(ZGBriefs is coming to you one day early this week because of Christmas. Merry Christmas to you and your family.)
A Note from ChinaSource
ZGBriefs exists to help readers understand what is happening in and around China by curating news and analysis from a variety of sources, including Chinese Christians. As part of ChinaSource’s Cultivating Resilient Faith end-of-year campaign, we are focusing on the need for deep spiritual roots as believers in China and across the global diaspora face increasing cultural and generational challenges. We believe that staying informed on events in and around China helps those of us who serve.
Is ZGBriefs a helpful resource for you? If so, we invite you to consider making a year-end gift to ChinaSource. Our goal is to raise $150,000 by December 31 to continue providing biblically grounded insights, amplifying Chinese Christian voices, and strengthening faith communities worldwide. Your support helps nurture resilient faith for a flourishing global Chinese church. You can make a donation here.
Featured Article
From ‘Ping Guo’ to Peace: How a Pun Created a Christmas Custom (December 22, 2025, China Christian Daily)
For Christians and churches worldwide, Christmas is a season of celebration and a crucial time for evangelism. While methods vary globally—from cantatas to charity drives—churches in China have adopted a unique medium to share the gospel: the “Peace Apple.” […] In Mandarin, Christmas Eve is translated as Ping An Ye (平安夜), meaning “The Night of Peace” (from “Silent Night”). The word for apple is Ping Guo (苹果). Because the first syllable of “apple” (Ping) sounds exactly like the first syllable of “peace” (Ping), the fruit has been culturally reimagined as the “Peace Apple” (Ping An Guo).
Government / Politics / Foreign Affairs
Among Palm Trees and Luxury Malls, China Launches an Ambitious Experiment (December 16, 2025, Christian Science Monitor)
Turquoise waves from the South China Sea sweep along the southern tip of China’s Hainan Island, as tourists in flip-flops pose for photos under palms. Long a lonely place of exile for banished Chinese court officials, this tropical island of 10 million people has transformed in recent decades into a resort-studded vacation spot. Now, Chinese leader Xi Jinping aims to turn Hainan into the world’s biggest free-trade port – leapfrogging ahead of the rest of the country in terms of economic openness and integration with the world.
From Labubu to Bockbuster Films, Was 2025 the Year China’s Soft Power Went Mainstream? (December 20, 2025, South China Morning Post)
Chinese lifestyle brands and other cultural exports proved to be a hit around the world this year, here are some of our most notable stories
Why China’s Spat with Japan Could Still Get Worse (December 21, 2025, The Economist) (subscription required)
“For nigh on 1,000 years, the Japanese pirates have wreaked havoc…they respect only force, and their hearts are bursting with malice.” This month China’s armed forces released these verses on social media. As poetry, it is perhaps not the best. But the message was clear enough. To hammer it home, the poem was accompanied by a cartoon of a skeleton, wearing a Japanese army cap, trying to clutch the island of Taiwan. A giant sword, swung from China’s mainland, is cutting its head off.
Religion
No House, No Car, No Bride: Economic Plight of China’s Young Clergy (December 17, 2025, China Christian Daily)
Brother Zibu (pseudonym) fits the description of an ideal partner in many ways. As a millennial, he is a tall, handsome “Northern big guy” with a healthy physique and a gentle demeanor. Now 33 years old—the age at which Jesus approached the cross—Zibu carries a cross of his own: despite his desire for marriage, he remains single.
Is Your Christianity Chinese? (December 18, 2025, China Partnership)
A few years ago, during Spring Festival, someone in my village asked me two questions: “Does it cost money to join your Christianity?” And, “Is your Christianity Chinese?” When he asked me these seemingly simple questions at the same time, it made me realize a profound truth: Chinese people misunderstand and persecute Christianity primarily because of these two things: money, and country.
From Reason to Faith (December 19, 2025, ChinaSource)
At twenty, I resolved to become a renowned scholar. I decided to sit for the entrance examination to the then-fashionable graduate program in aesthetics—reportedly the first student from my department to do so straight from undergraduate studies. The Party secretary even personally delivered my personnel file to Sichuan Normal University. Yet after four years of rigorous study, I found myself increasingly confused about what the discipline of aesthetics was actually supposed to study.
How China Tried to Dismantle a Major Underground Church (subscription required) (December 20, 2025, NY Times)
Videos and photographs show how the Chinese authorities have tried to dismantle Zion Church, a Christian network with branches across the country.
‘Is This Real?’: Wife of Detained Pastor Describes Anguish as China Cracks Down on Unofficial Churches (December 22, 2025, The Guardian)
The knocks came at 2am. Hiding out at a friend’s house in a Beijing suburb, Gao Yingjia and his wife, Geng Pengpeng, rushed downstairs to meet the group of plain-clothed men who said they were police officers. Their son, nearly six, was sleeping upstairs, and Gao and Geng wanted to minimize the ruckus. They knew their time was up. Two months later, Gao is in a detention centre in Guangxi province, southern China, charged with “illegal use of information networks”.
