Lawyer at firm defending Zion Church pastors escapes to Taiwan amid crackdown
Ruth Wang, a partner at a law firm representing pastors from Beijing’s Zion Church, among China's largest underground congregations, has fled the country with her husband and two children as Chinese authorities pressured the firm to dissolve.
Wang is now in Taiwan, where authorities have provided her family with temporary housing on humanitarian grounds, Visegrad 24 reported. She left China for the island earlier this month, according to the Malaysia Sun.
Taiwan lacks a formal asylum law, though the Mainland Affairs Council, its cross-strait agency, says it has a mechanism for such cases.
Taiwanese officials reportedly told Wang the island’s rules bar it from granting asylum to people from mainland China, given tension between Beijing and Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party, according to The Associated Press.
Wang is exploring resettlement in the U.S. or in Canada, including studying there to relocate her family, saying their future remains uncertain.
She is a partner at the law firm VDoor. Since October 2025, Wang has been part of the legal team representing Pastor Ezra Jin, the Zion Church founder, and other detained members.
Chinese authorities arrested 18 Zion Church members, including Jin, that October, in one of the biggest crackdowns on a single congregation in decades.
President Donald Trump brought up his case with China’s President Xi Jinping in a May meeting, and Jin was released in July, about nine months after his arrest.
Eight more church leaders are still being held.
Chinese authorities ordered Wang and her colleagues to dissolve VDoor Law Firm or risk having it shut down. She said refusing would “seriously affect my career development and other aspects of my life.”
VDoor’s founder, Zhang Kai, whom Wang has called her mentor, lost his law license and was blocked from leaving China. Other lawyers at the firm were suspended from practicing law for half a year, she said.
Judicial authorities told the firm’s lawyers to stop handling Zion Church cases and leave the company, and those who tried to move to other firms faced restrictions, Wang said.
Wang said Chinese officials phoned her last month while she was on a trip to Japan and asked to meet in person; she said she wasn’t in Beijing and wouldn’t return.
Bob Fu, founder of the U.S.-based human rights group ChinaAid, said Wang’s case shows the pressure faced by lawyers who defend persecuted Christians and others imprisoned for their beliefs.
He pressed Taiwan to protect Wang’s family from being returned to mainland China, and asked the U.S. and other democracies to help resolve the situation.
Jin founded Zion Church in 2007, and it has grown into one of China’s largest house churches, unregistered congregations that defy government rules requiring worship only at state-approved sites.
Sean Long, a Zion Church pastor studying in the U.S., said last year the church had about 5,000 members and more than 100 worship sites, including apartments, restaurants and karaoke bars, in about 40 Chinese cities.
Human Rights Watch said last week that more than a dozen Chinese cities introduced measures in the first half of this year offering rewards for reporting “illegal” religious activity, as surveillance tightened nationwide.
Shen Ming-shih, a research fellow at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research, was quoted as saying that Wang’s choice to seek asylum while passing through Taipei showed the government’s continued use of pressure to suppress religious freedom.
Tseng Chien-yuan, an adjunct associate professor at Taiwan's National Central University, was quoted as saying that Beijing allows only state-approved churches while pushing a policy of forcing religious groups to adopt Communist Party ideology, known as “Sinicization.”
He said the policy involves rewriting scripture, including the Bible and the Quran, interfering in worship, and demanding total loyalty from those organizations.
