Content note: this piece describes the beating death of a woman in a McDonald’s restaurant in front of other customers. It also engages seriously with a religious movement whose leadership, membership, and history of violence are the subject of an active propaganda war between the Chinese state and the movement itself. I will name what is well-established and I will name what is disputed. I will not pretend to know things I do not know.
The Woman on the Floor of a McDonald’s
Her name was Wu Shuoyan. She was thirty-seven years old. She worked as a salesperson in a clothing store in the city of Zhaoyuan, in Shandong Province, in eastern China. She was married. She had a five-year-old son. On the evening of May 28, 2014, at around nine o’clock at night, she stopped into a McDonald’s in Zhaoyuan for something to eat. Six people who had spent that evening in the same McDonald’s approached her table, twice, and asked her for her phone number so they could recruit her into their religious group. She refused, twice. On the second refusal, they called her an evil spirit. Two of them picked up mops they had brought with them into the restaurant. One of them threw a chair at her. They beat her, and stomped on her, and she died on the floor of the McDonald’s while other customers filmed it on their mobile phones.
I want to open the piece there, on the floor of the McDonald’s, on the woman with the five-year-old son at home who had said no to a phone number and was killed for it. Because everything else in this piece — the doctrine, the founders, the female Christ, the Chinese state, the CIA-adjacent Italian sociologist, the propaganda war, the millions of members scattered across five continents, the theological question of whether the killers were even members of the group they said they were killing in the name of — sits on top of that fact. Wu Shuoyan lived. Wu Shuoyan is dead. Her son is old enough now, in 2026, to know exactly what happened to his mother, and there is no version of this case where the theological argument about whose faith is whose does anything for that boy.
Now let me tell you what the group is, and let me be honest with you about what I know and what I do not.
Eastern Lightning: The Movement, Not the Weather
The group in question is known by two names in English. One is Eastern Lightning (東方閃電), taken from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew — “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” — that the group reads as prophecy about themselves. The other, more formal name is The Church of Almighty God (全能神教会), by which they refer to themselves in almost all of their own writing. They were founded in 1991, in Henan Province, in central China, by a former physics teacher and railway worker named Zhao Weishan. Zhao had been a member of another indigenous Chinese Protestant movement called the Shouters (呼喊派) in the late 1980s. When the Shouters were banned by Chinese authorities in the mid-1980s, he left, and by the early 1990s he was working on something of his own.
Around 1991 or 1992, Zhao met a young woman named Yang Xiangbin. Yang was in her late teens. She had recently suffered a mental breakdown after failing the Chinese university entrance exam — a specific and enormously heavy Chinese failure that has, over the decades, produced a whole small library of stories that end in it — and she had turned, during her breakdown, to writing long religious texts that she said were the words of God speaking through her. Zhao read them. Zhao saw what they could be. In 1993, Zhao declared publicly that Yang Xiangbin was the returned Christ — specifically, that Jesus had returned to earth for a second time, this time as a Chinese woman, this time in Henan, this time in the person of Yang Xiangbin, and this time to complete the work of salvation that his first male incarnation had left unfinished two thousand years ago. Zhao and Yang eventually became a couple. They named her sacred text The Word Appears in the Flesh (話在肉身顯現). It became the core scripture of the movement.
The theology of the Church of Almighty God is, in the simplest possible summary, a theology of three ages. The Age of Law — the Old Testament. The Age of Grace — the ministry of Jesus. And a new age, which the movement calls the Age of Kingdom, in which God has returned in a second incarnation, as Yang Xiangbin, to Chinese soil, to complete what the male Christ began. For a Chinese Protestant Christian in 1993, this was heresy on a scale that made the Shouters look mild — the claim that Christ had returned, that the Bible was no longer the final word, and that Chinese people were now the chosen ones was, in the view of every established church and every state authority, wildly unacceptable. The state moved quickly. In 1995, the Chinese government officially designated the Church of Almighty God a xie jiao — 邪教, a heterodox teaching, a term that appears in official English translations as “evil cult” and that authorizes systematic legal repression under Chinese law. That designation has never been lifted.
