There are those who run away because Christian. Who because accused of fraud, or because they seek freedom of expression. They all ask for protection in Italy. But Beijing’s “long hand” comes to butt here too
They seek them everywhere: in the internet points, in the dormitories rented in black, in the religious centers of the suburbs. There are those who run away from a forbidden cult, who gives a scam that has been welcomed to him, some by a dissent that, although whispered, on the upper floors of the Chinese Communist Party, the highest political authority in the country of the dragon, has arrived too strong.
The “persecution”, at least thus live it those who ask for international protection, goes on to variable geometry. And Italy often becomes a hunting land. Silent, discreet. But real. Cases multiply. And they are united by very similar reconstructions. Prato, January 2025. A Chinese official is arrested in a warehouse. Accused of fraud for 185 million euros. But for Beijing he is more than a refined: he is an enemy of the party.
It is the “Fox Hunt”, the fox hunt launched for years by the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping to bring money and opponents home. In Italy the repression becomes silent: interpol mandates, arrests, pressure on family members who remained at home.
In Prato, in 2022, an unofficial “police station” even emerged. No distinctive, but a clear mission: to monitor the diaspora. The stories that arrive in court are all resembled. Ancona is the most famous: a woman detained for 205 days, then exonerated. The state pays them 48 thousand euros for the error. Or as in Numana: an engineer stopped in the hotel, released after 50 days due to the risk of torture. The script is always the same.
Generic accusations, inconsistent tests, but the goal is only one: to return them to China. Where the prison awaits them, if not worse.
In the meantime, civil judges collect the rubble of persecution. Four most recent cases in Milan and Rome. And their unpublished stories contained in the testimonies before the Court, reconstruct deep and persistent fears: the fear of being spied on, betrayed, arrested without notice, tortured to extort confessions, forced to deny their faith or bend to the authority of a state that does not admit disobedience. A young, “irregular” waiter in a restaurant in Milanese sushi, faithful of the Church of Almighty God, religious movement indicated by the Chinese authorities as “outlaw”, in October 2024, tells the judges: “My aunt and my cousin were caught while predicting the Gospel. After the arrest, the police came to school and interrogated my teacher, me and my companions, who thus learned that my family had been arrested and that I practiced that faith ». Not only that: the teacher invited him to give up those religious frequentations and was expelled from the school. It was his uncle who advised him to move.
And once in Italy, he told the judges that “finally” he had managed to pray without hiding: “In most occasions in China we had to do so, it is not like in your country, where it can be worshiped publicly”. Then the passage that the court must have convinced: “I would like to stay in Italy because a church brother of mine when he returned to China was arrested”. He got refugee status. Like a woman who, in January last year, explained that she lived as a ghost in Treviso. He did not work, he does not attend compatriots. And he was afraid.
The judge writes: “Fear founded to come across informers”. She, that fear, had made him with these words: “I am afraid of being arrested and tortured, because I certainly have to pass the customs to return to China and could already find me there and stop me”. The report is full of details. The woman said that their “companion of faith” was arrested shortly after having delivered, together with the lady’s husband, the books for a prayer meeting. During the meeting they saw a man who, after photographing the house in which they had gathered, appeared to make a phone call.
“We imagined that he was denouncing it,” says the woman, “and the same evening we escaped.” But it is an help of cook in a Milanese restaurant, originally from the city of Huaibin, born in a family of Christian believers, to tell the court the long peregrination before arriving in Italy.
After being in a village bordering for evangelization activities, he returns home and finds it “sober”. The copies of the Bible “taken away”. A neighbor told him that “a young man full of wounds indicated to the agents where to go”.
On that occasion his brother was arrested. He knew that “he had been betrayed by a fellow faith undergoing atrocious torture”. And here’s how he explains why he chose to come to Italy: “Although I was transferred I was looking for me continuously, I changed the house three times, the Chinese police with the excuse of controlling the residence entered the house and asked if there were people who believed in God and Christians”. But the central point in the sentence, anchored to the story of the young cook, is this: «If I go back to China I will have to face the arrest and it will go like for my brother. If I can’t stand torture, I betray my church and I can’t stand this, I can’t be like Judah ».
For the judges “unregistered Christians risk being beaten, arrested, imprisoned in order to oblige them to register on the lists of the Chinese Communist Party”. And for the first time he recognizes the mixed persecution: religious and political. Because in China “the affiliation of the applicant to a group of worship considered illegal can be considered by the authorities as an action of a political nature (…). Therefore, in the event of repatriation, it could be the subject of persecution for a political opinion that is attributed to him by the state, which sees in his religious faith an act of subversion “.
Another woman, same faith. The Court of Rome, last January, avoids repatriation. It’s all in the same file. The story of the arrest, the arbitrary checks. Escape as an evasion. Pressure on relatives. “The denunciation of serious repressive conduct”, according to the judges, would have found “effective response in the international sources consulted, in which the tools used by the Chinese authorities for repressive purposes is acknowledged which, alongside the criminal ones, also include the adoption of informal measures”. Those put in place by the informants of Beijing.
