Wang Yi (1 June 1973—) is the founding pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China. He is also a writer, poet, and scholar.
Wang Yi was born in Santai County to a high school language teacher and enterprise manager. He attended Santai Middle School and was profoundly affected by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
In 1992, he began dating Jiang Rong, whom he had known from kindergarten. That year, Jiang enrolled in Chongqing University’s Foreign Language Department, while Wang Yi entered the Law School at Sichuan University. During college, Wang Yi and Jiang Rong wrote more than eight hundred letters to each other. The two married in 1997.
In 2001, he was appointed as the moderator of the “Guantian Teahouse” section on Tianya Forum, with scholars like Liu Junning, He Weifang, and Xiao Shu as active members. The next year, he launched the website “Constitutional Perspectives,” focusing on constitutional theory and China’s constitutional transformation.
In 2004, he and his wife began exploring Christianity and he began supporting cases of house church activists. He was listed by the influential magazine
Southern People Weekly as one of “50 Public Intellectuals Influencing China.”
In 2005, Wang was baptized and later became the senior pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu. Just a few months later, he was selected to
meet President George W. Bush at the White House as part of a program to reach out to Chinese Christians.
As an independent house church, the church was regularly suppressed but thrived in the 2000s and 2010s. At its peak it had more than 500 members and networked with other big urban churches in other major Chinese cities. Independent of government control, Early Rain set up a seminary, an elementary school and even a group to aid the families of political prisoners.
In 2018, however, Wang emerged as a critic of Xi Jinping. In his most outspoken sermon,
he declared: “If Xi Jinping does not repent, he will perish!”
On December 9, 2018, Wang and hundreds of Christians from the church, including his wife Jiang Rong, were arrested by the police, and the church was subsequently banned by the government. Jiang was later released and reportedly lives quietly with the couple’s son, Wang Shuya, in a suburb of Chengdu. The church remains closed but individual members curate a
Facebook page. It also has
a YouTube page with hundreds of videos, including many of Wang’s sermons.
On December 30, 2019, the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court in Sichuan Province announced that Wang was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for the crimes of inciting subversion of state power and illegal business operation.
Reports say he is being held in Jintang Prison, Chengdu.
Wang has published more than a dozen books including legal treatises, research on Christianity and Chinese house churches, as well as collections of poetry and essays, such as
On Constitutionalism, Classical Christian Education, and
Carrying the Cross: A History of Chinese Family Churches.
Sensing his pending detention, on Oct. 4, 2018, Wang wrote
a manifesto entitled “The Faith of Disobedience.” As per Wang’s instructions, the church published it 48 hours after his detention. In the essay, Wang argued that it was not his job to change society, but as a Christian it was his duty to speak out against evil:
I accept and respect the CCP’s political power as a temporary state allowed by God. As the Lord’s servant John Calvin said, a tyrant comes as God’s punishment for the wicked, with the purpose being to urge the people of God to repent. For this, I am willing to physically obey the rules of their law enforcement as a form of discipline and ordeal from the Lord.
At the same time, I must make it clear that the Communist regime’s persecution of the church is a heinous crime. As a pastor of the Christian church, I must resolutely and publicly condemn these sins. My calling also requires me to transgress all human laws, albeit nonviolently, that violate the Bible and God’s commandments. Christ, my Savior, also asks me to joyfully bear all the consequences that come with the transgression of these evil laws.
