We came across posts on the social media platforms Reddit and X about the following topic:

The posts claim that China is removing crosses from churches and replacing images of Jesus with those of Xi Jinping. They included links to articles on the sites catholicnewsagency.com and chinaoppresseschristians.com.

Catholic News Agency is a news service owned by EWTN, a US-based Catholic media network which describes itself as ‘the largest religious media network in the world’. It has a mixed record of factual reporting and has a history of conservative bias in its editorial positions and reporting.

Meanwhile, China Oppresses Christians appears to be a blog highly critical of China, focusing on alleged political and religious oppression in the country in its articles.

A reading of the articles revealed that they both traced their claims back to a report titled ‘Sinicisation of Religion: China’s Coervice Religious Policy’ by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in September 2024. USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan US federal government agency that monitors the right to freedom of religion or belief abroad, making policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State and Congress based on those findings.

The USCIRF report found that Chinese authorities targeted Catholic and Protestant Christians for sinicisation, a process that aims to subordinate religions to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s political agenda and ideology.

It had ‘ordered the removal of crosses from churches, replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi, required the display of CCP slogans at the entrances of churches, censored religious texts, imposed CCP-approved religious materials, and instructed clergy to preach CCP ideology’. The report also indicated how Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, as well as Chinese Buddhists and Taoists, had also been affected by the sinicisation policies.

The claims in the USCIRF’s report relating to the removal of crosses and the replacement of holy images with that of Xi were sourced to media sources from independent organisations whose work includes focus on religious liberty in China, Bitter Winter and China Aid.

Nailing Down the Truth

To verify the findings made in the publications quoted, we conducted our own keyword search on the claims.

Our search found news reports from as far back as 2015 that reported on the removal of crosses in China. While some of these removals were made under the pretext of ‘safety concerns’, they also coincided with Xi’s publicly stated intentions to ‘sinicise’ religions in China and ‘guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means’, which suggests they may have political motivations.

A 2016 report in the New York Times estimated that 1,200 to 1,700 churches had had their crosses removed on the instructions of the authorities, sometimes while being opposed violently by worshippers. Christians were not the only group affected, with thousands of mosques also losing their domes and minarets in recent years.

The article quoted in the USCIRF report regarding the replacement of holy images focused on a single instance of a Catholic church being coerced by local authorities to replace a painting of the Virgin Mary and her child with that of Xi. However, we found several other articles in international media which had reported on similar cases, such as in the South China Morning Post and ABC.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported in 2017 that ‘thousands of Christians’ in southeastern Jiangxi province had ‘swapped their posters of Jesus for portraits of President XI Jinping as part of a local government poverty-relief programme’. More than 11 per cent of the province’s residents lived below the poverty line at the time of the article’s publication, while about 10 per cent of the population was Christian, a disproportionate number compared to the rest of the country.

SCMP said that many believers had been told to remove images of Jesus, crosses and gospel couplets that formed the centrepieces of their homes and hang portraits of Xi instead if they wanted to benefit from poverty-relief efforts, with the person in charge of the initiative, Qi Yan, telling SCMP that the people should ‘no longer rely on Jesus, but on the party for help’.

While Qi Yan dismissed claims that funds were contingent on the religious objects being removed, this was contested by residents interviewed by SCMP. ‘We only asked them to take down [religious] posters in the centre of the home. They can still hang them in other rooms, we won’t interfere with that’, Qi Yan told SCMP.

In contrast to the reports on the removal of the crosses, the replacement of holy images with that of Xi appears to be a less widespread occurrence, and it is uncertain to what extent the local authorities in Jiangxi were coordinating with authorities at the national level. Nevertheless, it may also represent another form of religious oppression in China.

Some Ambiguity over Scale

While we found evidence of both the removal of crosses from churches and the replacement of holy images with that of Xi in China, we find that the reports on the replacement of holy images with Xi to be potentially misleading in some ways in the social media posts.

Context is required to indicate that the replacement of holy images may be limited to some local initiatives, and that ‘replacement’ refers to the physical location of the objects, rather than the use of the images for worship.

As such, we find the claim that China is removing crosses from churches and replacing pictures of Jesus with Xi Jinping to be mostly true, with some potentially misleading elements.