China has released an American Christian pastor who was jailed for life in 2006, according to the U.S. State Department.

David Lin, now 68, was found guilty of contract fraud by the Chinese Communist Party after he was caught fundraising for a Christian church in Beijing. Lin’s release comes after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi in Beijing in late August.

Lin was designated as wrongfully detained by Washington for years, with U.S. officials urging the Chinese government to release him. Lin was jailed in 2009, and later had his life sentence reduce so he would be released in 2029. Several other U.S. citizens are currently still being detained by China.

“It remains a top priority to resolve the cases of American citizens who are wrongfully detained or subject to exit bans in China,” Sullivan said during his meeting with Wang.

A congressional commission will be holding a hearing Wednesday to discuss U.S. citizens still imprisoned in China.

A 2022 report from the International Christian Concern titled “Chinese Conformity and Global Authoritarianism” points out the many instances where China has continually increased its efforts to silence religious groups.

“China has been increasing human rights abuses for years. Disappearances, persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, organs for sale, controlled press, and surveillance of its citizens have made international news. Authoritarianism on this scale takes years to cultivate,” ICC Fellow Lisa Navarrette wrote in the report.

While China is currently imprisoning over 1 million Uyghurs in concentration camps, the largest minority ethnic group in the northwestern province of Xinjiang – Christians have faced growing persecution by the Chinese government after a 2018 law was passed that restricted religious freedom, according to the report.

The persecution is not just restricted to mainland China, however. Thousands of Christians and Muslims have been murdered in Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country, while another 700,000 were forced to flee Bangladesh. India is also building camps for religious minorities within its largely Hindu population.

“People of faith supply important checks on government because they hold an allegiance to a power higher than the government. The government is a God-ordained institution, accountable to God. The function of government is to restrain evil and support and protect the sanctity of life. When the government is no longer just, it is the task of the church to expose the government and demand its officials repent. The local church is the hope of the world, and that is the case in China,” Navarrette said.

Currently, there are over 100 million Christians living in China, growing from 1 million over the past 40 years.

In a new report released Friday, the ICC states the Chinese government is accelerating efforts to eradicate Christianity and other minority religious groups. CCP members are also forced to be atheists, and must not follow any God.

Christians who refuse to support socialist ideals have been arrested and imprisoned, and the Chinese government is using a tactic called sinicization, which forces churches to make socialism their top priority in their preaching. Crosses were removed from Christian churches in 2020 because “their crosses were higher than their displays of the country’s flag.”

Since July 2021, 32 Christians have been arrested and detained, there have been at least five raids on Christian schools, and another 20 cases of sinicization of churches. Numbers are likely to be much higher after the ICC noted the difficulty of getting accurate information from Chinese officials.

“The government’s scrutiny of Christians is part of a wider effort to Sinicize the country by coercing religious groups to submit to the communist CCP ideology,” the report states.

In China’s official 1982 view on religion, it states religion is a “historical phenomenon” that will “eventually disappear from human history” through the “development of socialism and communism.”

“Religion will eventually disappear from human history. But it will disappear naturally only through the long-term development of Socialism and Communism, when all objective requirements are met. All Party members must have a sober-minded recognition of the protracted nature of the religious question under Socialist conditions,” the decree states.

The Council on Foreign Relations states China has recently softened its attitude toward Buddhism, and China’s only “indigenous” religion, Taoism. However, China views Christianity as “foreign,” and worries about outside influence on believers, despite Jesuit missionaries first arriving in China in 1601.

“Christianity is practiced among the Han Chinese majority, especially urban, white-collar professionals. In some ways, the CCP faces a greater challenge from Christianity because the religion is practiced among the very people the party needs to modernize the country,” the report states.