Zhang Yue (1961– )
A provincial political-legal chief who grew up inside the police's domestic-security and 'anti-cult' systems: born in June 1961 in Guangrao, Shandong, he entered the Beijing Public Security School in 1979 and rose through the Beijing bureau's First Division — the political-protection system — investigating 'illegal organisations', serving as First Division director, assistant to the bureau director commanding the Domestic Security Protection Corps, and deputy director. In November 2003 he became director of the Ministry of Public Security's 26th Bureau, the Anti-Cult Bureau — the police system's national operational bureau interfacing with the Central 610 system against Falun Gong — for four years. Parachuted into Hebei in December 2007, he became provincial PSB director in January 2008, secretary of the provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission in June 2008 and a standing-committee member that December: for eight years Hebei's police, courts, procuratorate, state security and provincial 610 system all sat under his PLC, the provincial 610 Office directed from May 2008 by his former subordinate Ma Yucia. Caixin's investigative reporting records that Qu Long, a businessman who had reported Guo Wengui, Ma Jian and Zhang to the CCDI, was seized by Hebei police in March 2011 and sentenced by a Hebei court a month later to fifteen years, with Ma Jian stating in a confession that he had asked Zhang to arrange the investigation; Caixin also reported Zhang's intervention in the Minzu Securities share transactions for Guo (reporting grade throughout, not court findings). The CCDI announced his investigation on 16 April 2016 and expelled him on 28 July 2016 — the bulletin finding that this former anti-cult chief had 'long engaged in superstitious activities', interfered in judicial activities and traded power for money. Under designated jurisdiction the case went to Jiangsu: tried at Changzhou in April 2017 on a prosecution figure of RMB 157.885 million, to which he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced on 12 July 2018 on the court's finding that from 2008 to 2016 he took more than RMB 156.9 million in bribes through his Hebei posts (favours spanning land development, project contracting, case handling and promotions) — fifteen years and a RMB 5 million fine, accepted without appeal. Sanctions: the coordinator's entry-by-entry check of 2 November 2026 found no 'ZHANG, Yue' entry in the OFAC SDN full list (28 October 2026 edition) and zero hits in the UK Sanctions List (27 October 2026) — no US or UK designation on record; every punishment he received came from the CCP's own discipline organs and courts. Current status: serving his sentence; prison location and execution details are matters of no public record.
1. June 1961: the evidence for the birth entry, and two namesakes separated first
The first cell of a people file is the birth date. For Zhang Yue, the evidence is the curriculum vitae text republished across Chinese official and semi-official channels: male, Han, born June 1961, a native of Guangrao, Shandong; began work in October 1979; joined the Communist Party in November 1984; educated in the Central Party School's correspondence in-service graduate class in law (a Central Party School postgraduate credential), holding in addition a master's degree in management from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the professional title of assistant researcher. After his fall, Chinese reports republished this text wholesale (one such report is listed in this section's sources), and this site adopts June 1961 at that grade: it is the official-CV wording, not a household-register or birth document this site has seen. The cross-check sits overseas: Caixin Global's sentencing bulletin of 13 July 2018 described him as "now 57" — a man born in June 1961 turned exactly 57 in July 2018. The two lines agree to the month. The day of the month appears in no public source this site found; it is recorded as no public record, and this site does not reverse-engineer a date from an age.
Two namesakes must be separated before anything else, to keep the file from crossing wires. Chinese officialdom contains another Zhang Yue born in August 1961 — a diplomat, former ambassador to Liberia and consul-general in Munich — born the same year, two months apart; Chinese Wikipedia maintains separate entries for precisely this reason. This page's Zhang Yue is identified by a single chain: a Guangrao native who entered the Beijing Public Security School in 1979, directed the MPS 26th Bureau, became secretary of the Hebei Provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and was sentenced to fifteen years at Changzhou in 2018. Anyone who does not match that chain is not this page's subject. The distinction matters most at section 16: the SDN List contains many ZHANG entries, and the coordinator's method was to scan them entry by entry and exclude namesakes by birth and identity, concluding that no entry corresponds to this page's subject at all.
The distance between his starting point and his final seat is worth one paragraph. In October 1979 the eighteen-year-old Zhang Yue entered the Beijing Public Security School, in the first years after police academies resumed enrolment following the Cultural Revolution. From police cadet to provincial PLC secretary he spent thirty-seven years inside the police and political-legal system without one day outside it: twenty-four years in the Beijing police, four at the Ministry of Public Security, eight in Hebei. Every entry in this file falls on that single-system trajectory: he was first the operational-bureau chief in charge of "cult problems" for the whole country's police, then the system's supreme chief in one province, and finally a man that same system sent to prison for bribery. The file proceeds in chronological order.
