When the power cut out and his signal dropped, TJ knew something was wrong.
Seconds later, the banging started on his front door. Terrified, he stood as still as possible with his wife and three-year-old daughter, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed.
But the Chinese police officers broke down the door, shoved his wife and child into a separate room and began to question TJ.
“They grabbed my clothes and grabbed my hands so I couldn’t move. I could hear my daughter crying so much in the room next door but I couldn’t go to her, I couldn’t hug my wife,” he told The Telegraph.
TJ knew what his family’s crime was: being Christian and worshipping a God that was not Xi Jinping. In China, following a church that is not state-controlled is punishable.
The Chinese leader is intensifying Beijing’s crackdown on Christians amid a wider purge of top officials, showing signs of an increasingly paranoid leader.
The country officially recognises five religions, including Protestantism and Catholicism, but this only extends to churches that are fully state-controlled, where congregation is expected to sing patriotic songs before every service and affix Mr Xi’s portrait above the pulpit.
Many Christians such as TJ, who withheld his full name for security reasons, and his wife have chosen to join unofficial churches – or underground churches – where they can preach the gospel away from the government’s oversight.
But attending these places of worship carries its own risks – not least because they are seen as traitors.
TJ last saw his wife when she was taken to a police station along with their phones, some books and artwork, and she has yet to be released. He still doesn’t understand why he was not taken too.
Under Mr Xi’s iron-tight grip, China has expanded its nationwide suppression of Christians during the last decade, arresting more than 10,000 people, according to Bob Fu, the founder of ChinaAid, a charity for victims of persecution in the country.
In the most recent crackdown, armed police stormed the Early Rain Covenant, an influential underground church, and detained more than 30 members last month.
Mr Xi’s ruthless campaign against these underground churches aims to ensure the survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and remove any threat to his power.
Mr Fu said: “It’s the emperor playing God. [Mr Xi] wants to be exclusive, he doesn’t want to have anything treated or worshipped more superior than him.”
TJ is one of six Chinese Christians who spoke to The Telegraph who have either been directly targeted by the CCP or have close relatives that are incarcerated.
They described police officers showing up at their homes unannounced in the middle of the night. Friends being rounded up and questioned by authorities, sometimes for weeks on end. Loved ones being convicted on trumped-up charges such as “using superstition to undermine the law” and detained indefinitely in crammed, dirty cells. And lawyers were targeted and suspended from practising law for defending Christians.
Jun Yang, a pastor with Zion Church, one of the largest underground churches in China, knows all too well about the risk of living as a Christian in China.
Nearly 30 members of his church, including Qu Qiuyu, his wife, and Ezra Jin Mingri, the church’s leader, were detained in October last year during one of the largest raids against Christians in recent years.
Mr Jin was released in early July, but many of those detained remain in prison.
Founded in 2007, Zion Church used to operate in a converted nightclub in Beijing but was forced to move to a decentralised, hybrid format 10 years later after the mass arrests of Christians across the underground church network and restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic forced many of the church’s sessions online.
The church’s membership has grown from 1,500 in 2018 to around 5,000 followers now, since the church adopted the hybrid format.
Mr Yang and other Zion Church members who spoke to The Telegraph said the arrests in October were not a complete surprise. Police had been harassing church members for months before the arrests and had been coming up with incriminating information about the church leaders.