About Bitter Winter

Bitter Winter

Bitter Winter is a daily online magazine on religious liberty and human rights, published at bitterwinter.org. It was launched in May 2018 with a single, sharply defined subject: how religions are allowed, restricted, or persecuted in China. Its own About page describes it as an online magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China, published by CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, headquartered in Torino, Italy. From 1 December 2020 it added an international section covering religious liberty worldwide, but China has remained its founding focus and the source of its best-known reporting. For readers researching religious freedom in China, it occupies an unusual position: part scholarly magazine, part news service built on correspondents inside China, and part archive of documents, testimonies, photographs, and videos supplied by people directly affected by the policies it covers.

Overview and Purpose

Bitter Winter was created, in its own description, to give a voice to the voiceless by publishing news, documents, and testimonies about persecution against all religions in China. Scholars, journalists, and human rights activists from different countries started working together on the project, and that mixture has shaped its output ever since. A typical item may be a short news report about a church closure or an arrest, a first-hand testimony from a member of a persecuted group, a translation or summary of an official document, or a longer analytical article placing an incident in the context of Chinese law and policy on religion.

The magazine states that it is independent of any religious or political organisation, that it does not take positions on political issues, and that it limits itself to the field of human rights. It also says that most of its work is done by volunteers, although donations are accepted. Because it is published by CESNUR, it says it is particularly attentive to religious liberty issues connected with new religious movements, while trying to cover all forms of religion and belief. That combination — a human-rights focus, an academic background in the study of new religions, and daily news production — distinguishes it from both a conventional newspaper China desk and a single-cause campaign publication.

Origins and Publisher: CESNUR

The publisher behind Bitter Winter is CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions. CESNUR's own history says it was established in 1988 by a group of religious scholars from leading universities in Europe and the Americas, with Massimo Introvigne as its managing director. Other accounts name Introvigne together with Jean-François Mayer and Ernesto Zucchini as its founders. CESNUR describes its original aim as offering a professional association to scholars specialising in religious minorities, new religious movements, contemporary esoteric, spiritual and gnostic schools, and the new religious consciousness in general. It was recognised as a public non-profit entity by the Italian authorities in 1996.

That background matters for understanding Bitter Winter. CESNUR had studied religious minorities for three decades before the magazine appeared, and Bitter Winter applies that specialism to a news format. The magazine went online in May 2018 — director-in-charge Marco Respinti has given the precise date as 2 May 2018 — at a moment when, as its early articles noted, a new Religious Affairs Regulation had come into force in China on 1 February 2018. Legal experts cited at the time said the regulation imposed new restrictions on the “gray market” of religions and churches outside the five official, government-controlled religious institutions. Bitter Winter was built to document the human consequences of that tightening environment, province by province and community by community.

Leadership and Editorial Structure

Bitter Winter is placed under the editorship of Massimo Introvigne, its editor-in-chief. Introvigne, born on 14 June 1955 in Rome, is an Italian sociologist of religions, founder and managing director of CESNUR, and the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion, according to his publisher's biography. From 5 January to 31 December 2011 he served as the OSCE Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions, and from 2012 to 2015 he chaired the Observatory of Religious Liberty instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The director-in-charge is Marco Respinti, an Italian professional journalist and member of the International Federation of Journalists, who has been in the role since the magazine's beginning. Respinti has described Bitter Winter as an original combination of three kinds of people: human-rights activists and advocates, religious-studies scholars, and professional journalists. Other named editorial figures in its early coverage include news editor Arune Kontautaitė and associate editor Rosita Šorytė, who presented the magazine's work on fake news and asylum cases at the European Academy of Religion conference in Bologna in March 2019. In 2019 Respinti also received a FIRMA media award at the Turin International Book Fair, honoured, as the magazine reported, for a journalism promoting religious liberty — an award he said belonged to the whole staff, including its translators, editors, webmasters, and the reporters in China.

How Its Reporting Is Gathered in China

The feature Bitter Winter itself calls unique is its network of correspondents in all Chinese provinces. Respinti has described that network as several hundred correspondents, operating thanks in part to Chinese exiles of different religious persuasions, and supplying news, photographs, and video from inside the country. The magazine says some of its reports come directly from members of religious minorities and organisations persecuted in China and elsewhere, and that its correspondents often supply exclusive photographs and videos. Its Donate page notes, for example, that it published dozens of secret Chinese Communist Party documents on the persecution of Christians and other believers and posted video from inside the “transformation through education” camps for Uyghur and other Muslims.

This sourcing model explains both the magazine's value and its risks. Reports are frequently attributed to correspondents writing under pseudonyms, and the magazine has said that, in almost all cases concerning its arrested reporters, it did not know their real names, only pseudonyms. For safety, it does not always publish information about where and when reporters are arrested or detained, because disclosure might further jeopardise them. Readers should therefore understand its China news as field reporting gathered under constraint: valuable precisely because it comes from inside the country, and necessarily handled with anonymity and caution that conventional newsrooms operating openly do not face.

What It Covers in China

Bitter Winter's China coverage is deliberately comprehensive across faiths. Its reporting and the official reports drawing on it follow Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, Hui Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Catholics, Protestant house churches, Falun Gong practitioners, and The Church of Almighty God, as well as other groups labelled xie jiao — a Chinese term the magazine translates as “heterodox teachings” and criticises the common rendering of as “evil cults.” It also covers Taoists and Buddhists more broadly, state-approved churches facing interference, and Chinese religious refugees seeking asylum abroad, particularly in South Korea, which Respinti has noted is often the first country Chinese exiles reach when fleeing persecution.

