BRUSSELS — The Church of Almighty God (CAG) released its annual persecution report on February 13, 2026, documenting what its data indicate was the most severe year of state repression since the church began publishing systematic records in 2017. The figures contained in the report — 19,191 arrests, 2,291 prison sentences, 23 deaths attributed to persecution, and at least 330 million RMB (approximately USD 47 million) in confiscated assets — paint a picture of a comprehensive state campaign that operates not as a series of isolated law enforcement actions, but as a coordinated program of institutional elimination.
The report, available at the church’s official documentation platform, covers the calendar year 2025 and spans every major province and municipality of the People’s Republic of China. Due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strict information blockade, the authors caution throughout that all figures are conservative estimates and that entire regions — most notably the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region — remain effectively closed to independent documentation.
A “Three-Year Tough Battle” Against a Religious Community
To understand 2025, one must understand the policy architecture behind it. In August 2023, the CCP formally launched what internal documents and police statements describe as a “Three-Year Tough Battle” (January 2024–December 2026), a nationally coordinated suppression campaign explicitly targeting the CAG and classified under the rubric of “national security.” This followed the “Three-Year General Battle” (September 2020–August 2023), which the report describes as having “caused severe disruption” but having failed to halt the church’s expansion — now reaching more than 100 countries.
The institutional machinery deployed in 2025 under this framework is extensive. According to the report, search and arrest quotas were directly tied to the performance evaluations and bonuses of grassroots public security officials, transforming persecution into a measurable bureaucratic objective. Citizens were offered cash rewards for informing on CAG members, with amounts ranging from several hundred to tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Domestic Security Protection units were coordinated with criminal police, special police, and armed police forces in joint operations. The high-tech surveillance infrastructure known as “Skynet” and “Sharp Eyes,” combined with facial recognition systems, drone fleets, big data analysis, and electric bike tracking devices, provided the logistical backbone for arrests.
A police officer quoted in the report during an April operation in Ju County, Shandong Province, stated with particular directness: “This year and next, we must ‘zero out’ The Church of Almighty God.” Another officer, during a separate October operation in Qingdao, declared: “China absolutely does not allow belief in Almighty God — this is Xi Jinping’s China.”
Arrests at Record Levels: A Month-by-Month Escalation
The arrest figures documented in the 2025 report reveal a campaign that intensified progressively throughout the year. January saw at least 430 arrests. By June, that monthly figure had risen to at least 2,387 — a single month accounting for a greater number of detentions than the entire reporting year of 2017. September recorded 2,447 arrests. The total of 19,191 arrests for the year is described by the report as the highest annual figure in its reporting history.
Operationally, these were not disorganized local crackdowns. The report documents coordinated simultaneous operations across multiple cities in the same province, with task forces of hundreds of officers, pre-operational surveillance lasting months or even years, and instructions handed down from provincial-level public security bureaus. During a late May operation in Zhangqiu District and Dezhou City, Shandong Province, a police officer confirmed: “This operation is based on a central directive. The provincial public security department and municipal public security bureaus jointly carried out this large-scale arrest.”
A particularly notable pattern is the deliberate targeting of elderly believers. Approximately 7,000 people aged 60 and above were arrested across ten provinces alone. The oldest documented detainee was 93 years old. An 82-year-old was among those arrested in a January operation in Laixi City, Shandong. An 84-year-old with limited mobility was taken from his home in June in Taizhou, Jiangsu, by officers using a room inspection as a pretext. The report notes that arrest quotas and financial incentives created institutional pressure to pursue any identifiable CAG member, regardless of age or health status.
Torture, Brainwashing, and the “Three Statements”
The report’s documentation of detention conditions indicates that physical coercion is systematically applied, rather than constituting aberrant individual conduct. Of the 19,191 persons arrested, at least 8,996 were subjected to torture or forced brainwashing. Methods described include sleep deprivation, prolonged exposure to propaganda materials, placement on “tiger benches,” electric shocks, exposure to extreme cold through deliberate soaking with water, and beatings.
The stated objective of these practices is to compel detainees to sign one of two sets of documents: the “Three Statements” (comprising a Statement of Guarantee, a Statement of Repentance, and a Statement of Severance from the faith) or the “Five Statements,” which add a Statement of Confession and a Statement of Denunciation. The systematic nature of this demand — replicated in detention centers and improvised brainwashing facilities across dozens of provinces — suggests a centrally designed ideological protocol rather than local improvisation.
One account from a May 23 operation in Chengdu, Sichuan, describes the interrogation of a female detainee: officers struck her chin upward repeatedly with a clenched fist, causing her head to slam against the wall, loosening her teeth and causing oral bleeding. Separately, in June in Taizhou, Jiangsu, a 61-year-old woman was doused twice with cold water and kept in an air-conditioned room in wet clothing; her resulting throat damage required three months of medical treatment. A June operation in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, involved a brainwashing facility guarded by several hundred police and armed police officers.
