Seven People Were Taken in Wenzhou on August 5. The Only Record That It Happened Is a Prayer Account.
Seventeen days. No charge, no location, no lawyer. Two watchdogs, one prayer account, and nothing at all from the state.
The police arrived at about half past seven in the morning. They were not local. They had come from Shanghai, across a provincial line, which is what happens in China when the decision to move on a church has been made somewhere above the city bureau.
They took Pastor David Tang. They took his church's financial administrator. They took five more workers from the Purpose Driven Church in Wenzhou, a congregation that meets in rooms rather than in a building, because the state closed the building.
That was seventeen days ago. No charge has been announced. No location has been given. No lawyer has seen any of the seven. Public security authorities in Shanghai and in Wenzhou have said nothing at all, and the church has done the only thing left to it, which is to ask people to pray.
Now the part that should stop you. The reason anyone outside those seven households knows this happened is a single post on X, published on August 7 by an account that exists to ask Christians to fast for the church in China. That post is the whole paper trail. Everything written about these seven people since, including this, sits on top of it.