Sources: Zhang Yue's official CV text (born June 1961, Guangrao, Shandong; work from October 1979; Party membership November 1984; education and title — as republished verbatim in post-fall Chinese reporting, checked by this site across multiple republications for consistency); Caixin Global's sentencing bulletin of 13 July 2018 (age 57 at sentencing); the Chinese Wikipedia entries "Zhang Yue (born June 1961)" and "Zhang Yue (born August 1961)" (namesake disambiguation).
2. Twenty-four years in the Beijing police: from Xuanwu Branch officer to First Division director (1979–2001)
His early career lies entirely inside the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, at the granularity his published CV provides: October 1979 to August 1980, cadet at the Beijing Public Security School; August 1980 to May 1984, police officer at the Xuanwu Branch; then the Beijing Railway Station district branch's Screening Section, as officer and deputy section head; then the bureau's First Division — junior cadre, deputy head of its Fifth Section, deputy head of its Illegal Organisations Reconnaissance Office, deputy director and finally director of the First Division. In plain language: the First Division was the Beijing bureau's political-protection department, later styled the domestic security protection system, responsible for "enemy situation" and political cases — watching and investigating people and organisations the regime classed as political threats. The very name "Illegal Organisations Reconnaissance Office" states what he was doing from his twenties: targeting "illegal organisations". He was never a criminal investigator, never a public-order or household-registration officer; four years into the job he entered the most politicised line in the police system and never left it.
Through the 1990s he rose within that line: assistant to the bureau director, concurrently director of the Domestic Security Protection Department, then assistant to the director concurrently commanding the Domestic Security Protection Corps. The Domestic Security Protection Corps — guobao, in the abbreviation that recurs throughout the record of dissidents, rights lawyers and religious believers being watched, summoned, searched and taken away — is the municipal police's dedicated political-security force. The discipline of this file requires the following to be stated plainly: for specific cases handled during his years commanding the Beijing guobao, public sources provide no record of personal responsibility meeting this site's filing standard. The one concrete narrative this site found about his Beijing years is the reported connection described at section 10, which belongs to the relationship ledger, not the case ledger. This section therefore records posts and dates only: by 2001, aged forty, Zhang Yue was a deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and a member of its Party committee, still overseeing the line he had served all his life. For a man who had climbed the domestic-security ladder to deputy bureau director, the next posting followed naturally: the ministry bureau in charge of the same business nationwide.
Sources: Zhang Yue's official CV (1979 police-school cadet; 1980 Xuanwu Branch officer; Railway Station branch Screening Section; First Division posts including Illegal Organisations Reconnaissance Office deputy head; assistant to the director with the Domestic Security Protection Department and Corps; deputy director April 2001 — as republished in post-fall Chinese reporting and cross-checked against the career section of the Chinese Wikipedia entry).
3. Interlude: what the "610" system is, and what the 26th Bureau was
Before his 2003 appointment can be weighed, one section must lay out the institutional vocabulary. On 10 June 1999 the Party Central Committee created a Leading Group for Handling the Falun Gong Problem; its standing office became known as the "610 Office", after its founding date. It was an extra-legal Party coordination body standing above the police, procuratorate and courts, dedicated to suppressing Falun Gong. It was later renamed the Leading Group (and Office) for Preventing and Handling Cult Problems, its nominal remit widened to all groups the state designates as "cults", while its overwhelming practical target remained Falun Gong practitioners. Below the centre, every province, city and county Party committee maintained a corresponding leading group and office; provincial 610 offices typically sat inside the provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission system, led by the PLC — the institutional foundation for the bookkeeping at section 6 of this file.
On the Ministry of Public Security side, the counterpart organ was the 26th Bureau. Chinese reporting uniformly calls it the Anti-Cult Bureau: the ministry bureau that received the 610 system's directives and organised police forces nationwide in preventing, investigating and handling Falun Gong and other designated groups. Materials published by Minghui.org in July 2021 state that the 26th Bureau was redesignated the MPS Fourth Bureau in April 2019, that it reported directly to the 610 Office, and that after the Central 610 Office's functions contracted it assumed the duty of carrying out the persecution. That institutional genealogy comes from Falun Gong-side list and investigation materials and is recorded at that grade; but the basic characterisation — the 26th Bureau was the Anti-Cult Bureau, the 610 system's executive arm inside the ministry — matches the uniform wording of Chinese official-side reporting on Zhang's post ("director of the MPS 26th Bureau (Anti-Cult Bureau)") and can serve as the file's working definition. Only with that structure in view does the weight of his 2003 appointment become legible: he was not taking over an ordinary operational bureau; he was taking the command seat the police system had built for a continuing political campaign.
