Xi freed one pastor and kept the boot on every family that prays.
That is what happened on July 3, when Chinese authorities let Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri out of a detention center in southern China and put him on a plane to Los Angeles. Within a day, the fifty-seven-year-old was eating a hamburger with his family and watching Fourth of July fireworks. He had been locked up since October. He thought he was looking at fifteen years.
Good for him. A man was in a cage and now he is sitting with his wife and his kids. I am not going to take that away or dress it up.
But I want to talk about the people he left behind, because that is where the actual story lives.
Pastor Jin led an underground church. Not the state-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which is the company union of Chinese Protestantism, where the party vets every pastor and every sermon gets run past the precinct before it reaches the pulpit. Jin’s congregation met outside that apparatus. Real believers, real families, meeting in somebody’s living room or a back room because the legally sanctioned version was not the thing they wanted. That is the same reason workers organize a rank-and-file caucus instead of going through the house union. The power structure tolerates the official version. Anything outside it is a problem.
When that kind of pastor gets taken, here is what happens on the ground. The local party secretary who monitors the neighborhood now knows who was in that congregation. The precinct police who showed up at the door have names. The families who showed up every week scatter the way a shop floor scatters after a steward gets fired in front of everybody. Some meet smaller. Some meet in different rooms every week. Some stop meeting entirely and just live the way people live under a boss who just made an example. Eyes down, keep your mouth shut, don’t catch anybody’s attention. The congregation does not just lose its pastor. It loses the ordinary fabric: the birthday prayers, the funeral rites, the way neighbors took care of each other. That gets dismantled along with the man.
The Associated Press reported that letting a well-known prisoner go after a direct American presidential request is rare for this government, and that Beijing has grown more unyielding to foreign pressure, not less. Freeing one pastor is not a thaw. It is management. Trump raised Jin’s case in a May meeting. Xi said he would give it serious consideration. Weeks later, the pastor was on a plane. It cost the party nothing. The underground churches are still illegal. The precinct police still have the list. The party secretary still watches the door.
Jimmy Lai did not get the same phone call. The seventy-eight-year-old Hong Kong publisher has been in a cell since December 2020. Trump called his case a tough one. It is still tough. The Uyghurs in Xinjiang detention camps did not get a call. The student leaders, the democracy advocates, the other pastors caught in the same net that took Pastor Jin — none of them walked out of a detention center this month.
I am a man who reads his Bible and fixes cars, and I know the difference between a boss who lets one worker go because the labor board is watching and a boss who has actually changed the way the shop runs. The Chinese Communist Party let one pastor walk to look reasonable in front of an American president. The families who used to gather at Pastor Jin’s church are still scattered, still careful, still listening for footsteps. One man got out. The party officials and the precinct police who locked him up are still doing the same work.