China Power | Society | East Asia

China Fears the Church, America Fears the Chinese: A Chinese Christian Student Caught in Between

For some Chinese, studying in the U.S. is a welcome breath of freedom. But they are increasingly met not with open arms but with suspicion.

For spring break, we took the kids to Disneyland. The line for the Guardians of the Galaxy ride stretched to 95 minutes. Standing in front of me was a young Asian man, scrolling on his phone. I glanced over and saw him using WeChat, the Chinese social media app. So I decided to strike up a conversation in Chinese: “Are you excited to ride Guardians? It’s one of the most thrilling roller coasters in the U.S.”

He looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, I’m so excited! Hallelujah!”

Hallelujah? My religion-scholar antenna went up. “If I could ask – are you a Christian?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m a fifth-generation Christian from Wenzhou, and I study in America.”

My wait time suddenly became a window into the life and plight of “Peter,” a Christian youth from “China’s Jerusalem,” navigating the tensions of Trump’s America as an international student.

Wenzhou: China’s Jerusalem

Wenzhou, a coastal hub in southeastern China, is renowned for its entrepreneurial and religious fervor. Economically, it leads in regional light manufacturing – textiles, shoes, and small commodities. The distinct “Wenzhou model” is famous: family-owned workshops, dense networks of small businesses, and relentless risk-taking markets. 

But Wenzhou is even more significant as the largest urban Christian center in China, commonly known as “China’s Jerusalem.” With a long history of Christianity and some distance from Beijing, Wenzhou developed dense, vibrant Christian communities closely tied to business networks – less common in northern regions where central control of religion is tighter. Local Christian entrepreneurs – “boss Christians” – build factories and trading companies while also financing church buildings, evangelistic campaigns, and charity ministries. Here, Christianity is not a fringe subculture; it is integral to business, local power, and Wenzhou’s global outreach.

Given both the size of the Christian population and its economic weight, the local government often tries to “manage” churches pragmatically – tolerance at times, pressure to register under official religious associations, and coercion when needed. House-church Christians negotiate over land use and endure financial harassment through tax audits rather than purely religious charges. There have also been waves of cross demolitions, as local governments fear the “over-popularity” of Christianity and try to keep it from being “too visible and beyond control.” Yet “nameless” churches continue to thrive, in factory spaces, rented apartments, restaurants, with or without a cross on the roof.

A Fifth-Generation Christian Family

Peter’s family embodies this landscape. His great-grandparents came to faith through American missionaries before 1949. Peter’s parents never went beyond middle school. They entered the textile industry as teenagers, working long shifts in noisy, humid factories in Wenzhou and Shaoxing – another key textile hub in Zhejiang. Over time, through relentless work and shrewd entrepreneurship, they moved from wage labor to owning several medium-sized textile facilities. They are not China’s elite or “red families” from high-ranking Communist Party officials. Their capital comes from sweat, entrepreneurship, and faith networks.

Devout in belief, they endure ongoing repression but cherish the privilege of providing Peter with a family-based religious education, since religious activities for minors – church attendance, baptism, Sunday school – are forbidden by Chinese law. Peter’s faith grew in “underground” spaces that exist only in gray zones – tolerated at times, always vulnerable.

Like many Chinese parents, they want to give their children opportunities they never had. They are also uneasy about China’s public education system. From kindergarten, their sons would be required to study Marxism, “scientific atheism,” “Sinicizing religion to core socialist values” and “Xi Jinping Thought.” From their perspective, the issue is not just exam pressure; it is a worldview in which the CCP defines “truth” and controls the future.

Under Xi, as under Mao, patriotic education begins with the young. A new wave of directives calls for “patriotic education at every stage and in every aspect of schooling,” and for threading socialist core values through “the entire process of national education” so that students “form a correct outlook on the world, life, and values” and “fortify their faith” in the party’s leadership. The aim is to form a generation taught that the CCP is the only legitimate voice of the people, that criticism of it is an insult to the entire Chinese people, and that the proper, party-approved instinct is suspicion – if not hostility – toward Western ideas. 

For a teenager like Peter, studying abroad is not just about academics. It means a few formative years outside a tightly managed information ecosystem, with room to learn what China’s classrooms do not offer.

So Peter’s parents did what many Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurs have done: worked hard, saved, and poured profits into tuition. They sent both sons to the United States, imagining a place where academic excellence, religious freedom, and a different civic order would lead to a brighter future. 

John, the older brother, graduated from a private Christian college on the East Coast with a Master of Divinity and returned to China to serve in ministry last year. Peter, in contrast, is the math genius and scientist in the family. He’s currently a senior at a private Christian high school in the U.S., excelling in science and sports.

A Star Student, Sobering Options

The demographic of Chinese students in the United States has changed significantly over the past 25 years. Around 2000, three-quarters of the Chinese students were in graduate programs. Over the next 10-15 years, that picture flipped as China’s urban middle class expanded and parents began sending children out earlier to escape the gaokao track. By the mid-2010s, Chinese undergraduates outnumbered graduate students, and “younger” cohorts........

© The Diplomat