In 2000, Zhao Weishan and Yang Xiangbin fled China for the United States. They applied for and received political asylum. They have lived in the greater New York area since then, running the Church of Almighty God from abroad while the state hunts its members inside China. The movement claims somewhere between three and four million members. The Chinese state disputes this figure, generally downward. Nobody outside the movement can independently verify it. What is not in dispute is that the Church of Almighty God is one of the largest and most persistent new religious movements to emerge from China in the last century, and that it has been on the receiving end of state repression at a scale and consistency that has produced tens of thousands of refugee asylum applications in South Korea, Italy, Japan, and the United States.
The Recruitment Style That Has Made Enemies of Almost Everyone
What is also not in dispute is the recruitment style. This is where the Church of Almighty God has, over three decades, made enemies of every other Chinese Christian community it has come into contact with.
The movement recruits, and always has recruited, most heavily from within the Chinese Protestant house-church movement — the loose, semi-underground network of unregistered Protestant congregations that operates outside the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement. CAG missionaries pose, in many well-documented cases, as ordinary Protestant Christians. They attend an unregistered house church for weeks or months, build relationships, and then begin to introduce the teaching that Christ has returned as a Chinese woman. When the host congregation reacts — sometimes with expulsion, sometimes with denunciation to authorities — the CAG missionary either leaves or, in the documented pattern that Chinese Protestant leaders have complained about for thirty years, takes members of the host congregation with them. Whole house churches have been reported as being “swallowed” by CAG in this way. The tactic has a name in Chinese Protestant literature: gua yang tou mai gou rou (掛羊頭賣狗肉), roughly “hanging up a sheep’s head to sell dog meat.”
There are also credible, documented cases of kidnapping-adjacent recruitment tactics — instances in which a Chinese Protestant pastor has been taken away by CAG members, held in a private location for days or weeks, and subjected to intense religious pressure aimed at converting them. Chinese state-media reporting on this is heavy; independent Christian human-rights organizations like ChinaAid have also reported cases; scholars like Emily Dunn have documented specific incidents. This is one of the areas where the state narrative and the independent scholarly literature overlap significantly. It happens.
Where the state narrative and the scholarly literature diverge is on the question of systemic organized violence directed at ordinary members of the public. That is where we have to talk about the McDonald’s.
Zhaoyuan, Shandong, May 28, 2014, Approximately Nine P.M.
Six people were sitting in a McDonald’s in Zhaoyuan that evening. They were all from or associated with a single Chinese family: the Zhang family, whose paternal head was Zhang Lidong, a fifty-five-year-old former textile-business owner from Wuhan. With him were his two adult daughters — Zhang Fan, then thirty, and Zhang Hang, then eighteen — his teenage son Zhang Duo, then thirteen, his younger romantic partner Zhang Qiaolian, then twenty-four, and a woman who had been living with the family named Lü Yingchun, then thirty-nine. Six adults and one child, sitting in a fast-food restaurant on a spring night, with mops that they had brought with them.
They approached Wu Shuoyan’s table. They asked for her phone number. They said they wanted it for missionary purposes. She said no. They asked again. She said no again. On the second refusal, Zhang Fan and Lü Yingchun stood up. They told her she was an “evil spirit” that had to be destroyed. Zhang Fan hit her with a chair. Others began stomping. Zhang Lidong — the father — joined in. Zhang Duo, the thirteen-year-old son, was, according to police accounts, present but did not participate physically. The attack lasted several minutes. Other customers, including at least one who filmed the whole thing on their phone, did not intervene. Wu Shuoyan died on the floor.
Police arrested all seven family members that night. Chinese state media, within hours, identified them as members of the Church of Almighty God. On May 31, three days after the murder, CCTV — the state television broadcaster — aired a jailhouse interview with Zhang Lidong. In it he was completely unrepentant. He said, in remarks that were widely quoted internationally: “I beat her with all my might and stamped on her too. She was a demon. We had to destroy her.” He and his daughter Zhang Fan were sentenced to death on October 11, 2014. They were executed on February 2, 2015. Lü Yingchun received a life sentence, later reduced on appeal to twenty-one years and three months. Zhang Hang received ten years. Zhang Qiaolian received seven. Zhang Duo, the thirteen-year-old, was too young for adult trial and was released to the custody of relatives.
