11 senior citizens were at the table and Chengdu police defined it as an “illegal lecture”

Eleven people sat in a teahouse in Chengdu to read a book that was sold in public and turned into an administrative detention.

On the afternoon of 11 September, members of the Church of the Church of the Autumn-damn Church of the Grace Group attended the Maung-Chou Chou Tea House. The participants were mostly older, with the majority of 11 over 60 years of age and two or three over

1. They read the published Passage through the Suffering. The police then took all 11 persons away.

The following day, nine people were released. Wu and Shen were referred to as “narco-literate groups”, and administrative detention was held for 10 days and fined $500 and $300, respectively.

The most noteworthy aspect of this enforcement is not the number of participants, but the ordinaryity of the activity itself.

No podium, no church, no secret publications

(b) Teahouses are not places of worship; The participants are not reading underground publications. According to public reports, this is a book that is available for reading at a round table for elderly people.

However, in the current logic of religious governance in China, the question is not whether a book is legally published, but rather who organizes it, where it is organized and whether the group belongs to an officially recognized religious system.

The Church of the Autumn Covenant has long refused to join the official “Thirty”. Since his conviction for nine years after his large-scale arrest in 2018, members of the church have continued to face summonses, expulsions, meetings and administrative penalties.

In January this year, the head of the church, Lee Young-ghang, and others, were taken away during the party; On 14 June, some 60 law enforcement officers gathered on the occasion of the Day of the River Oil, and more than 30 followers were taken from their homes in groups. By September, the law enforcement scene had been further reduced to a teahouse table.

The punishment of two men is enough to allow dozens of people to recalculate the costs of participating in the party

The police did not detain all 11 persons for long periods of time on this occasion. What is truly deterrent is selective punishment.

U Wu Ching has been held in administrative detention for the second time this year. Shen Xiaoqing was detained on the day of her mother ' s 90th birthday. Reports also indicate that other church workers were subsequently pressured to move, and that some members of the mayor ' s hotline who had called to complain were warned or summoned.

This form of governance does not require the declaration of “unlawing the whole Church”. The punishment of one or two individuals at some time, the shock of a gathering and the forced eviction of a landlord are sufficient to keep increasing the personal costs of participating in religious life.

It creates a long-term uncertainty: whether today's singing is illegal, whether tomorrow's reading will become a “teaching” and whether the day after tomorrow's prayers in private homes will be considered an unauthorized religious practice.

The “Chinaization” of the religion under Xi Jinping's rule, which ultimately translates into the right to explain a book

Official documents on religious “Chinaization” often use a great political language: patriotism, legal regulation, adaptation to socialist society. But at the grass-roots level, the power to function is very specific — the police and religious authorities can decide when a reading conference will cross the “illegal” border.

This is the core of the eight-year-long Autumn Church case: the State is not simply requiring religious communities to comply with the law, but rather that religious activities must be part of a identifiable, authorized and manageable organizational system in the party State.

When 11 elderly people can be converted into “illegal preaching” at the round table, the remaining space for freedom of religion is no longer determined by the constitutional text but is subject to the permission of the law enforcers.

A regime that is extremely vigilant about the learning of a group of older persons is not exposed to the dangers of believers, but rather to the system ' s lack of security for any community that is not controlled by party organizations.