In mid-December, the Chinese Communist Party sent more than a thousand police officers to arrest more than a hundred Christians in a town in the Zhejiang Province of China (Uyghur Times, December 19, 2025).
Beginning on December 13, more than 1,000 police officers, reportedly dispatched from Hangzhou, Pingyang, and other areas, sealed off Yayuan Town and launched mass arrests targeting local Christian believers. Over 100 people were detained within the first two days, with at least four additional arrests reported on December 16 and 17. Information related to the operation was tightly controlled.
The crackdown came to public attention on December 15, when local authorities unexpectedly staged a large fireworks display at the town government square despite the absence of any public holiday. The event drew widespread online attention, and local netizens later disclosed that the fireworks coincided with the ongoing arrests.
Authorities issued wanted notices for two prominent church leaders—58-year-old Lin Enzhao and 54-year-old Lin Enci—labeling them “key suspects in a criminal gang” and accusing them of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a broadly defined charge. No specific criminal evidence was made public.
The cops may have set off fireworks to distract or disorient during their operation. But the display above all served to draw attention to arrests that “might have remained unknown to this day” otherwise, according to yesterdayprotests.com’s X.com channel, @YesterdayBigcat.
Had it not been for the local government’s ostentatious fireworks display, this large-scale religious persecution might remain unknown to this day. After two days of mass arrests, the authorities suddenly set off a grand fireworks display on the evening of the 15th in front of the Yayang Town government building and mobilized a large number of online trolls to post videos of the display online, accompanied by the blatant slogan, “Listen to the Party, follow the Party.” Since it wasn’t a holiday, the fireworks display immediately attracted significant attention online, with netizens flooding the comments section to inquire about the true reason behind it….
Online trolls could only offer vague explanations, claiming the fireworks display was “a spontaneous celebration by ordinary people setting off fireworks worth millions to celebrate the arrest of a criminal gang.”… Fortunately…many local netizens withstood the pressure and spoke the truth. It is these courageous voices that allow us to understand the full picture of this religious persecution….
Multiple sources familiar with the matter pointed out that the direct trigger for labeling the church as a “gangster force” was the local church’s resistance to the government’s Five Entries and Five Transformations policy, particularly its refusal to display the national flag in the core area of the church.
@YesterdayBigcat posted video with English subtitles of the police on the march and the fireworks.
If Google is translating the channel’s Chinese accurately, YesterdayBigcat is saying both that “hundreds” of Christians were arrested and also that “more than a hundred” were arrested on December 13 and 14, plus at least four more during the next two days (the count repeated by Uyghur Times). With such a large deployment of police, it would be no surprise to learn that “more than a hundred” is an underestimate.
