Do we like them?

Do we like Wang Yi?

Our score: 8 out of 10. He stood up at huge personal cost and we found no harmful words, but the record on his views of LGBTQ+ people is thin.

Wang Yi is the pastor who led the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, one of China's best-known unregistered Protestant congregations. Chinese authorities cracked down on it in December 2018, and he was arrested in that sweep of unauthorised religious groups. [Nothing here is about a scandal he caused: the story is what the state did to him.]

A Chengdu court sentenced him to nine years in prison in late December 2019 for inciting subversion of state power and illegal business operations. He was also fined and had his personal assets seized. The illegal business charge reportedly related to printing Christian books.

His own lawyer's view is that it was about speech. Si Weijiang, hired by Wang's mother, said the book-printing charge was really about the freedom of publication, and that the incitement charge concerned speech and caused no social harm. Amnesty International's China researcher said the sentence made a mockery of China's supposed religious freedoms.

On the harm test, we found no words or acts from him that target LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no dodgy company. The honest gap is that the coverage we could read is about church and state, not about sexuality or gender. So this is a pass on what we found, not a full character reference on every issue.

On the good-person test, the pattern is plain: he kept speaking out and leading his congregation while knowing the cost, and he is still serving his sentence. His church has kept being targeted, with fresh arrests of house church members reported in January 2026. No source we read suggests he mistreated anyone.