It was at the back of the restaurant – beyond the fry stand, the grease-slicked counter, the droves of gawking patrons — where the murder happened. The restaurant was a McDonald’s. It was a Wednesday evening. The murderers, who bludgeoned the woman to death with chairs and a mop, belonged to a cult described as China’s “most radical.” Called the Church of the Almighty God, it claims to have a million followers, aggressively promotes Doomsday scenarios, wants to destroy the Chinese Communist Party and believes that Jesus Christ has returned — as a Chinese woman.
But it was the McDonald’s murder that has consumed a Chinese court’s attention over the last two months. Days ago, two church members were convicted and sentenced to death for a killing that, even by the standards of the Church of the Almighty God, was peculiar and brutal.
According to prosecutors, five members tried to recruit a woman patronizing the McDonald’s in question, asked for her phone number and beat her to death when she refused. Defendant Zhang Lidong, who arrived that night in luxury Porsche Cayenne car, never offered much explanation.
“You could just tell she was not a good person,” he said in a state television interview, describing the 35-year-old mother. “She was a demon, the evil spirit. We had to beat her to death.”
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Much of the church’s teaching hinges on Jesus, who to them is now a woman named Yang Xiangbin. Little is known of the woman beyond this: she reportedly suffered some sort of mental breakdown after failing a national exam and “has a history of mental illness,” according to China’s People’s Daily. In the early 1990s, the 30-year-old woman came into the orbit of a square-jawed man named Zhao Weishan in Zhengzhou, Henan province, according to the Christian Research Institute. Zhao claimed that God had told him she was the “female Christ,” and he began attracting followers to her.
The murderous Chinese cult that thinks Jesus has returned — as a Chinese woman - The Washington Post
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