to worship only in churches affiliated with Communist Party-controlled religious groups, for decades the authorities tolerated these independent “house churches.”

After President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, however, the house churches have been driven further underground as state authorities stepped up surveillance of all religious practices, including unregistered churches’ activities.

According to a 2017 study by Freedom House, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for democratic reforms and human rights around the world, at least 100 million Chinese citizens belong to religious groups facing “high” or “very high” levels of persecution. These include Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, members of the Falun Gong – and Uyghur Muslims, whose extreme persecution has been labeled an attempted “genocide” by the U.S. State Department.

The forced detention, relocation, sterilization and other abuses of some 1 million Uyghurs has generated the most international headlines in recent years as China has tightened its grip on Xinjiang, a once autonomous region in northwest China and the Uyghur homeland. But the Xi regime is also making life extremely difficult for most believers who continue to try to practice their religious faith independent from government control and intrusion.

The state-sanctioned Christian churches must abide by strict guidelines imposed by Beijing for sermons, and teachings must be in line with the Communist Party’s ideals. The move is part of the government’s “Principle for Promoting Chinese Christianity in China for the Next Five Years” plan, issued in 2018, which details how the Chinese government aims to “Sinicize” or adapt Christianity to China’s communist society. Within hours of the plan going public, Bibles were seized and banned, and digital versions can no longer be found online. Still, many churches, including the Mayflower Church, chose to defy the new laws and have even engaged in direct public protests, further angering authorities.

Despite Xi’s crackdown, or possibly because of it, underground churches have proliferated in recent years. Some estimates put the underground Christian church movement’s members in the tens of millions, likely outnumbering those in the official churches. Dissidents continue to pray together and protest at their own peril.

Before Pan and his congregation fled China, authorities hauled the pastor in for questioning several times, according to Fu. He became a more frequent target of police after they learned that the congregation had officially affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America. Pan also drew the ire of authorities for refusing to allow them to install facial recognition cameras in places of worship. The pastor began to think about leaving China after a friend of the same denomination was arrested. The plans accelerated after millions protested in Hong Kong in 2019 amid Beijing’s new tighter city control. Pan decided to hold a vote of all church members about leaving China; most chose to flee.

China’s Transnational Intimidation

For a time, Mayflower Church found refuge on Jeju Island in South Korea, one of the only places Chinese citizens are allowed entry without a visa. But the Chinese government soon located them and began a harassment campaign. Chinese police started questioning church members who remained in China, family members of those who left, and some congregants whom South Korean immigration authorities tracked down and sent back home, where they found themselves under constant surveillance by police. One woman was refused entry into South Korea and placed under house arrest in Shenzhen.

Chinese authorities even sought to locate Pan and others by forcing their family members in China to urge the asylum seekers to reactivate their WeChat accounts, according to Fu’s testimony to the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom in December.

Beginning in March 2021, Chinese authorities escalated their campaign of harassment and intimidation. Mayflower Church members living on Jeju Island received anonymous menacing phone calls accusing them of “treason” and “subversion of state power,” demanding they return to China immediately.

After exhausting the South Korean asylum system, the congregation voted to leave South Korea for Bangkok where they could apply for U.N. High Commission for Refugee status, a process that could lead to legal asylum in the United States or another Western country. The congregation nervously moved forward with the…