Gatekeeping and the Construction of "Cultic" Extremism in China: The Church of Almighty God and the Mcdonald's Murder of 2014

On May 28, 2014, one of the most horrific murders in the story of new religious movements was perpetrated in a McDonald diner in Zhaoyuan, in the Chinese province of Shandong. Six “missionaries” entered the diner and asked clients to leave their phone numbers for further contacts. A young female client, Wu Shuoyan, refused to give her number. She was declared an “evil spirit” and beaten to death with a mop handle. At the time of the murder, the Chinese government was engaged in a campaign for eradicating the Church of Almighty God, or Eastern Lightning, a new religious movement hostile to the government. Although it soon emerged that the McDonald's assassins were not members of the Church of Almighty God, but of a different group, Chinese propaganda, through an abstute use of gatekeeper media, quickly persuaded first the Chinese and then the international public opinion that it was indeed this Church that was responsible of the crime, thus legitimizing its persecution as the ultimate "extremist" or "radical" group. The paper examines two results of this campaign. First, as of September 2017 there were some 20,000 Web sites throughout the word attributing the McDonald's murder to the Church of Almighty God, evidencing that gatekeepers controlled by the Chinese governement did succeed in fashioning international public opinion's response to the alleged danger of "cults" in China in general and the Chuch of Almighty God in particular. Second, however, within a logic of deviance amplification, the campaign also had the unintended result to radicalize the Church of Almighty God and raising millenarian expectations among its members about a final confrontation between good and evil.