Sources: the public record of the Central 610 Office's creation on 10 June 1999 and its later renaming; the uniform Chinese-reporting formula "director of the MPS 26th Bureau (Anti-Cult Bureau)" in fall and sentencing reports; Minghui.org, 21 July 2021, list of responsible persons of the "Office for the Prevention and Handling of Cult Crimes" submitted to more than thirty governments (2019 redesignation as Fourth Bureau, reporting line to the 610 Office — recorded at Falun Gong-side list grade).
4. Four years heading the 26th Bureau: chief of the national anti-cult line (November 2003 – December 2007)
In November 2003 Zhang Yue moved from deputy director of the Beijing bureau to director of the MPS 26th Bureau, serving four years and a month until he left Beijing for Hebei in December 2007. The July 2021 Minghui.org list submitted to governments goes one step further: it describes Zhang as the bureau's first director after its establishment ("the first director"), appointed in November 2003 from the Beijing deputy directorship, leaving in December 2007, after which no dedicated successor was appointed for years — the post being held concurrently by the director of the ministry's First Bureau (Domestic Security) until a dedicated director was again named after the 2019 redesignation. This site's treatment of "first director" is fixed: the list materials say it, this site reports it with its source named, but no ministry or official document confirming the bureau's establishment date and first chief was found, so "first" is not upgraded to established fact. What is established is the tenure itself: November 2003 to December 2007 as 26th Bureau director is consistent across his official CV, Chinese Wikipedia and the fall reporting.
What years were those? After the suppression began in 1999, by the mid-2000s the campaign against Falun Gong had shifted from street clearances to a routinised pipeline of prevention, surveillance, "transformation", re-education through labour (until its abolition in 2013) and prosecution: local 610 offices set the quotas, police guobao units made the arrests, searched the homes and fed the labour-camp and court pipelines, and the propaganda system supplied the stigma. The 26th Bureau director sat at the police side's national operational hub of that pipeline — provincial public security departments' prevention-and-handling work reported up its line, and special campaigns took their operational wording from it. This site books the tenure strictly at that level: the bureau's nationwide operational work from 2003 to 2007 is booked as an "operational-bureau chief tenure account"; for individual cases ordered or handled by Zhang personally, this site found no public source meeting its filing standard, and it invents none, naming no victim to his personal account. That restraint is stated openly because it forms the file's internal contrast: against it stands the Qu Long case of his Hebei years, where a source does reach his level (section 8). Where the record reaches, it is written; where it does not, the file says so.
One further detail belongs in the record because it explains a hinge in his later life. While directing the 26th Bureau, from September 2003 to December 2006 he studied management science and engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' graduate school, earning a master's degree in management (per his CV). An anti-cult bureau chief taking a management degree in service is unremarkable in itself; this site records it because it fixes his position in 2006: forty-five years old, four years a bureau director, the in-service master's nearly complete, waiting at the threshold of the next promotion. It was also in 2006, according to Caixin's reporting citing an informed source, that he came to know the businessman Guo Wengui and introduced Ma Jian — that year promoted to vice minister of state security — to Guo. The relationship line that would eventually drag him into prison begins in the last year of his 26th Bureau tenure. It is media-grade material, and section 9 treats it at that grade.
Sources: Zhang Yue's official CV (26th Bureau director November 2003 – December 2007; Chinese Academy of Sciences management studies September 2003 – December 2006); Minghui.org list of 21 July 2021 ("first director" claim and the post-2007 concurrent arrangement, at list grade); Caixin Global, 21 April 2017, investigative report on Guo Wengui's Minzu Securities acquisition (the c. 2006 introduction of Ma Jian to Guo, informed-source account; see section 9).
5. Parachuted into Hebei: three promotions in twelve months (December 2007 – December 2008)
In December 2007 Zhang Yue left Beijing and was "parachuted" into Hebei as Party secretary of the provincial Public Security Department. Chinese reporting uses the word "parachuted" (kongjiang) uniformly, because nothing in his past connected him to the province: a Shandong native, a career Beijing policeman, four years in a ministry bureau — his CV contained not one Hebei place-name. The ascent that followed was fast, and it is fixed month by month: December 2007, Party secretary of the provincial PSB; January 2008, assistant to the provincial governor and director of the provincial PSB, holding the department's Party and administrative leadership together as Hebei's police chief; June 2008, secretary of the Hebei Provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission, still doubling as PSB director; December 2008, member of the Hebei Provincial Party Standing Committee and PLC secretary. Within exactly one year of setting foot in the province he had completed the climb from outsider to standing-committee member and PLC secretary — the province's highest political-legal official, at deputy-provincial rank. Caixin Global's sentencing bulletin summarised his Hebei posts as the PLC secretaryship, a job "overseeing the province's police and judicial system", and noted that he was also head of the provincial Public Security Bureau until 2015. (The Chinese CV is finer-grained — he gave up the directorship in September 2013 and the department Party secretaryship in March 2015 — and this site follows the itemised Chinese dates; see section 7.)