Zion Church Crackdown (December 22, 2025, ChinaSource)
It has now been almost three months since authorities in China intensified a crackdown on Zion Church, arresting founding pastor Jin Mingri (Ezra Jin) and others spread around the country. Among unregistered churches in China, Zion was unique in that it had adopted an internet-based church growth model in the years since its main church location was shut down in 2018, establishing 100 church sites in 40 cities.
Changchun: How to Pray for Us (December 22, 2025, China Partnership)
For the church, please pray that God will continue to bless our campus ministry. Last year the ministry went through some major changes, but we are asking God to revive this work. We are asking that more graduating students will stay in Changchun, and that God will call them to be future missionaries, pastors, and key co-workers.
The Man Who Longed to Go Home (December 23, 2025, ChinaSource)
I noticed an elderly man in a long, quilted Chinese gown sitting quietly among the residents. When he looked up and greeted me—in clear, fluent Chinese—I stopped short in astonishment. No one had mentioned a Chinese resident in this home. But as I stepped closer, my surprise deepened: the face before me was unmistakably Western—a white man, not Chinese at all.
Society / Life
Dashed Dreams and Land Grabs: The Rise of Rural Protest in China (December 18, 2025, The Guardian)
Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums. Then the tension erupts. A scuffle breaks out, some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.
A Blood-Smuggling Scandal Reveals China’s Genetic Security Anxiety (December 19, 2025, The Diplomat)
This week, Chinese customs announced they had busted a blood-smuggling ring. The scale of the gang’s activities is shocking – the authorities revealed that they had handled the blood of over 100,000 pregnant women from the majority of the country’s provinces. If we assume one baby per woman, that’s roughly equivalent to one percent of all births in the country in 2024.
This Billionaire Tested China’s Limits. It Cost Him His Freedom. (December 20, 2025, BBC News)
On a winter morning in 2022 Raphael Wong and Figo Chan walked into Hong Kong’s Stanley prison to meet Jimmy Lai, the media billionaire who had been arrested two years before and was awaiting trial charged with national security offences. They had all been part of the turbulent protests that had rocked Hong Kong in 2019, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets demanding democracy and more freedom in the Chinese territory.
Hoping to Curb Obesity, Chinese City Implements Health Ordinance (December 22, 2025, Sixth Tone)
Hangzhou, capital of the eastern Zhejiang province, has passed a municipal health ordinance partially directed at residents’ weight loss, in line with China’s battle against obesity. The city is the first to codify the nation’s three-year weight management initiative into local measures. The ordinance, which will take effect Jan. 1, states that local health authorities will periodically monitor residents’ health and develop targeted programs for groups, particularly children and the elderly. Both the city and district governments will also be required to expand public fitness programs and facilities.
Economics / Trade / Business
Next in Line: Meet the New Heirs of Chinese Manufacturing (December 22, 2025, The World of Chinese)
Across China, a growing number of young people—collectively known as “chang’erdai (厂二代),” literally second-generation factory owners—are turning to social media to showcase and promote their family businesses. Under the tag “chang’erdai,” they post everything from casual vlogs about daily life on the factory floor to elaborately staged short dramas detailing their parents’ rags-to-riches stories, racking up billions of views and feeding outsiders’ curiosity about the lifestyles of the wealthy and sparking interest in these young heirs’ paths to succession.
What China’s Yuan Internationalisation Push Looks Like – And What May Hold It Back (December 23, 2025, South China Morning Post)
The yuan has strengthened in recent months, with the offshore rate hitting its highest level against the US dollar in more than a year, fuelling forecasts that it could reach as high as 6.8 in 2026. The currency’s international profile has also inched upwards as Beijing pushes for wider global use. In this explainer, the Post reviews the yuan’s progress across several fronts, drawing on a recent analysis by Betty Wang, head of North Asia research at Oxford Economics.
The Second China Shock Is Coming – and the UK’s Response Is Too Timid (December 23, 2025, The Guardian)
We all need to pay attention as we brace for the second China shock. The first, which followed China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, was about China’s integration into the global trading system, with huge consequences for global labour and resource markets and the harm experienced by many communities around the world as firms and jobs were lost. The second one is China’s attempt to lead and dominate advanced technologies, such as electric vehicles, batteries, semiconductors, biotechnology, robotics and AI, via state-directed industrial policy on an unprecedented scale.
China’s Industrial Policy a Recipe of Overcapacity (December 23, 2025, East Asia Forum)
Key to China’s industrial policy success is not mere subsidies but a system of coordination underpinned by the central government’s Catalogue of Industrial Guidance. With resources flowing to sectors prioritized by the catalogue, economies of scale have helped propel China’s manufacturing output. But the expansive support of the catalogue has produced a new structural crisis in the Chinese economy — overcapacity.