Recurring themes include arrests, detention and sentencing of believers, closures and demolitions of places of worship, confiscation of religious materials, surveillance, forced indoctrination, restrictions under religious-affairs regulations, and the treatment of groups that exist outside the five officially authorised religions. Alongside news, it publishes analysis of regulations — it was, for example, the first Western media outlet to publish an English-language translation of China's Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy, according to its summary of the U.S. State Department's reporting — and debates about how persecution is documented and how false information about persecuted groups circulates. The result is an archive organised around a single question: whether, and how, freedom of religion or belief is being respected in practice.

A Daily Magazine in Several Languages

Bitter Winter publishes every day. Respinti described it in interview as “basically a journal” and “a daily magazine,” and publishing in Chinese was, he said, a major feature for a publication focused on human rights and religious liberty in China. At its fullest extent it was published in eight languages: English, Chinese, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Korean and Japanese. That multilingual reach meant the same reporting could be read by scholars and officials in Europe and North America, by Korean readers in the country most directly concerned with Chinese asylum seekers, and by Chinese-language readers inside and outside China.

Multilingual daily publication is expensive, however, and the magazine has been candid about the cost. In a Christmas message to readers it reported that it had discontinued three foreign-language editions — German, French and Japanese — because, although many of its workers are volunteers, some translators are paid and donations had not covered the heavy translation costs. It kept five editions, in English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Italian. Its appeals for support list the same practical needs: translation, technology to withstand cyberattacks, and advertising the magazine. The language history is therefore part of its story: an unusually wide reach for a volunteer-based specialist magazine, trimmed back to what reader donations could sustain.

Ban in China and the Arrest of Contributors

The Chinese authorities reacted to Bitter Winter within months of its launch. In August 2018, the magazine was designated a “foreign hostile website” and banned in China, after publishing secret documents and news reports about the suppression of religious beliefs and human-rights violations. Radio Free Asia reported on 31 January 2019 that, since the ban, at least 45 of its contributors had faced arrest and interrogation on charges of “divulging state secrets” or “involvement in infiltration by foreign forces,” for filming incidents of, or gathering news about, persecution of religious freedom and human-rights violations.

Bitter Winter's own account says the 45 reporters and contributors were arrested from August to December 2018, with some early arrests in July. Reporters, it says, were usually detained and interrogated on those charges; some were sent to “legal education centres” for mandatory indoctrination, and others were tortured and abused, according to its reporting. Individual cases it publicised included two contributors arrested in Fujian in mid-October and designated “first-level persons” subject to heightened scrutiny, with family visits prohibited, and a contributor in Xinjiang who was arrested at the end of September 2018 after investigative reporting into the “transformation through education” camps, including filming one of them; his whereabouts were reported as unknown. Petitions and letters from religious-freedom organisations followed, calling for the detained reporters' release. Respinti vowed in the Radio Free Asia report that the magazine would continue documenting the oppression of Uyghurs and religious persecution in China despite the ban and arrests, while acknowledging that having contributors on the ground was both what made the publication different and dangerous work. The magazine has also reported repeated hacking attempts against its website since its launch.

Citation by Governments and Researchers

Whatever the risks to its contributors, Bitter Winter's reporting quickly entered the official record. The U.S. Department of State's International Religious Freedom Report for 2018, unveiled on 21 June 2019, mentioned Bitter Winter 15 times — making it, by its own count, the most quoted media publication in the report, ahead of The New York Times with seven mentions. In the following year's report, published on 10 June 2020, the number of quotations rose to 74, and the report itself noted that at least 45 of Bitter Winter's correspondents and contributors in China had been detained, some physically abused, in retaliation for reporting on religious freedom. In the 2022 report, covering 2021, the magazine said it remained the most quoted source in the China section, with 48 quotations, followed by ChinaAid with 25 and Radio Free Asia with 13. A 2023 CESNUR release described it as the most quoted source on China in the State Department's yearly religious-freedom reports for four years in a row.

Its work has also been presented in academic and policy settings. A panel at the European Academy of Religion in Bologna in March 2019 was devoted to what scholars know about religion in China, contrasting fake news and real news through the example of Bitter Winter, with its editors demonstrating how the website operates. CESNUR also submitted material on the repression of religion in China to the OSCE context in September 2018, identifying itself as publisher of the daily magazine. Such uptake does not settle every question a careful reader might ask of any advocacy-linked source — Bitter Winter is open about its mission — but it shows that its on-the-ground material has been treated as a significant primary source by government researchers who state that they double-check the sources they quote.

International Expansion After 2020

On 1 December 2020, Bitter Winter added an international section covering religious liberty worldwide, and its About page says it continuously expands coverage to new countries and new issues. Its Donate page, describing the change, says it created the international section in December 2020 and began concerning itself with intolerance, discrimination, and persecution of believers throughout the world, not in China only. The China method — daily news, documents, testimonies, and scholarly analysis, with special attention to new religious movements — was thereby applied to other settings.

Examples of that wider brief include its sustained coverage of Japan after the July 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, where it published investigation and argument about the campaign to dissolve the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, formerly the Unification Church, including a four-part English series in July 2023 presenting Japanese journalist Masumi Fukuda's case that the dissolution campaign lacked a legal basis. It has also given special attention, in its reading of later U.S. religious-freedom reports, to Russia and Pakistan alongside China. The expansion has not changed its identity as stated on its About page: a magazine on religious liberty and human rights, published by CESNUR in Torino, volunteer-driven, independent of any religious or political organisation, and still defined by the China reporting — and the risks borne by the correspondents who supply it — with which it began in May 2018.