The year matters as much as the posts. 2008 was the Beijing Olympics year; Olympic security was the national political-legal system's first-order political task, and Hebei surrounds Beijing, borders the co-host city of Tianjin, and contains a football venue city, Qinhuangdao — it is the capital security cordon's gateway province. After the Lhasa unrest of March 2008 the national stability system tightened across the board. To parachute, in such a year, a political-protection careerist and former anti-cult bureau chief into the province ringing the capital — first as police chief, within six months as PLC secretary — reads, as a matter of personnel logic, as handing the capital's outer political-legal machine to a domestic-security professional. This site labels that sentence for what it is: an archival observation from timing and career composition, not the wording of any appointment document. The documents record only posts and dates, fixed above. For the eight years that followed, every campaign, sensitive-period security operation and stability disposition of the Hebei political-legal system unfolded inside this outsider's tenure.
Sources: Zhang Yue's official CV and the Chinese Wikipedia career section (PSB Party secretary December 2007; assistant governor and PSB director January 2008; PLC secretary June 2008; standing committee December 2008 — cross-checked month by month); the uniform "parachuted" wording in Chinese reporting (as recapitulated in coverage of the Ma Yucia case: "parachuted into Hebei in December 2007 as Party secretary of the provincial Public Security Department"); Caixin Global sentencing bulletin, 13 July 2018 (PLC overseeing police and judicial system; PSB leadership until 2015 in its summary wording).
6. The machine he commanded: Hebei's political-legal system and its 610 Office
To book Hebei 2008–2016, the structure of the machine under his hand must first be drawn. A provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission is the Party committee organ leading political-legal work; its secretary answers to the provincial Party committee and oversees the provincial Public Security Department (police), the provincial High People's Court, the provincial People's Procuratorate, the provincial State Security Department and the provincial Justice Department (prisons, and until the system's abolition at the end of 2013, re-education through labour), together with coordination of province-wide social-stability work — the provincial stability-maintenance leading group and its office likewise usually sit inside the PLC system. A PLC secretary can convene joint police-procuratorate-court coordination meetings and exert decisive influence over the handling line in "major and sensitive" cases. Zhang's case had an added feature: from 2008 to 2013 he simultaneously held the provincial PSB directorship in person (and the department Party secretaryship until March 2015) — coordinator and the largest coordinated agency fused in one man, leaving no internal layer in Hebei's police system able to check him in those years.
The link to the 610 system is the machine's most consequential joint, and it happens to have a concrete personnel record. According to the retrospective reporting published when Hebei's discipline authorities investigated Ma Yucia in 2022: Ma Yucia, born December 1955 in Shijiazhuang, had been a deputy director and deputy Party secretary of the provincial PSB — part of the incumbent team when Zhang parachuted in. In May 2008 — four months after Zhang became PSB director and one month before he rose to PLC secretary — Ma became a member of the provincial PLC and director of the office of the provincial Leading Group for Preventing and Handling Cult Problems, concurrently director of the provincial government's office of the same name: in short, director of the Hebei 610 Office. In November 2009 Ma rose further, to deputy secretary and secretary-general of the provincial PLC — Zhang's deputy and chief of staff — before moving on to become a deputy secretary of the provincial discipline commission. Read plainly: during the formative first stretch of Zhang's eight years over Hebei's political-legal system, the provincial 610 Office — the office running prevention, surveillance, transformation and suppression directed at Falun Gong — was directed by a man Zhang had brought over from the PSB, and the PLC's secretary-general was the same man. This site books accordingly: Hebei's preventing-and-handling-cult-problems line sat institutionally under the provincial PLC Zhang led, and the appointment timing and the subordinate relationship of its office director are both matters of public reporting. Ma's own responsibility belongs to his own file; this page records the line of subordination and appointment.
One more personnel fact shows the machine's continuity. After Zhang gave up the PSB directorship in September 2013 and the department Party secretaryship in March 2015, the PLC secretaryship never left his hands; he sat in it until he was taken away in April 2016. From 2013 onward he was no longer the police system's direct chief, but he remained the Party chief of the entire political-legal system including the police — with its powers of coordination, supervision and personnel recommendation undiminished. The court's later judgment listed the posts underlying his bribe-taking as "Party secretary of the Hebei PSB, director of the Hebei PSB, member of the provincial Party standing committee, PLC secretary", spanning exactly 2008 to 2016. The correspondence is exact: the eight years of adjudicated corruption are the eight years he commanded Hebei's political-legal system — not a day more, not a day less.
