China In Eurasia

BUCHAREST -- Through online sermons and a bustling virtual community, a Chinese Christian group labeled as a "cult" and persecuted inside China is finding new members in Romania.

The Church of Almighty God (CAG), also known as Eastern Lightning, claims millions of followers worldwide and has had an online footprint in Romania since 2018. More recently, a flurry of WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages -- many with more than 50,000 members -- have sprung up in the last year alone. These pages are all in Romanian, but many of the administrators are based in other European countries, such as Spain, Greece, France, and Serbia, as well as some in Romania.

RFE/RL tracked dozens of online Romanian groups tied to the CAG, all with followings ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of members, and with sermons held twice a day. While these are full of uplifting hymns and homilies, the church's core belief is that Jesus has returned to Earth as a Chinese woman to wreak the apocalypse.

"One of the reasons they are growing is because they are presenting a message that is attractive to people that already have a strong background in Christianity," Holly Folk, a professor at Western Washington University who has researched the CAG up close since 2016, told RFE/RL. "Most of the people who join already have a familiarity and it's not one you can easily jump into if you don't."

While much about the CAG remains quite secretive, including who is funding it and directing its operations in China and abroad, its growing following in Romania marks the latest chapter for the Chinese offshoot of Christianity as it spreads its message and grapples with pressure from Chinese authorities in China and abroad.

Eastern Lightning Goes West

Folk says that the group is known for its heavily online presence, which developed in part because of security concerns faced by its members inside China, where it has been the target of a crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party for decades that has since sent many members fleeing persecution and claiming asylum abroad.

"There is a big concern about security. They're targeted in China and there is fear about their immigration status in a lot of countries," she said. "That's part of why things happen mostly online and you see fake names being used."

The CAG did not reply to RFE/RL's request for comment.

Founded in 1989 in northeastern China by Zhao Weishan, a former physics teacher, the church is fixated on doomsday scenarios and holds that Christ has returned to Earth as a Chinese woman named Yang Xiangbin, with whom Zhao claims direct contact.

After it was banned and classified as a cult by Beijing in 1995, Zhao reportedly fled to the United States where he received asylum in 2000. Yang is also believed to be in the United States.

Among the CAG's other tenets is that resisting the Communist Party, "the big red dragon," is a key test of fitness for salvation.

The fervency of church adherents and anti-communist beliefs, combined with the Chinese Communist Party's deep suspicion of Christianity and religious sects, has put the CAG in Beijing's crosshairs.

In one 2014 incident that was caught on camera and widely circulated in China, Chinese police alleged that CAG members beat a woman to death in a McDonald's after she refused to join them. Chinese authorities used the ensuing outcry to further crack down on the church -- launching a wave of arrests -- although experts say the episode was likely the work of a deranged individual and the CAG is not known for violence.

This pressure from the Communist Party has sent CAG members abroad. Many have applied for asylum in the United States and Canada, parts of Asia like Japan and Taiwan, and in Western Europe. Spain, where many of the group administrators for the CAG's Romanian presence are based, has been a leading European destination, with more than 500 asylum applications.

Massimo Introvigne, a sociologist and lawyer based in Italy who has researched the CAG for decades, wrote recently that some of these asylum claims have been denied recently and that Chinese authorities have played a role in trying to get the CAG members returned to China.

"Chinese embassies and consulates continue to supply authorities in the countries where the refugees arrive and courts of law with hostile information about the CAG," Introvigne wrote earlier this month.

The Romanian Chapter

All of the Romanian sermons attended by RFE/RL throughout January were online and while there were assurances that physical meetings would be coming soon, no specifics were shared in any of the groups.

One sermon of 30 people that RFE/RL joined in January was run by a woman using a Romanian name who said she was from Singapore but married to a Romanian man and living in Spain. The dozens of sermons attended over the course of a week were all conducted in Romanian and used the pacing and Christian imagery of an Orthodox church service, the predominant form of Christianity in Romania.

Some sermons were run by Romanians. One Romanian group admin -- a woman in her 60s who spoke to RFE/RL about her voluntary work with the CAG on condition of anonymity -- said that she took over the Facebook group after it was created by Chinese members of the church and that her role is to introduce potential new members to the CAG's beliefs. She herself converted and shared her own personal story.

"All my life I didn't have time to go to church, I raised my children while working and now I have found the answer to all my questions," she states, referring to the CAG.

The Romanian online community is growing.

The prolific Facebook and WhatsApp groups also link to YouTube pages that highlight a growing media footprint, which includes songs and slickly produced short films showcasing the CAG's beliefs. Some groups gained thousands of new followers in a single week, with more than 10,000 new posts in a month.

RFE/RL was not able to verify that all these members and posts were genuine, however, and many of the images and videos posted appear to be generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), where they combined the CAG's teachings with Orthodox religious themes related to Romania.

Despite the heavy use of AI in generating posts across the groups, the CAG apparently has devout Romanian members.

One Romanian woman who delivered an online sermon said that despite adhering to the CAG, she still attends services at her local Romanian Orthodox church. She also told RFE/RL that there is a growing cohort of Romanian members and claimed they meet in person regularly.

"Members of the CAG believe in their message and want to draw in local members and elevate local leaders," Folk said. "You can't grow a tradition from a bunch of websites alone."

