Christian Persecution: The Tense Topic Trump And Xi Want To Avoid But Shouldn’t

As President Donald Trump prepares to welcome China’s President Xi Jinping Wednesday night, family members and supporters of over a dozen Christians behind bars are praying and pleading for Trump to raise their cases with the head of the Communist regime.

Gao Pu, a Chinese Christian currently applying for asylum after coming to the U.S. for school in 2007, detailed the horrendous conditions his elderly parents are facing. (RELATED: China Leads Global Campaign To Silence Religious Dissidents On American Soil, Waltz Warns)

While communication between Gao and his parents is rare and must be done through the family’s ever-shifting roster of lawyers, he has learned some of what his parents and other prisoners are suffering.

“The way they are treated is just, you know, inhumane and just brutal and they’re actually, like, animalistic,” the son told the Daily Caller.

The men, he said, are often packed 20 to a cell, forced into the impossible, endless task of cleaning dirt while being fed protein only once a week. Instead of showers, inmates would get hosed down twice a month, and fellow prisoners would be forced into beating anyone caught trying to clean themselves or brush their teeth.

Gao choked up, telling the Caller that he had just heard his 70-year-old father was recently beaten by a group of men, adding that it pains him to consider the details of what his parents are actually going through.

He described his 69-year-old mother as the most “innocent and pure-hearted woman,” whose imprisonment is taking a toll on her mental state as well as her body. She has high blood pressure, chest pain, severe bruising, and a weak left leg, yet she is forced to stand in place for hours every day without rest.

Gao’s parents, Pastor Gao Quanfu and Pang Yu, were both entertainment industry figures who gave up their careers and millions of dollars to follow Christianity. Quanfu was a famous musician and film/TV producer, while Yu was a former actress and TV anchor.

After embracing a calling as a pastor and pastor’s wife, Quanfu and Yu were both detained last year on charges of “using superstition to undermine the implementation of the law,” which were later changed to fraud. Gao said the charges were a convenient way for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to turn the acceptance of tithes and offerings into a 10-plus-year sentence.

But Gao’s parents aren’t alone.

Arrested with Quanfu and Yu is another pastor of the Light of Zion Church, Tang Bingyi, who remains detained. Additionally, another eight leaders of the Zion Church, eight other Catholic bishops, and several other Christian leaders remain imprisoned.

Gao said that while he understands the summit may focus on AI policy and access to rare earth minerals, some things should be non-negotiable for a country built on the principles for which the U.S. stands.

He said his only hope is that his parents’ names, along with those of the other political and religious prisoners, are mentioned during the meeting.

“Everyday normal families wonder if high-level summits like this can have any outcomes for their lives, like life-changing outcomes for them,” Gao said. “I can only pray.”

The pastor’s son wouldn’t be the first to see Trump’s pressure on China result in the freedom of detained Christians.

“I do think that God put the president in this position for a reason,” Gao said, “and we are in the best position to make this happen.”

Trump has made defending persecuted Christians a hallmark of his second term, even going off the teleprompter during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to call out the group’s hypocrisy for not standing up for persecuted Christians around the world.

Gao spoke of Pastor Ezra Jin, the leader of the Zion Church, who was released in July only two months after his name was invoked by Trump during his visit to Beijing.

At the Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s hearing on Tuesday, Jin said that he had joined Christianity shortly after witnessing the Tiananmen incident in 1989 and founded his church in 2007 after studying to become a minister in the U.S.

His growing church immediately began to face persecution. Jin testified that landlords were pressured to terminate leases, and police demanded that attendees register their ID cards as they cut the meeting places’ access to water and power.

Nevertheless, the church reached 1,500 members by 2018, when the CCP installed 24 surveillance cameras at the church’s sanctuary before mobilizing hundreds of police to shut it down.

Although the CCP scattered the church, it only helped it spread as evangelism increased and COVID-era Zoom worship services made nearly 100 meeting places possible across 40 cities by 2025.