Sources: Hebei discipline reporting of 2022 on Ma Yucia and multiple retrospective reports (Ma as provincial PLC member and director of the provincial Preventing and Handling Cult Problems Leading Group Office from May 2008, PLC deputy secretary and secretary-general from November 2009, formerly Zhang's subordinate); Zhang Yue's official CV (PSB directorship relinquished September 2013, department Party secretaryship March 2015); Changzhou Intermediate People's Court verdict bulletin of 12 July 2018 (posts underlying the bribery and the 2008–2016 span).
7. The tenure account (I): eight years of the stability machine — institutional bookkeeping only, no invented cases
This section and the next keep the account of his Hebei tenure. The rule comes first, the facts after. The rule is this site's uniform standard for provincial political-legal chiefs: suppression and stability work carried out institutionally by a province's political-legal system during the tenure is booked as a "provincial PLC secretary tenure account" — the acts are the system's, he is the system's highest Party official. But where no public source brings an instruction, an annotation or a coordination responsibility for a specific case up to his level, this site does not name that case to his personal account, and it never invents victims' names. What follows records the machine's operation, with sources for every figure and event; where no reliable Hebei-specific data was found, the file says so.
The machine's first standing task was preventing and handling cult problems, its practical target mainly Falun Gong. The institutional facts are at sections 3 and 6: the provincial 610 Office sat inside the PLC system, and Ma Yucia took its directorship in May 2008. The national background is documented by US government annual records: the State Department's International Religious Freedom Reports and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's annual reports recorded continuously through this period that Falun Gong practitioners across China were detained, sent to re-education through labour (before its 2013 abolition), sentenced, and held in "legal education" transformation facilities, with the 610 system and police guobao as the executing organs. This site cites those reports only to fix the national policy environment of the line Zhang commanded — it does not pass off national figures as Hebei figures. For Hebei province specifically in these years, this site found no official publication and no independent organisation's systematic statistics of detentions or sentences, and records that as no public statistical record. Falun Gong-side reporting (Minghui.org) carries a large volume of Hebei case reports, but its cases sit overwhelmingly at city and county execution level; this site did not verify them case by case up to provincial responsibility level, and so does not list individual names in this page's responsibility columns. That is not a claim that those events did not happen; it is this site's archival standard refusing to write cases into a provincial chief's responsibility column at a level where they were not verified. The treatment matches section 4's treatment of his 26th Bureau tenure exactly.
The machine's second task was stability maintenance in the broad sense. Between 2008 and 2016 the national stability system passed through a series of set pieces, in none of which was Hebei — the province ringing the capital — absent, and all of which ran under provincial PLC coordination (institutional bookkeeping): the 2008 Olympic security operation and the post-Lhasa tightening; the 2009 sixtieth-anniversary National Day security and the nationwide hardening after the Ürümqi riots; the expansion of stability offices and comprehensive-management budgets around 2010, when publicly reported national public-security spending overtook the defence budget — the period's emblematic fiscal fact; the 2012 Eighteenth Party Congress security operation; and, year by year, the ramping of Hebei's capital-ring "moat" project — checks on the corridors into Beijing, control of designated persons, interception of petitioners travelling to the capital in sensitive periods, a special burden distinguishing Hebei's political-legal system from inland provinces'. The abolition of re-education through labour at the end of 2013, the largest institutional change in the national political-legal system of the period, falls inside his tenure; Hebei's labour-camp facilities converted accordingly — recorded here as institutional timeline. The July 2015 "709" crackdown on rights lawyers was a nationally directed political-legal operation; Hebei-connected lawyers appear in public reporting among those affected, but this site found no reliable record tying Hebei cases to the provincial PLC coordination level, so it records only the national deployment's timing and develops no cases. Read together: the machine Zhang presided over for eight years was formed in Olympic security, expanded on swelling stability budgets, and run in a ring around the capital. He did not invent it — it existed before he arrived — but from June 2008 to April 2016, in Hebei, it had exactly one supreme operator.
Sources: US Department of State International Religious Freedom Reports (China chapters) and Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual reports (nationwide Falun Gong detention, labour-camp and transformation-facility record, 2008–2016 — cited as policy environment only); public reporting that national public-security expenditure overtook defence spending around 2011 (budget background); the NPC Standing Committee decision of December 2013 abolishing re-education through labour; public reporting on Hebei's capital-ring "moat" security project (institutional background).
