President Donald Trump revealed that he personally pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping on two of the most high-profile political prisoners in China during their face-to-face summit.
Trump told reporters he raised the case of Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy publisher, and a detained Christian pastor now identified as Ezra Jin, the founder of Zion Church in Beijing.
The results were mixed, but the moment still matters. The leader of the free world looked the head of the Chinese Communist Party in the eye and demanded answers on religious persecution.
Trump said Xi’s response on Lai was negative. On the pastor’s case, Trump said he felt “very optimistic, actually.”
.@POTUS on his meeting with President Xi: "I brought up Jimmy Lai, and I would say the response to that was not positive… I did I feel optimistic about the second one that’s now under consideration—the pastor. Very optimistic, actually." pic.twitter.com/Y3fxWlilCN
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 15, 2026
Daily Signal reported that Trump discussed both cases with Xi during his historic China trip and described the two very different reactions he received from the Chinese leader.
Trump said Xi Jinping was giving very serious consideration to the release of Pastor Ezra Jin, the leader of Zion Church. Zion Church is a prominent house church founded in Beijing, and its members have also faced imprisonment under the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump described the case of Jimmy Lai as tougher. Lai is the Hong Kong businessman who founded Apple Daily and became a symbol of pro-democracy resistance after Beijing crushed basic liberties in Hong Kong.
Daily Signal identified Lai as 78 years old and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly condemned Lai’s sentence, and Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Chris Smith led more than 100 lawmakers in urging President Trump to press for Lai’s release during his meeting with Xi.
The report made the contrast clear: one case sounded harder, while the pastor’s case appeared to have real movement. That is why Trump’s direct pressure matters.
Pastor Ezra Jin’s story shows one of the most brutal examples of CCP religious persecution in recent years.
He led one of the largest unregistered Protestant churches in Beijing before the regime shut it down and threw him behind bars, where he has reportedly been denied needed medical care.
Rep. Chris Smith laid out the stakes in an official release ahead of the summit, calling on the House to pass a resolution urging Trump to prioritize political prisoners in any engagement with Xi.
Smith named Pastor Jin Mingri, Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife Pang Yu, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, and Jimmy Lai among those imprisoned by the People’s Republic of China. He described the cases as examples of people being punished for prayer, publishing, speech, worship, and advocacy for fundamental freedoms.
ADVERTISEMENTSmith said Lai was imprisoned for defending freedom of the press, democracy, and rule of law in Hong Kong. He also called attention to Pastor Ezra Jin being denied critical medical care while detained.
Smith and Sen. Rick Scott led a letter signed by more than 100 congressional colleagues asking President Trump to keep pressing for their release. That congressional pressure matters because Trump was heading into a summit with the one man who can answer for Beijing’s political-prisoner system.
The official release put religious liberty and political imprisonment at the center of the China meeting. It gave Trump a clear mandate to raise names, not abstractions.
More than 100 members of Congress standing behind this effort shows that religious freedom and political-prisoner cases still carry real weight on Capitol Hill when the right president is willing to act on them.
President Donald J. Trump sits down for a wide ranging interview on his historic trip to China with @SpecialReport. 🇺🇸
Watch the key moments in under two minutes. pic.twitter.com/fjYzSSFKsI
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 16, 2026
Neither Lai nor Pastor Jin has been released at this point, and nobody should pretend this is a done deal.
But President Trump did what the CCP fears most: he made their dirty work personal, public, and impossible to ignore on the world stage.
The Chinese Communist Party locks up pastors for praying and publishers for printing the truth, and for the first time in years, the President of the United States looked their leader in the face and told him it was unacceptable.
That is what American leadership looks like.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at 100 Percent Fed Up. View the original article here.
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