Science / Technology
Can China Be Trusted to Lead on AI Safety? (December 18, 2025, China Media Project)
While AI development accelerates from week to week, so rapidly that most of us are hard-pressed to keep up, it seems that international governance is stalling. For their part, many frontier AI companies have abandoned the safety commitments made at international summits. Meanwhile, policymakers in global capitals like Beijing, Brussels and Washington are competing for the high ground when it comes to the emerging international system for AI governance. The stakes could not be higher. If some prognosticators are right, a breakneck race to AGI between rival powers could end catastrophically within five years.
In the Shadow of US Export Controls, China Rallies Its Own Chip Industry (December 19, 2025, NPR)
The tech company SiCarrier is hardly a household name. The government-backed Chinese firm makes things most people have probably never heard of, like epitaxy equipment and atomic layer deposition tools used in microchip fabrication. Wonky stuff. But at a chip industry expo in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen this fall, a crowd thronged its display booth, snapping pictures, doing livestreams and marveling at its wares.
How Close Is the US-China AI Race? (December 19, 2025, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations)
On December 8, 2025, President Donald Trump stated that NVIDIA would be allowed to sell its advanced H200 chips to China. This decision departs from previous US policy that prevented the export of H200 chips to China to preserve the United States’ lead over China in the AI race. Industry leaders touted economic incentives, such as US companies’ desire to strengthen market shares in China, urging President Trump to change the course of the United States’ advance compute export policy. Some experts fear that this decision will yield negative national security implications for the United States and pave the way for Chinese AI companies to catch up to American ones, narrowing the gap between the two countries in the AI competition.
Health / Environment
China’s Green Investment in Pakistan: Solar Dreams, Debt Shadows, and the Politics of a Rapid Transition (December 18 , 2025, Global Voices)
This solar explosion captured global attention. It was hailed by some as evidence that South Asia could leapfrog into a renewable future. But beneath the optimism lies a more complex story — one that reveals how China’s expanding role in Pakistan’s energy sector sits at the intersection of climate vulnerability, financial fragility, and geopolitical ambition.
Arts / Entertainment / Media
China’s Communication Centers Stumble (December 18, 2025, China Media Project)
Since 2018, China’s leadership under Xi Jinping has pushed a radical reinvention of the country’s international communication — what the Chinese Communist Party still refers to as “external propaganda” (对外宣传) — by thinking beyond central-level media giants like Xinhua News Agency and CGTN and leveraging local and regional networks. The model builds on integrated media centers (融媒体中心) established nationwide to consolidate local propaganda resources, with content then repurposed for international audiences and distributed through international communication centers (国际传播中心), or ICCs.
Act Your Age? Chinese Dramas Thrust Preschoolers Into Adult Roles (December 18, 2025, Sixth Tone)
It’s 10 a.m. in mid-October, and child actor Yueyue is on set waiting for the director to call “action.” Dressed in sparkling blue, with white shoes and curly pigtails, the 4-year-old is playing an “elderly aunt with supernatural powers” in an ultrashort drama. For the upcoming scene, Yueyue needs to tell the other characters that the villain is “draining the blood of corpses” and trying to summon evil spirits. She has no idea what these lines mean.
How a Bullied Teenager Built China’s Unlikeliest Music Festival (December 23, 2025, Sixth Tone)
The building where Beijing’s most unlikely music festival was born no longer exists. The dilapidated table tennis club in the capital’s northeastern suburbs was demolished early this fall, another casualty of urban “beautification and renewal.” For three summers before that, its worn courts hosted a festival with no tickets, few rules, and little interest in behaving like one.
Links for Researchers
2025 Annual Report on the Persecution of Chinese House Churches (Early Rain Ministries)
Events
Online Courses for those working with Chinese students (Thriving Turtles)
January 19-30, 2026. Thriving Turtles Training is an initiative to equip front-line gospel workers with the knowledge and skills they need to be effective cross-cultural gospel ministers. These courses are asynchronous (not in real time) running for 6-10 hours over a 2-week period. They are NOT webinars, so you are free to work in your own time and time zone. Courses contain a variety of interactive activities including (written) discussion forums. For more information see our website https://www.thrivingturtles.org/online-courses/
Courses offered this year:
• Cultural Intelligence for Ministry
• Helping Your Friend Thrive in China
• Discipling People with a Chinese Worldview
• Culture Values and Distance
Pray for China
December 25 (Pray For China: A Walk Through History)
On Christmas Day in 1989, Tiananmen student leader Zhang Boli (张伯笠牧师) became a Christian while hiding in a shed in Heilongjiang during a blizzard. Zhang was on the “most wanted” list for two years before finally escaping from China. He later became the pastor of Harvest Chinese Christian Church in Fairfax, Virginia. As Christians celebrate the incarnation, pray that we would fully appreciate the reality that God became flesh, empowering us to build His kingdom here and now. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. 1 Corinthians 3:10
Praying Through the ChinaSource Journal (October 13, 2025, ChinaSource)
Praying Through ZGBriefs (August 29, 2025, ChinaSource)
Operation World (April 21, 2025, ChinaSource)
Pray for China (prayforchina.us)
Prayer Walking as a Rhythm of Life (May 30, 2025, ChinaSource)