8. The tenure account (II): the Qu Long case — the one case a source brings up to his level (2011)
Within the institutional account of the Hebei years, one case crosses the institutional line: investigative reporting brings responsibility up to the level of Zhang's own participation in coordination. That is the Qu Long case. This section follows Caixin's investigative report of 21 April 2017, "Tycoon Guo Wengui's Power Play in Netting Securities Firm", point by point, with the composition of its evidence marked. Qu Long, former president of Guangzhou-based Grandrank Investment, was Guo Wengui's long-time business partner before the two fell out over conflicting interests. During Guo's acquisition of Minzu Securities (section 9), Qu submitted a report to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection accusing Guo of partnering with Ma Jian and Zhang Yue to use state security power to intervene in the deal. In the report's text, which Caixin viewed, Qu wrote that "between 2009 and 2011, several national securities departments have signed official letters to the CAAC and CAH, requesting them to sell Minzu stakes to Guo at a low price and asking Beijing's state-owned asset administration and the Beijing Equity Exchange to support the deal for national security. Ma personally intervened to make sure Zenith was the only bidder."
What happened shortly after the report was filed is the case's most glaring passage. In March 2011 Qu was detained in Beijing by police from neighbouring Hebei province, on suspicion of "illegally holding guns". Qu's family told Caixin he was taken away by more than ten people, including a mid-level official from the Ministry of State Security and several of Guo's employees. A month later, a Hebei court sentenced Qu to fifteen years in prison for embezzlement of 855 million yuan — Caixin's sentence is flat: "A month later, a Hebei court sentenced Qu to 15 years in prison." From a cross-provincial seizure to a fifteen-year first-instance sentence in about a month. During his detention Qu wrote, in a further report, that after he had reported Guo to the CCDI, "Guo called me and told me he knew all about my report. He threatened me: 'You dare to report me, count your days.'" (Caixin quoting Qu's written material; this site relays it as the report relays it.) The decisive attribution comes from Ma Jian himself: Caixin reported that in a confession video Ma said he had asked Zhang — who "oversaw Hebei's legal affairs" — to investigate Qu to clear the way for Guo's deal, and that Ma had also issued several notices to Hebei officials, citing national security concerns, to push the investigation along. Qu's wife told Caixin that the Supreme People's Court had started a review of Qu's case (as of the 2017 report).
This site's bookkeeping for the Qu Long case is fixed in three layers. Layer one, judicial fact: Qu was taken by Hebei police in March 2011 and sentenced that year by a Hebei court to fifteen years for embezzling 855 million yuan — supported by court documents and Caixin's reporting, and bookable. Layer two, attribution: Ma Jian's confession-video statement that he asked Zhang to arrange the investigation is the account of a detained official as reviewed and relayed by Caixin's journalists; this site found no court judgment or official bulletin confirming Zhang's specific role in the Qu case, so it is booked as "Ma Jian's confession as reported by Caixin" — a grade below court findings and above rumour, and readers should hold it at exactly that grade. Layer three, the relation to Zhang's own bribery verdict: the Changzhou court found that the benefits Zhang sold included "case handling" — the judgment's list of favour categories is land development, project contracting, case handling and promotions — confirming that he used political-legal power to intervene in cases for bribers; but the judgment names no specific case publicly, and this site does not forcibly merge the two ledgers. What can be fixed is the structure: a businessman who had reported the provincial PLC secretary himself to the Party's graft watchdog was, within a month, seized across a provincial border by that secretary's police and sentenced to fifteen years by a court inside that secretary's coordination remit — while another fallen senior official states on a confession recording that the investigation was arranged at his request, by that secretary. Whatever grade is assigned to each single item of evidence, that structure is itself the archival specimen of how unchecked provincial PLC power operated, and this site files it as such.
Sources: Caixin Global, 21 April 2017, "Tycoon Guo Wengui's Power Play in Netting Securities Firm" (Qu's CCDI report text as viewed by Caixin; the March 2011 detention in Beijing by Hebei police on a firearms suspicion; the Hebei court's fifteen-year sentence for embezzling 855 million yuan a month later; Ma Jian's confession-video statements about asking Zhang to investigate Qu and issuing notices to Hebei officials; Qu's wife on the Supreme Court review — all as reported there, graded in the text); Changzhou Intermediate People's Court verdict bulletin of 12 July 2018 (case handling among Zhang's adjudicated favour categories, no case named).
9. Minzu Securities and the Guo Wengui–Ma Jian–Zhang Yue triangle: the network as media reporting records it (2006–2015)
Zhang Yue's name attaches to a national-scale scandal through two men: the businessman Guo Wengui and Ma Jian, former vice minister of state security. Everything in this section is at the grade of media investigative reporting — built on Caixin's April 2017 investigation, supplemented by the publicly relayed content of Ma Jian's confession video — and the grade is declared at the head of the section for a reason: not one item below is a court finding about Zhang Yue. His judgment found only that he took more than RMB 156.9 million in bribes; it did not find that he formed any joint criminal enterprise with Guo or Ma. With that stated, the reporting can be read.
