Drawing on analysis, leaked budget data, court records, and party documents, exclusive research maps the CCP’s security apparatus.
On the eve of Independence Day, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri landed in Los Angeles, free after roughly nine months in Chinese prison.
During his detainment, Jin had wondered if he would ever see freedom again. His release came only after President Donald Trump raised the case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in May. At least eight members of Jin’s church remain behind bars.
Although Jin is a Christian pastor, he wasn’t accused of a crime of a religious nature. Instead, the Chinese regime charged him with illegally using information networks and running an illegal business—internet and commercial offenses.
What he had actually done was refuse to install a camera. In 2018, authorities told him to place surveillance equipment in the sanctuary of Beijing’s Zion Church, which he had built into a congregation with a membership of more than 1,500. He said no. Officials shut the church and took its property.
The congregation moved online and continued holding services for another seven years. Then, on Oct. 10, 2025, police took Jin from his home in the southern city of Beihai and detained him, along with nearly 30 other church leaders around the country. It was the largest coordinated takedown of an urban house church in China in more than four decades, according to human rights groups.
None of that required a spy hunt or a dramatic raid. A church was treated as a security problem, prosecuted under business and internet law, and handled by ordinary police in a provincial city far from the capital.
Jin’s case shows how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reaches deep into the private life of China’s 1.4 billion people.
An upcoming exclusive report by The Epoch Times, “The Structure of the CCP’s Security Organs: From Central Rosters to Front-Line Operational Units,” maps the CCP’s security apparatus from its central ministries down to its front-line units.
The central finding of the report, which draws on Western and Chinese scholarship, leaked budget figures, court records, and the Party’s own documents, is that the Party does not rely on one feared agency to do its watching. It assigns the job to everyone else—local police, neighborhood monitors, employers, universities, landlords, and 10 million to 15 million ordinary citizens recruited to report what they notice.
That vast surveillance network, sitting below a police force of nearly 2 million, allows the Party to reach places where no police force can go.
Not China’s CIA
When Americans hear about China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), they may think of the CIA. But while the CIA is barred by law from policing Americans at home, the MSS began as a domestic security service and grew outward.
“In its early years, the MSS was mostly focused on internal security while [the People’s Liberation Army’s] intelligence was the stronger organ abroad,” said Matthew Brazil, a former U.S. Army officer, diplomat, and corporate security investigator who co-wrote “Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer.”
Only recently did that change. “Since 2017 or so, foreign intelligence has greatly expanded and MSS seems in charge of political and technological intelligence,” he said.
But catching the party’s “enemies” at home never stopped being the ministry’s work.
The MSS works alongside the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which runs traffic stops, household registrations, and the neighborhood beat. It also runs the camera network, the police databases, and the real-name systems that tie a phone number or a bank card to an individual.
The branch of the MPS that handles dissidents, petitioners, and religious groups—known by the shorthand Chinese term “guobao”—draws on all of that surveillance.
Political policing rarely announces itself and is instead couched under the headings of public order, anti-fraud, cybersecurity, and household registration.
By Sean Tseng
