A secretive Chinese court sentenced one of the country’s best-known Christian voices and founder of one of its largest underground churches to nine years in prison for subversion of state power and illegal business operations, according to a government statement released on Monday.
Wang Yi, the pastor who founded Early Rain Covenant Church, was detained last December with more than 100 members of his congregation as part of a crackdown on churches, mosques and temples not registered with the state.
While many of Mr. Wang’s parishioners, including his wife, Jiang Rong, were eventually released, Mr. Wang never re-emerged from detention.
As part of his sentence, he will also be stripped of his political rights for three years and have 50,000 renminbi, or almost $7,200, of his assets seized, according to the statement.
Mr. Wang had become known for taking high-profile positions on politically sensitive issues, including forced abortions and the massacre that crushed the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. More recently, he emerged as a critic of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who ushered in more authoritarian policies and abolished term limits.
“Pastor Wang Yi was just sentenced to 9 years in prison for proclaiming the gospel,” read a statement posted to his church’s Facebook page, which added, “May the lord use Pastor Wang Yi’s imprisonment to draw many to himself and to bring glory to his name.”
Mr. Wang’s arrest is part of a broader effort to subdue religious groups in China. The ruling Communist Party has long viewed religions’ independent teachings and leadership structures as threats to its power. That policy has most dramatically included the internment of a million minority Muslims in China’s Far West.
Compared to the country’s 20 million Muslims, most of whom are ethnic minorities, Protestant Christianity is practiced by 60 million ethnic Chinese in the country’s heartland. The vast majority of China’s independent churches have been untouched by the recent crackdown. But observers saw the move against Early Rain, and two other high-profile churches, as a signal to churches to avoid politics.
Mr. Wang, who founded Early Rain in the city of Chengdu, rejected the idea that his church should avoid political issues in order to operate unmolested by the authorities. In a 2017 sermon on the issue he shared a quote that he attributed to Hermann Hesse, saying it was “better to harm your body ten times over, than to harm your soul once.”
In its statement, Mr. Wang’s church quoted the Bible: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