Caixin's backbone narrative runs as follows. A source close to the matter told Caixin that Zhang introduced Ma to Guo around 2006, the year Ma was promoted to deputy national security chief. Investigations, Caixin reported, revealed that Guo, Ma and Zhang formed a close alliance, using security and legal power to meddle in business deals. The most controversial was Guo's Zenith Holdings' acquisition of Beijing-based Minzu Securities. Guo began buying into Minzu in 2009, paying 291 million yuan for 6.81 per cent from Shijiazhuang Commercial Bank; a source close to the investigation of Zhang's case told Caixin that during that state-backed bank's sale, Zhang — who controlled Hebei's Political and Legal Affairs Commission at the time and was an old acquaintance of Ma's — intervened to help Zenith secure the deal. Guo then sought the 61.25 per cent held by Capital Airports Holding; after the civil aviation chief Li Jiaxiang refused him, Ma personally pressed Li to accept on national-security grounds, and Li yielded. In January 2011 Capital Airports auctioned the stake at the low price of 1.6 billion yuan under strict buyer requirements that left Zenith the only bidder. Over the following years Zenith raised its holding above 80 per cent for a total outlay of 1.89 billion yuan, against Minzu book net assets of 1.78 billion yuan as of mid-2010 and a Beijing Equity Exchange valuation of 2.5 billion yuan. In September 2015 the securities regulator investigated the suspected embezzlement of 2.05 billion yuan of Minzu client deposits; sources close to that investigation told Caixin the transfers were made on Guo's orders. Caixin also quoted a person familiar with Guo summarising Zhang's place in the network: Guo was confident that in Hebei "Zhang will do whatever (we) ask".
Ma Jian's confession video supplies the network's self-description. In it Ma said: "From 2008 to 2014 I used my power and position to benefit Guo Wengui," and that Guo paid him more than 60 million yuan in bribes in that period, including two Hong Kong properties and more than 3 million yuan in cash (all as relayed by Caixin from the video). Ma said he had ordered security departments to delete online reports and posts negative to Guo, sent officials to threaten a critical reporter and newspaper, and used his clout in the domestic security apparatus to help Guo escape hundreds of millions of yuan in Beijing fines over construction violations at the Pangu Plaza site in 2008. As for what Guo paid Zhang, Caixin wrote plainly that it is unclear how much investigators believe Guo paid him. This site archives that sentence as written: at the level of public reporting, no reliable source states a figure for Guo's bribes to Zhang, and to enter a rumoured number into the file would be fabrication. This site does not.
The network's end can be fixed on a timeline: Guo fled China in 2014; Ma was taken by the CCDI in January 2015 and in December 2018 was sentenced by the Dalian Intermediate People's Court to life imprisonment for bribery, forced transactions and insider trading (cited here as timeline background from Ma's own public verdict); Zhang fell in April 2016, and of the three he was sentenced first. In no official document were the three ever characterised as a "gang" or "alliance" — "close alliance" is Caixin's investigative wording, and this site preserves its media attribute when quoting it. Readers should hold this section at that grade: it is a network map assembled by a financial-news organisation known for investigative work, from informed sources and a fallen official's confession. It explains how Zhang's power was borrowed by a businessman; it is not a judicial finding.
Sources: Caixin Global, 21 April 2017 (the c. 2006 introduction; Zhang's intervention in the Shijiazhuang Commercial Bank share sale; the Capital Airports auction process and prices; the Minzu client-deposit investigation; Ma Jian's confession-video statements; the "Zhang will do whatever (we) ask" quotation; the express statement that Guo's payments to Zhang are unclear — all from that report, relayed at investigative-reporting grade); Dalian Intermediate People's Court verdict on Ma Jian, December 2018 (life sentence; timeline background only).