RFE/RL Romanian Service correspondent Simona Carlugea reported from Bucharest. RFE/RL China Global Affairs correspondent Reid Standish reported from Prague.

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Attacks on strategic undersea telecom cables off the coast of Taiwan are not new, but when one was suspected of being severed off its northern coast by a Chinese-owned ship in early January, it fit a growing pattern.

Just a few weeks earlier, a Russian-flagged ship had cut an electricity cable running between Finland and Estonia in the Baltic Sea.

That followed several similar developments in the Baltic involving Chinese-flagged ships harming undersea infrastructure, including severing fiber-optic cables in November and damaging a gas pipeline in October 2023.

For Gabrielius Landsbergis, who served as Lithuania’s foreign minister until December, the string of incidents highlights how the dividing lines between simmering tensions with the West and Russia over the war in Ukraine are blurring with China’s aggression in the South China Sea as it claims the self-ruled island of Taiwan as its own.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt that Russia is behind these incidents in the Baltic,” Landsbergis told RFE/RL in an interview as he visited Taiwan. “For China, there is no clear attribution, but if it wanted to build up pressure on Taiwan through a shadow war by cutting cables, there are lessons to learn about that from Moscow.”

While China has supported Russia diplomatically since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, helped its economy, and bolstered its war effort by supplying dual-use technology for the battlefield, the prospect of growing coordination between Beijing and Moscow represents a new challenge for the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

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With An Eye On Ukraine, Taiwan Prepares For Trump 2.0

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"China is trying to create a new normal around Taiwan,” Chiu Chui-cheng, the minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the body that spearheads relations with Beijing, told RFE/RL. “Beijing’s goal is to shrink the buffer zone between us and make it that much easier for it to escalate, if it decides to.”

The recent cable incident is the latest of what Chiu says has been a steady uptick in such events -- ranging from new military exercises intended to simulate a blockade of the island to a threefold increase in suspected Chinese espionage cases -- meant to lay the groundwork for future moves against Taiwan.

“We don’t see these as accidents, we see them as strategy,” he said, referring to an increase in incidents targeting undersea infrastructure around Taiwan in recent years.

Living In The 'Gray Zone'

Fears over a potential Chinese invasion are far from the surface of everyday life in Taiwan’s lush, urban capital.

But the realities of these shifting dynamics are also setting in. During his campaign, Trump said that Taiwan doesn’t pay enough for its own defense and raised doubts over the level of U.S. support in the event of a Chinese invasion.

For the island’s policymakers, that’s raised concerns that severing underseas cables as part of so-called “gray zone” operations -- the term often used by Taiwanese officials to refer to the hybrid tactics used to intimidate the island but which remain below the threshold for war -- will make it harder to defend against Chinese aggression should it escalate to an outright attack.

China has denied involvement in the January cable damage in Taiwan and investigations into the incidents in the Baltic Sea are still under way.

While these cable episodes highlight the vulnerability of crucial offshore infrastructure and the difficulties in prosecuting sabotage, analysts say that they are part of a worrying new security climate in frontline areas near Ukraine and Taiwan that could easily escalate in the coming years as Trump takes office.

“These hybrid tactics that we’re seeing from China and Russia are meant to create favorable conditions for them if an opening presents itself to carry out a larger move,” Sari Arho Havren, an associate fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL. “It seems there is also a desire to signal some red lines to Washington as Trump comes into office.”

A New Normal

While Trump has vowed to quickly end the war in Ukraine, the risk of tensions between Beijing and Taipei escalating into a conflict appears to be rising.

U.S. officials have warned in recent years that China is preparing for a potential invasion of Taiwan, a call echoed by Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, during his January 15 U.S. Senate confirmation hearing.

“We need to wrap our head around the fact that unless something dramatic changes, like an equilibrium [between China and Taiwan], where they conclude that the costs of intervening in Taiwan are too high, we're going to have to deal with this before the end of this decade," Rubio said.

Added to the rise in hybrid encounters and growing tensions is stepped-up military cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.

Recently, Chinese and Russian bombers have flown exercises near Alaska, conducted naval drills together off the coast of South Africa, and carried out live fire exercises in the South China Sea.

The joint war games are part of a pattern of more than a decade of enhanced military coordination and one of the more visible expressions of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s alignment, which is held together by a shared desire to counterbalance the United States.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, has recorded 102 joint war games, multilateral military drills, or patrols from 2003 to the end of July 2024. Since then, an additional four exercises involving China and Russia have occurred. According to CSIS data, their militaries held at least four and as many as 10 joint drills each year between 2014 and 2023. The two countries carried out 11 exercises together in 2024.

U.S. policymakers have repeatedly warned in recent years about the risks posed by China and Russia’s growing partnership -- from economic support to growing military cooperation -- with one congressionally mandated report describing China and Russia’s deepening alignment as “the most significant strategic development in recent years.”

“As a military planner, you need to prepare for the worst-case scenario, which is Russia and China teaming up in a major way,” said Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses who studies Chinese foreign policy.

Taken together, the trend raises difficult questions for the Trump administration and other U.S. policymakers who have long factored how to deal with each nuclear-armed power separately, but now must plan for the risk of dealing with both, especially how China and Russia could act together in any potential future conflict in Europe or the Asia-Pacific.

“It’s still unclear how this would all play out and this isn’t a true military alliance,” said Wishnick. “But within the contours of where Beijing and Moscow like their cooperation to be, it’s growing.”