Report: “Unless the grain dies” – Unregistered Churches in China

This report examines the contemporary governance of Christianity in the People’s Republic of China through the crackdown on Zion Church, drawing on extensive interviews and a wide range of primary materials. It argues that “unregistered church” status is not a fixed legal category but a relational condition produced by the Party-state’s regulatory and coercive architecture, and shows how believers experience and reinterpret these pressures through religious narratives of sacrifice, testing, and resilience.