The Chinese police officers hurried the pastor out of the jail cell where he’d been held for 266 days. They hustled him into a van, then onto a train — where he sat surrounded by about two dozen officers, many with cameras trained on him.
The pastor, Jin Mingri, who founded one of China’s most prominent underground churches, wondered aloud if he was being transferred to a secret prison. An officer laughed and told him to think more positively.
Hours later, Mr. Jin, who also goes by Ezra, had been escorted onto a flight. As the plane started to move, the man sitting next to him turned to introduce himself. He was an American government official, he said.
Mr. Jin was free.
Mr. Jin’s sudden release from Chinese jail on July 3, brokered after a personal appeal by President Trump to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was a rare concession from Beijing. It reflects how, in Mr. Xi’s authoritarian system, the fate of such high-profile detainees or prisoners — like Mr. Jin, or the imprisoned Hong Kong pro-democracy dissident Jimmy Lai — can depend less on the courts than on intervention at the highest levels.
The pastor was rounded up last October in China’s biggest church crackdown in nearly a decade, alongside many of his fellow church leaders. Mr. Trump raised Mr. Jin’s case to Mr. Xi during his visit to Beijing in May, but it had not been clear in the weeks that followed that Mr. Xi, who has tightened controls on society, and on religion in particular, would agree to his release.
In an interview with The New York Times, his first since he was arrested in October last year, Mr. Jin recounted the circumstances that led to his detention and eventual release.
A Rare Release of a Political Prisoner
When Mr. Jin’s flight landed in Los Angeles, his wife and children were waiting. He had not seen them in nearly a decade.
“Twenty-four hours earlier I was in such a harsh jail environment, with no idea what the future held, expecting around a 15-year sentence,” Mr. Jin told The Times.
“Suddenly, I was free,” he said. “And the fact that I could reunite with my family — my heart was just filled with indescribable emotion.”
China has generally resisted American appeals to release political prisoners, treating such cases as a matter of sovereignty. When it has granted releases, it has usually done so only on the condition that detainees confess to guilt, or are on medical parole, or are swapped for Chinese nationals held in the United States.
Mr. Jin, 57, said that he had not been forced to sign any statements and that Chinese officials had not warned him away from future attempts to contact his friends or congregation.
“It may be because everybody knows President Xi personally made the decision,” Mr. Jin said. “Otherwise, this wouldn’t be possible.”
Mr. Jin and his wife are Chinese nationals, but his children are American citizens. He said he did not know whether the United States and China had struck a deal to secure his freedom. Neither the Chinese government nor the White House has commented on the release. Mr. Trump, while leaving China on Air Force One, had said that Mr. Xi had told him he would “strongly consider the pastor.”
Eight of his fellow church leaders are still in jail.
The Nationwide Raid on Zion Church
Mr. Jin’s ordeal began in October, when dozens of police officers burst into his home in Beihai, a city in southwestern China, while he was eating dinner.
They accused him of the crime of “illegally using information networks.” That was a reference to the online activities of Mr. Jin’s church, Zion. The government had shut down its physical space in Beijing in 2018.
Zion members had been expecting a crackdown. For months, officers had been disrupting gatherings across the country. The day before Mr. Jin’s arrest, he had heard that another Zion pastor, Franklin Wang Lin, had been arrested at the airport while trying to fly to Hong Kong.
The Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but in reality, the ruling Communist Party requires religious groups to register with the government and submit to strict political controls. By some estimates, there are tens of millions of unregistered Christians in China who worship in secret.
Two dozen other Zion church members were also detained around the same time, though some were later released.
“We always knew something could happen,” Mr. Jin said. He thought: “What was meant to come, has come.”
Pressured While in Detention
Mr. Jin was taken to a detention center, where he shared a roughly 1,000-square-foot room with between two and three dozen other detainees, who all slept on one giant platform bed. There were no panes in the windows, so the cell was freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer, he said.
During the day, the detainees were required to sit on benches, raising their hands if they wanted to stand. Many detainees developed constipation or sores from being unable to move, he said.
Officials repeatedly pressured Mr. Jin to plead guilty, he said. Mr. Jin admitted to some of the facts the officers laid out: that he had established a church, continued gathering with members after the church was shut down, and held meetings online. But those acts were not illegal, he told them.
The officers said that if he continued refusing, he might draw harsher punishments for his fellow church members, Mr. Jin said. The government revoked the legal credentials of his lawyers, so he had to find new lawyers three times.
Officials also tried to persuade him by saying he could be reunited with his family sooner. Mr. Jin’s family had moved to the United States in 2018 as pressure grew on Zion, but Mr. Jin chose to stay in China with the church.
“Of course I desperately wanted to reunite with my family, but you can’t use that to tempt me,” Mr. Jin said. “If I’m guilty, sentence me. If I’m innocent, release me.”
A Sliver of Hope
Mr. Jin said he prayed consistently and fasted every Thursday and Friday but sometimes felt despondent. He has diabetes but was given only oral medication, not the insulin he usually took, he said. He was not allowed to write letters.
It was through his lawyers that he learned his family in the United States had been lobbying the Trump administration for help. After about a month in detention, he was granted access to a Bible — usually not allowed in Chinese jails — after pressure by his lawyers and the American government.
When Mr. Trump met with Mr. Xi in May, Mr. Jin heard about it from a report on China’s state broadcaster, which sometimes played in the jail. But it was not until several weeks later, during a visit by his lawyers, that he learned that Mr. Trump had brought up his case.
He didn’t dare get too excited. At best, he might be transferred to house arrest, he thought.
“The U.S. government hasn’t had much success asking for people over the past 20 years, especially during the Xi era,” Mr. Jin said. “The Chinese government is too strong now.”
But around noon on July 3, officers abruptly escorted Mr. Jin from his cell. They brought him to the international airport in Guangzhou, about 300 miles away.
That was when Mr. Jin began to hope.
He was taken to a conference room in the airport. There, officials set up a national emblem. Then the chief prosecutor on his case, who had also traveled from Beihai, formally addressed Mr. Jin, saying that the authorities had “conclusive evidence” of his crime.
However, the prosecutor continued, they had decided not to indict him.
When Mr. Jin pointed out that the argument didn’t make sense, the prosecutor said she couldn’t say more, he said.
A Long-Awaited Reunion
When Mr. Jin stepped off the airplane, he saw that his youngest son, who had been 10 years old when they last met, was now taller than him. He had missed the wedding of his oldest child, Grace Jin Drexel, who was now a mother of three. She was carrying her youngest, just one month old, whom she had named Ezra in her father’s honor.
“Holding the children, that was the happiest moment of my life,” he said.
Still, the moment was tinged by grief, too. Ms. Jin Drexel said she almost didn’t recognize her father at first, because he had lost more than 30 pounds. His hair had also been shaved in jail.
On the Fourth of July, the family ate In-N-Out burgers and watched fireworks from their hotel room in Los Angeles.
Mr. Jin is now living near Washington, the district, with his daughter. He says his emotions can swing rapidly from joy to sorrow, and he has slept little.
He has been busy lobbying American officials to continue working for the freedom of the eight other Zion leaders, and for religious and human rights in China more broadly. He was considering passing the church’s leadership onto a younger generation.
He said he wanted to emphasize that he was thankful that China had freed him, and hoped it would do so again with others, including Mr. Lai, in Hong Kong.
“I hope people don’t think ‘We succeeded’ and forget the others,” Mr. Jin said.
“We must go all out and speak out. That’s what my family did, and look at the result.”
