For months, Gao Pu shut himself in his apartment, a wave of hopelessness washing over him.

He had no connections, no political power, and no influence. The most he could do was post on social media, although that was unlikely to help much.

Both of his parents, Christian leaders approaching their 70s, were now in Chinese jail.

And he was thousands of miles away—in the United States.

“Be safe. Take care of yourself,” his mother had told him when the police first came for his father. Weeks later, they took her, too.

The couple, Gao Quanfu and Pang Yu, led the Light of Zion Church in central China. Over the years, the church became an influential gathering place for Christians who wished to worship outside Communist Party control, Gao Pu told The Epoch Times.

They pose no threat, Gao said—they just want to serve their God in peace. But to Beijing, independent faith is the problem.

The Chinese regime officially allows only five religions. To operate, religious organizations must register with the government, align with socialist values, and show loyalty to the Party. Veering outside of that tight boundary risks police harassment, a jail term, or worse. And tens of millions of believers face that peril day in and day out, be they house Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, or Falun Gong practitioners.

Gao, like other children of Chinese religious dissidents, faces a paradox.

He lives under the auspices of American freedom. But he faces the same choice he would have in China: self-censor, or speak out and risk his loved ones’ safety.

And neither do America’s freedoms protect them from the heartache of knowing their families are suffering in China.

At a March press conference in Washington, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) featured two daughters, Claire Lai and Grace Jin Drexel, who are caught in a similar dilemma.

“It’s so important that as we appreciate our freedoms in this country, we recognize that that isn’t the case with China,” said Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Community Party.

In China, he said, “people are being unjustly held because of their love of God, their love of freedom, and the respect for human dignity that all of us would want to share.”

The Party doesn’t believe in free expression, he said. “It doesn’t have confidence in its ideas. It fears people of faith, and it censors the truth.”

Gao said that in those initial months after his parents’ arrest, he was “a walking shell.” Several other pastors had been sentenced to multiyear jail terms, an ominous sign for his parents.

“Be prepared for a long fight,” he recalled his parents’ attorney saying.

‘Why Is That Illegal?’

Last October, Grace Jin Drexel woke up to a text from her father, Beijing’s Zion Church leader Ezra Jin.

It was a prayer letter he had just sent to his congregation, voicing concern about the detention of another pastor the previous day.

That entire day, Drexel and her mother tried to reach Jin and those around him. No one responded. Finally, they confirmed he was jailed as well, one of 28 swept up in Beijing’s massive raid on Chinese house churches.

Christmas came, then the Chinese New Year and Easter. The times for reunion with family passed in succession. Both Drexel and Gao spent these days worrying over their parents. Neither they nor their relatives in China have been able to see their detained loved ones face to face. The prisoners can’t receive letters or phone calls.

The sparse bits of information they’ve gathered about their conditions are not encouraging.

Gao’s mother, who had heart issues and anxiety, couldn’t get her medication. Drexel’s father was sleeping on a mat on the floor with dozens of others as wind and rain swept in through the cell’s glassless window, leaving the inmates shivering at night.

Gao’s parents’ supposed crime is using superstition to obstruct law enforcement, a charge later changed to fraud. Jin is accused of illegal use of information networks.

Both Gao and Drexel said the Chinese authorities’ claims are baseless.

“If you push them and you ask them, ‘What is the illegal information that is being spread?’ they can only point to the sermons and the worship music that is still available on YouTube,” Drexel told The Epoch Times.

“Why is that illegal in China, and what is it about this normal sermon and worship music that is illegal?”

‘Either You Capitulate or You Die’

Religious believers in China can see their fortunes turn overnight if they fall out of favor with the Party.

When the regime launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in 1999, it stunned practitioners of the spiritual discipline. They went in waves to Beijing, pleading for leaders to change their mind. Awaiting them were more arrests and beatings.

Nevermind that state media had lauded many of these individuals as model citizens—frontline volunteers during a major flood just a year prior, top performers at their workplaces, elite university students, veterans, and scientists. Overnight, they became public enemies destined for prison.

A similar fate befell Chinese Christians years later, noted Pastor Bob Fu, founder of Christian human rights group China Aid.

When a major earthquake devastated China’s mountainous Sichuan Province in 2008, hundreds of thousands of Christians mobilized, bringing in supplies to the region and setting up makeshift schools for displaced children.

But even amid the rescue efforts, authorities continued to go after them, Fu said. One man who accommodated a group of Christian volunteers and later converted to Christianity was accused of “providing illegal gathering space” and “engaging in unlawful preaching activities,” according to China Aid. He was detained for five days.

“Everything is political in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party,” Fu told The Epoch Times. When the Party wants to “play God,” he said, a refusal to bow to the Chinese leadership’s portrait or worship the Communist Party doctrine constitutes a betrayal.