That is the story as the Chinese state, and as most of the world’s major news organizations, told it in the summer and fall of 2014. That is the story on which most English-language accounts of the Church of Almighty God still rest. It is, in every fact of what physically happened in the restaurant, correct. Wu Shuoyan is dead. Zhang Lidong killed her. Six people were arrested and five were sentenced.
There is, however, a second layer of this story that I have to be honest with you about, because it is the layer where scholars of Chinese religion and Chinese-state prosecutors are in real, deep, unresolved disagreement.
The Question of Whose Faith the Killers Belonged To
Within weeks of the Zhaoyuan murder, a mainland Chinese newspaper — The Beijing News (新京报), a state-sanctioned but relatively independent outlet by Chinese standards — published an investigative report on the Zhang family’s religious history. What they reported was uncomfortable for the state narrative. The Zhang family, per their own statements to police and per the reporters’ own reconstruction, had indeed been involved with Church of Almighty God congregations at various points — but had, by the Zhangs’ own account, left the movement around 2010, approximately four years before the murder. They had, in the interval, developed their own private theology in which Zhang Fan and Lü Yingchun claimed to be divine incarnations themselves — a claim mainstream CAG explicitly forbids, because the whole point of CAG doctrine is that Yang Xiangbin is the one and only female Christ.
Emily Dunn, an Australian scholar at the University of Melbourne who wrote her doctoral thesis on CAG and later published it as Lightning from the East: Heterodoxy and Christianity in Contemporary China (Brill, 2015), agrees with the Beijing News reporting. So does Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist of religion who runs the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and who edited the 2020 Oxford University Press volume Inside The Church of Almighty God. Introvigne’s book contains an entire chapter titled “Fake News: The McDonald’s Murder of 2014”, arguing that the perpetrators had left CAG years earlier, that their splinter theology was explicitly rejected by CAG, and that the Chinese state used the murder as a pretext to justify a nationwide crackdown on the movement that had nothing to do with the actual killers’ actual beliefs.
I want to be careful about how I present this to you, because Massimo Introvigne is not a neutral figure. He runs an outlet, Bitter Winter, that has been accused by Chinese state media (and by some Western analysts) of being aligned with CAG’s own communications strategy. The Chinese Embassy in Rome has publicly complained about him. His work has been cited approvingly by CAG’s own publications. That does not necessarily mean he is wrong. It means the reader should hold what he says knowing where he stands. Emily Dunn has fewer such entanglements and reaches largely the same conclusion about the Zhang family, which is the reason I am inclined to weight the “they had left CAG” account seriously.
So here is where I have to leave you, honestly, in 2026. Wu Shuoyan is dead. She was killed by six people. Those six people had a religious history that included the Church of Almighty God at some point in their past. Whether they were members of CAG on the evening of May 28, 2014, is a question the Chinese state answers with an unambiguous yes and independent Western scholars answer with a qualified no. Both sides in that disagreement have reasons to hold their position that are not exclusively about the truth. The Chinese state wants to justify a crackdown on a religious movement it sees as a political threat. CAG and its Western defenders want to preserve the movement’s legitimacy in the international refugee context. And Wu Shuoyan, who did not care about any of it, is dead.
The Doomsday That Did Not Come and the Crackdown That Did
The other event that has shaped what CAG became in the 2010s, and one the current post on this site does not mention at all, is the failed doomsday prophecy of December 2012. In the year leading up to December 21, 2012 — the date circulating in global popular culture at the time as the end of the world under a misreading of the Mayan calendar — CAG members inside China reportedly began giving away possessions, quitting jobs, and preparing for the end. When the day passed without incident, the Chinese state moved quickly. Thousands of CAG members were arrested in the first weeks of 2013. Property was confiscated. Many of the members who fled at that point are now the core of the CAG refugee population in South Korea, where roughly 800 CAG asylum-seekers have applied for protection with a very low success rate.
The 2014 McDonald’s murder, coming eighteen months into an already active crackdown, gave the Chinese state the public-facing justification it needed to intensify. From 2014 through the present, arrests of CAG members inside China have run continuously into the thousands per year. Bitter Winter and other CAG-adjacent outlets publish detailed accounts of specific arrests, tortures, and deaths in custody. Chinese state outlets publish detailed accounts of CAG deceptions, kidnappings, and destructive family separations. Both are largely writing to and for their own audiences. Both are largely accurate about specific incidents. Neither describes the whole picture, because the whole picture cannot be described from either seat.