At least 23 CAG members died in 2025 as a direct consequence of persecution. The causes documented include untreated illness following arrest, injury sustained during interrogation, and deterioration of health under sustained pressure after release. The report specifically mentions Yu Xiaomei, who died after a period of medical neglect following her detention.
International Condemnation: A Growing but Incomplete Record
The scale of repression documented in the 2025 CAG report does not stand in isolation from the assessments of international human rights bodies, though the CAG has received less individualized attention than Uyghur Muslims or Tibetan Buddhists in multilateral forums.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its 2025 Annual Report covering conditions in 2024, explicitly names the Church of Almighty God alongside Falun Gong as groups targeted by the Chinese government as illegal “cults,” documenting “thousands of adherents” facing “arrest, imprisonment, and mistreatment, including deaths resulting from abuse in custody.” USCIRF has repeatedly recommended that the U.S. State Department designate China as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) — a designation China has held continuously, most recently redesignated on December 29, 2023, under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). The commission specifically identified CAG member Mo Xiufeng by name in its victims database.
The U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Reports similarly document the CCP’s continued classification of the CAG as an illegal “xie jiao” (heterodox teaching), a legal designation that effectively criminalizes membership and enables the application of the Criminal Law’s provisions on “cult” activity, which carry sentences of up to life imprisonment.
In 2024, during China’s Universal Periodic Review before the UN Human Rights Council, UN member states urged Beijing to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) — a treaty whose Article 18 provides the most directly applicable protection for freedom of thought, conscience, and religion — and to allow UN Special Procedures to conduct visits. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called on China to implement recommendations from OHCHR and other UN bodies, while the Office of the High Commissioner acknowledged in August 2024 that progress on human rights for religious minorities remained absent.
The legal framework that Chinese authorities invoke against the CAG stands in direct tension with several binding or broadly recognized international instruments. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its codification in Article 18 of the ICCPR protect the right to manifest religious belief “in worship, observance, practice and teaching,” and specify that this right cannot be subjected to limitations beyond those “necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.” The practices described in the CAG report — systematized torture to compel renunciation of faith, criminal sentencing for attendance at gatherings, and the plundering of personal property — find no legitimate basis under these provisions.
The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which China acceded in 1988, prohibits torture “in all circumstances” and obligates states to investigate and prosecute acts of torture committed by public officials. The systematic use of physical coercion described in the 2025 report, confirmed across multiple provinces and hundreds of individual cases, represents a substantial body of evidence relevant to this obligation.
A Campaign Defined by Its Own Officials
What distinguishes the 2025 CAG report from advocacy documents of a more general character is the degree to which it is corroborated — often inadvertently — by the statements of the very officials conducting the operations. The quotes cited are not drawn from dissident sources: they are statements made by police officers, domestic security captains, and village party secretaries to the CAG members they were in the process of detaining. A domestic security captain in Henan Province, explaining surveillance methods in August, described using rotating vehicles, personnel in various disguises, shared bicycles, and drones before making arrests. A village party secretary in the same province explained that local officials faced dismissal and salary withholding if they failed to report sufficient cases.
This institutional logic — in which participation in religious persecution is a condition of professional survival for thousands of local officials — reflects the structural depth of the campaign. It is not reducible to ideological zeal at the margins; it is embedded in performance management systems, budget allocations, and career incentives.
Implications and the Path Forward
The release of this report arrives at a moment when international scrutiny of China’s religious freedom record is, institutionally speaking, well-established but operationally constrained. USCIRF and the State Department maintain their CPC designations and their documentation; the UN Human Rights Council conducted its Universal Periodic Review; UN High Commissioner Türk has spoken. Yet access to China for independent monitors remains denied, and the gap between international documentation and concrete accountability mechanisms continues to widen.
For the CAG specifically, the international community’s record of named engagement — as opposed to aggregate references to “house church Christians” or “unregistered religious groups” — remains thinner than the scale of documented persecution would seem to warrant. With 520,191 arrests documented since the church’s founding in 1991, and 2025 marking a new annual record, the question of whether existing multilateral frameworks are adequate to the situation is one that religious freedom advocates, diplomats, and UN mandate holders will need to address with greater specificity.
The “Three-Year Tough Battle” runs through December 2026. According to the report’s own data, its second year was its most intensive. Whether the third produces a different outcome — through internal policy change, external pressure, or both — remains an open question with consequences for tens of thousands of people currently living under surveillance, restriction, or detention in China for the act of attending a religious gathering.
Sources: CAG Annual Persecution Report 2025 (godfootsteps.org); USCIRF Annual Report 2025 – China Chapter; U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom Reports; UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review of China, 2024; Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, August 2024 press briefing; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 18; Convention Against Torture, Article 1; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18.