Drexel’s father paid the price for saying no. In 2018, authorities shut down Zion Church after he refused their demand to install surveillance cameras inside the building. They also imposed an exit ban, barring the pastor from leaving China.

“It’s either you capitulate or you die”—that’s the regime’s modus operandi, Drexel said.

Maureen Ferguson, who sits in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, described an “across the board crackdown.”

“They are persecuting every faith community, from the Uyghur Muslims to Falun Gong to the Tibetan movement to the underground Catholic church to the Christian house churches,” she told The Epoch Times.

The policy is systematic, and it’s deliberate: to “have the Chinese Communist Party in control of every facet of religion,” she said.

“People of faith so often come under attack because the authoritarian government wants to control the people, and there’s a higher power that people believe in and follow their conscience, so an authoritarian state views that as a threat.”

Since 1999, the United States has consistently designated China as a “country of particular concern” over the regime’s severe religious freedom violations.

Blissfulness, Then Blows

Liu Zhitong’s voice breaks as she speaks of her 60-year-old mother, Kong Qingping.

Their last reunion was in late 2019. Kong flew to Liu’s Bay Area home and stayed through the Chinese New Year. Every day after work, Liu rushed back, opening the door to the aroma of hometown food—beef stew, crispy sweet and sour pork, stir-fried prawns.

Months later, Liu was still savoring the plump, juicy dumplings that her mother packed in her freezer.

Every bite made her feel that her mother was still around, she said.

Those blissful weeks were too fleeting.

About a month after Kong returned to China, police raided her home, seizing leaflets and books relating to her faith, Falun Gong. Kong lived in hiding for more than two years before the authorities tracked her down, handing her a seven year sentence.

Upon hearing the verdict, Liu’s mind went blank.

“It’s so long,” she told The Epoch Times. “Seven years—I just can’t bear to think of it.”

Twice, the police altered statements from Kong’s neighbor, describing Kong distributing flyers around the community compound, according to Liu. The neighbor wouldn’t sign it, but it entered into the court record regardless, a court ruling The Epoch Times reviewed shows.

The ruling cited the wording of New Year’s messages Kong had hung around her door frame as incriminating evidence.

One read “Be truthful, be kind, forbearance is top of mind.” The words related to the three tenets—truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—that are central to Falun Gong’s teachings.

Liu found the authorities’ reasoning “beyond comprehension.”

“Which one of these words violates the law?” she said. “It’s simply telling people to be a better version of themselves.”

Pressure

More painful yet is living under America’s First Amendment, yet knowing that exercising those freedoms will impact the people one loves in China.

Activist Rushan Abbas’s work in speaking out about the mass repression targeting fellow Uyghurs in Xinjiang led to the arrest of her sister Gulshan, who is still in jail.

After issuing a bounty for Hong Kong dissident Anna Kwok, the city convicted Kwok’s father for attempting to withdraw funds linked to her.

The threats came for Liu, too. Not long after she told her mother’s story at a demonstration, Chinese authorities flashed a photo of Liu, holding a banner, to her mother’s attorney. The message was clear: We are watching.

They also conveyed an explicit warning: “Don’t ever come back to China,” she said.

The fear is real.

Drexel said she feels herself followed and monitored when she meets with people about her father’s case. Her mother’s tire was slashed inside her garage, a possible scare tactic, she said.

Now expecting their third child, Drexel and her husband have installed security cameras around their house. Her husband sleeps with a metal bat next to the bed, just to make sure she and their children are safe.

“They want us to be quiet,” Drexel said, referring to authorities in China. “Not to mention I am a mere individual, and yet I’m trying to expose what has happened in the second most powerful nation in the world.”

Beijing, she added, has everything in its toolkit.

“They have the justice system. They have police. ... I am just myself,” she said. “It is a very fearful thing to think about.”

Joy to Sorrow

For these children of Chinese religious dissidents, the notion of filial piety—of honoring, respecting, and caring for their parents—is so ingrained in traditional Chinese culture that they wouldn’t think to mention it explicitly. But it’s there, supercharging their sense of numbness, separation, and guilt.

In May 2023, Doria Liu (no relation to Liu Zhitong) and her husband celebrated World Falun Dafa Day, a day honoring the public introduction of their faith and the Falun Gong community’s resilience amid ongoing suppression in China.

During a video chat, Liu showed her mother, Meng Zhaohong, a photo of them holding their months-old son, their faces beaming, in bright yellow shirts to celebrate the day. Meng, who had gritted her teeth through numerous torture sessions in Chinese prison, quietly wiped her eyes.

They promised to talk again the next day. It never happened. Meng went to jail—for talking to shoppers at a farmer’s market about Falun Gong.

In the 11 years since Liu fled China, Meng had missed her daughter’s wedding, the birth of her grandson, and all the joys of witnessing the little boy grow.