Eventually, the government arrested 30 pastors in October.

While Jin and many of the others were eventually released, eight still remain imprisoned on charges of using information networks, illegal business operations, and fraud connected to their online Christian worship, according to Premier Christian News.

“This is a tremendous insult and a vicious attack on the Christian faith,” Jin said at the hearing.

Jin said his release was the direct result of Trump raising the issue with Xi, adding that an immediate letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a statement signed by 33 members of Congress also went a long way in ensuring he hadn’t been mistreated during his detention.

After all, Beijing knew that Washington was keeping an eye on Jin.

“I sincerely hope that members of Congress will continue to pay attention to religious persecution and human rights within China,” Jin said. “I hope that this meeting between the two heads of state can produce genuine consensus and breakthroughs in improving China’s human rights situation and ending the persecution of religious believers.”

During the hearing, the commission’s co-chairman, Republican New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, said that he is asking Trump “to appeal to Xi Jinping to show compassion and courage,” as he has with Jin.

It’s not only the small house churches that are targeted. The persecution reaches even the largest organized religious institution in the world, the Catholic Church.

Jason Jones, the founder of the Vulnerable People Project, which launched a campaign to free Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen and seven other bishops imprisoned by the regime and replaced with leaders approved by the CCP, told the Caller that Trump is in a unique position to advocate for prisoners of conscience and speak out against the Vatican’s secretive agreement with Beijing. (RELATED: The Vatican Weighs CCP Deal As Beijing Disappears Bishops, Appoints State-Backed Clergy)

“The administration should understand that not only are American Catholics united on this, but the whole Body of Christ is,” Jones said. “We are locking arms with our persecuted bishops in China. They are our shepherds. Their suffering is ours, and if they’re not free, no Catholic is free. No American president can make Catholics an afterthought to some trade negotiation. It wouldn’t just be wrong – it would also be unbelievably bad politics.”

And it’s not just Americans asking Trump to get involved.

The British Prime Minister Andy Burnham also asked Trump to bring up the case of Jimmy Lai this week, Politico reported Tuesday.

Lai was a Christian pioneer of the fashion industry turned media magnate who was sentenced by a Hong Kong court this year on sedition charges and now faces 20 years in prison.

Trump’s former Ambassador-at-large Sam Brownback told the Caller that Lai, along with the Catholic bishops, was one of several issues he hopes the president raises by name during the visit.

Brownback said that although he understands much of the summit will focus on non-human rights issues, bringing up these cases of human rights abuses could go a long way toward showing the world and the citizens of China what is going on. He also said it could help demonstrate that the whole system China is implementing is flawed in its most fundamental aspects.

Having just published a book diving into the stories of several religious minorities being just as persecuted, if not more so, than the Christians by the Chinese, Brownback said that the Communist regime is aiming to crack down on any religion that places something above the state.

This, he said, is why China has sought to imprison Christian leaders, sterilize and “reeducate” Uyghur Muslims, place Falun Gong practitioners into forced labor camps as they are tested for forced organ harvesting, and impose heavily burdensome restrictions on the Tibetan Buddhists, including the disappearance of the six-year-old Panchen Lama in 1995 and the regime’s current plan to pick the next Dalai Lama so that he could function as a puppet of the state.

While Gao joins Smith, Brownback, Jin, Burnham, and thousands of others in the hope that even the names of these prisoners will be raised by the president, he believes there is something real and tangible anyone can do to help.

“And for the Christians here in this country, we desperately, desperately need your prayers,” Gao said. “We need our parents’ names, our church’s name, in their prayers, every Sunday, every day. We need prayers.” (RELATED: ‘Murder Masquerading As Medicine’: Senate Ignores Bill On CCP’s Christian Organ Harvesting)

Despite the odds, the son hopes a dictator’s heart can be softened, telling the Caller, “What’s impossible with men is possible with God.”