Yang Xiangbin, Still Alive, Still in New York
Yang Xiangbin is, as I write this in 2026, approximately fifty-three years old. She lives, along with Zhao Weishan, in the greater New York area. She has not, so far as any journalist has ever been able to confirm, given a public interview since fleeing China in 2000. Her writings continue to be published as the ongoing word of Almighty God through the movement’s publishing arm. Her image is not, in most CAG media, shown; the movement generally represents her only in abstract or through her written words. Zhao Weishan, in his mid-seventies, appears to run the operational side of the movement from the US, communicating with local leaders in China through encrypted channels and with the global membership through CAG’s substantial multilingual media apparatus, which produces feature films, documentaries, and hymnal music in dozens of languages.
The movement is not going away. Whatever the Chinese state does to CAG members inside China, the leadership sits outside the state’s reach, and the diaspora continues to grow. The Church of Almighty God is now on every continent except Antarctica. There are CAG congregations in Seoul, in Rome, in Tokyo, in Los Angeles, in São Paulo, in Sydney. Most of the members in those diaspora congregations arrived as refugees from the post-2012 crackdown or from the intensification after 2014. Some are second-generation now. The children of Chinese women who fled arrest are growing up in Korean or Italian schools, learning Korean or Italian in the classroom and CAG hymns at home.
What This Case Asks Us to Do
I want to close, as I did with the Nagoya and Setagaya pieces, on the woman.
Wu Shuoyan was a young mother. She stopped for something to eat. She was asked for her phone number by strangers. She refused. She was killed for the refusal, in a public restaurant, in front of witnesses who filmed it and did not intervene. Nothing about the twelve years of religious-studies argument about whether her killers were “really” Church of Almighty God members or whether they were splinter-cell ex-CAG members changes that. Nothing about the Chinese state’s crackdown, or the CESNUR defense of the movement, or Yang Xiangbin’s continued life in exile in New York, does anything for the five-year-old boy who woke up on the morning of May 29, 2014 without a mother. He is seventeen years old now, somewhere in Shandong Province. He knows, at seventeen, exactly what happened to his mother, and I do not think there is a version of the theological argument that he owes any of them a hearing.
So here is what I want you to take away from this case, if you are going to take one thing. When religious movements — whether they are CAG, or the movement that killed Wu Shuoyan and claimed to be CAG, or any other — teach their members that other human beings are demons, evil spirits, obstacles to be destroyed rather than persons to be treated as persons, they have crossed a line that no theological refinement can walk back. It does not matter whether the killers were CAG-in-good-standing or CAG-splinter. It matters that they were operating inside a framework of thought that let them look at a woman in a McDonald’s and see a demon. That framework existed. That framework moved a woman’s body from being a person to being a target. And a woman is dead because of it.
Her name was Wu Shuoyan. She was thirty-seven. She had a son. Please do not forget her under the weight of the argument about whose faith owns her killers.
Sources
- Emily Dunn, Lightning from the East: Heterodoxy and Christianity in Contemporary China, Brill, 2015.
- Massimo Introvigne (ed.), Inside The Church of Almighty God: The Most Persecuted Religious Movement in China, Oxford University Press, 2020, esp. chapter “Fake News: The McDonald’s Murder of 2014.”
- The Beijing News (新京报), investigative reporting on the Zhang family’s religious history, 2014.
- CNN, “Eastern Lightning: Kidnapping, murder and a female Christ,” June 6, 2014.
- CNN, “Chinese court sentences cult members to death over McDonald’s killing,” October 13, 2014.
- BBC News, “Chinese cult murder trial opens in Shandong.”
- The China Story (Australian National University), “Almighty God: Murder in a McDonald’s,” 2014 Yearbook.
- Bitter Winter (CESNUR), ongoing reporting on Church of Almighty God persecution and refugee cases.
- ChinaAid, ongoing reporting on Chinese Christian house-church interactions with CAG.
- CCTV, May 31, 2014, broadcast of Zhang Lidong jailhouse interview.
- Yantai Intermediate People’s Court, sentencing records, October 11, 2014.