Guilt hit when Liu and her son made a snowman near Lake Tahoe, when they soaked in a hot spring in Japan, and when they had barbecue, something her mother also loves.

When everyone’s laughing, when happiness surges, that’s when it suddenly hurts.

“It’s like, I can’t allow myself to be too happy,” she told The Epoch Times. “As soon as I feel happy, I will remember that my mother is suffering in China.”

Every experience marks a memory that Meng has missed. She hasn’t gone on a trip abroad nor seen a ski resort.

Today, Liu writes long letters, jotting down sparks in her life and seeking Meng’s counsel on childrearing. Each exchange takes months, limited by censorship to superficial niceties, leaving them to communicate their faith through coded messages. It’s cumbersome, but it’s their only way to hear each other’s voices and offer reassurance.

“Don’t worry, I won’t go into a depression,” Liu wrote. She added that she’s “living in the moment” and focusing on reuniting with her mother soon.

She’s thought of risking it all and going back to China. But if she does, the odds are against her obtaining justice for her mother. And she would be putting herself in danger.

Recently, she learned that her mother had some heart issues and was having trouble breathing.

Liu’s heart jolted. She prayed her mother would make it—and that they’d see each other again.

Faith Through Darkness

Over the past six years since the jailing of her father, Jimmy Lai, in Hong Kong, Claire Lai has watched the pro-democracy media mogul’s hearing and eyesight fade.

His nails have turned dry, changed color, and fallen off; his teeth have rotted; his skin has withered. The one thing that hasn’t changed, Lai said, is his smile.

Lai called herself the “worrier” in her family. At the March press conference, she sighed harshly as she detailed her father’s condition, her voice at times quivering. Her father, a devout Catholic, has now been sentenced to 20 years in prison under the regime’s national security law. He has no direct access to sunlight or fresh air.

Instead of turning bitter, she said, her father has embraced pain with grace; he has asked Lai—his “gentlehearted but stubborn child”—to pray for those who mistreat him.

“Guards who are harsh on him—they are to teach him humility. The envelopes he folds, leading to severe back pains—they are to teach him to grow in fortitude. The car journeys to court where he is chained and can’t move in the dark—they are to teach him patience,” she said.

God’s outstretched arm to sinners, she said, poses a stark contrast to the Party’s clenched fist and the sickle and hammer.

Drexel, wiping away tears, said she believes adversity may ultimately serve a greater purpose.

“I believe that God is also testing us during this time, like refining silver—painful, but full of love,” she said in a February keynote address at the International Religious Freedom Summit.

In going after people of faith, the atheist Communist Party has failed to understand that religion only thrives under pressure, said David Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Stilwell previously served a two-year stint in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

He noted that before the Chinese leadership went all in against Falun Gong 27 years ago, even some senior officials’ families were practicing it.

The regime “went so hard against Falun Gong. That was a mistake,” he told The Epoch Times.

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who single-handedly unleashed the sweeping eradication campaign at the time, wanted Falun Gong gone in three months. That hasn’t happened. Neither have house churches disappeared from China.

This persecution of faith is “self-defeating,” Stilwell said.

More repression begets more resistance. “It’s human nature. It’s spiritual nature, too,” he said.

A Patch of Hope

On Chinese New Year’s Eve, Liu Zhitong’s family was wrapping beef pepper dumplings. They were the very same kind that her mother had made six years ago, when she was free.

Kong’s weight had dropped more than 30 pounds a few months into her detention, Liu said. Kong was a slave laborer, sewing some products, although Liu didn’t know what kind.

It was hard to not think of her mother. And as Liu did, her heart ached—as if “a rock was pushing down” on it, she said. She sought solace in spiritual teachings, reminding herself that all is temporary.

As these parents languish in Chinese jails, their children in America cling to hope.

Moolenaar, the House China panel chair, recently wrote to President Donald Trump about the “systematic” and growing religious persecution in China.

“The scope and scale of the CCP’s arbitrary and wrongful detentions and other abuses such as family separation and forced labor arguably constitute crimes against humanity,” he wrote, urging the president to raise the matter during his mid-May Beijing trip and set the religious prisoners free.

The arrest of close friends Ezra Jin and Gao Quanfu in China has also reconnected their son and daughter in America, making the fight less lonely for Drexel and Gao Pu.

“We need a win on our side, no matter how small,” Gao said.

They feel vulnerable. But they also want their parents back. And they see no other option but to keep speaking out.

Doria Liu recalls happier days, when she and her mother could still make calls. Liu’s family had just settled into their new home.

Her mother had talked about all the vegetables she would plant: some green beans here, some eggplant there—“once I come over,” she'd said.

The patch remains largely idle. A few saplings stand behind a manicured stripe of meadow.

“It’s waiting for her to sow the seeds,” Liu said.