10. The Zhou Yongkang network claim: media reporting only, no characterisation
When Zhang fell, one further name recurred across Chinese and overseas reporting: Zhou Yongkang. This section treats that line at the lowest grade in the file, for a plain reason: Zhou, sentenced to life in 2015, casts a long network shadow, a great many fallen political-legal officials were attached to it by media accounts of uneven quality, and this file records only two classes of checkable fact about it, making no assertion that "Zhang was Zhou's man". First, a structural fact of the timeline: every key step of Zhang's ascent — 26th Bureau director in 2003, the move to Hebei in 2007, standing-committee member and PLC secretary in 2008 — occurred while Zhou Yongkang headed the Ministry of Public Security (2002–2007) and then the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (2007–2012); that is, each of Zhang's promotions passed, in organisational sequence, through the public-security and political-legal systems Zhou led. That is a fact of chronology and appointment authority. This site states expressly that the overlap of tenure and appointing authority is not evidence of a personal loyalty relationship — it is equally true of every political-legal official promoted in those years — and it must not be stretched. Second, a specific media claim: the "controversies" section of Zhang's Chinese Wikipedia entry relays media reporting that, while commanding Beijing's Domestic Security Protection Corps, Zhang attached himself to Zhou Yongkang through his second wife Meng Li, a former CCTV presenter. This site found no primary source for the claim and archives it strictly as "media reporting relayed by the entry, not independently verified" — recording its existence, not its truth. It is also on the record that Zhang was the second provincial PLC secretary investigated since the Eighteenth Party Congress (per the Chinese Wikipedia entry). The conclusion is fixed: no official document and no court judgment records a personal relationship between Zhang Yue and Zhou Yongkang; neither the expulsion bulletin nor the verdict mentions Zhou's name — a negative finding this site verified against both texts. This page archives the existence of the reporting, not its conclusion.
Sources: Zhou Yongkang's public tenure as Minister of Public Security (2002–2007) and Central PLC secretary (2007–2012), used for chronology comparison; the Chinese Wikipedia entry "Zhang Yue (born June 1961)", controversies section, relaying the media report about attachment to Zhou via Meng Li (archived at relay grade, not independently verified); Zhang's expulsion bulletin and the Changzhou verdict bulletin in full (neither mentions Zhou Yongkang — a negative finding verified by this site against the texts).
11. The Nie Shubin case: the wrongful conviction the Supreme Court took out of Hebei's hands on his watch
Nie Shubin's case has no publicly recorded connection to Zhang Yue personally. This section exists because it is the file's best yardstick of the boundary of a "PLC secretary tenure account" — what should be booked, and what must not, is demonstrated here. The outline: in 1994 a rape-murder occurred in Shijiazhuang; Nie Shubin was identified as the killer and executed in April 1995, aged twenty. In 2005 Wang Shujin, a genuine suspect in serial rape-murders, was arrested and confessed to the crime; the wrongful conviction was exposed. For nearly a decade thereafter the Hebei review stalled; episodes widely reported at the time included the removal from post of Zheng Chengyue, the original-case police officer who had pushed the review (Zheng's removal occurred around 2009, by which time Zhang was Hebei's PLC secretary — the institutional timeline is so, but public reporting has never attributed Zheng's fate to Zhang personally, and this site does not). In December 2014 the Supreme People's Court ordered the Shandong Provincial High Court to re-examine the Nie case in another province — an off-site review decision that amounted, in substance, to the supreme judicial organ declaring it would not trust Hebei's own political-legal system to review the case itself. At that moment Zhang was in the sixth year of his Hebei PLC secretaryship. In June 2016 the Shandong High Court recommended retrial; on 2 December 2016 the SPC's Second Circuit Court acquitted Nie on retrial — by then Zhang had been expelled for four months and was awaiting trial in Jiangsu.
This site's bookkeeping for the case is fixed in three sentences. First: the wrongful conviction was made in 1994–1995, when Hebei's PLC secretary was Xu Yongyue; it has nothing to do with Zhang, and any writing that books the miscarriage itself to Zhang commits a chronological error. Second: of the decade of review delay (2005–2014), the last six years overlapped his PLC tenure, Hebei's political-legal system did not correct the case in those years, and in the end the Supreme Court lifted it out of the province — an institutional-level fact, booked as a tenure-overlap account: the answer his system delivered on the country's most notorious wrongful conviction was to be bypassed by a higher court. Third: no public source records Zhang personally instructing, obstructing or intervening in the Nie review; this page books no personal act of his in the case, and allegations of that kind found in commentary are not adopted, no file-grade evidence for them having been found. These three sentences side by side are this site's standard format for everything that "happened during the tenure without personal evidence".
Sources: the public Nie Shubin timeline (execution 1995; Wang Shujin's 2005 confession; the SPC's December 2014 order assigning review to the Shandong High Court; the acquittal on retrial of 2 December 2016 — per SPC retrial reporting and the Chinese Wikipedia entry "Nie Shubin case"); public reporting on Zheng Chengyue's removal (c. 2009, institutional timeline; this site found no source attributing it to Zhang personally).
12. The fall: 16 April 2016, and the eight days after
On 16 April 2016 the CCDI's website announced that Zhang Yue, member of the Hebei Provincial Party Standing Committee and secretary of its Political and Legal Affairs Commission, was under organisational investigation for suspected serious discipline violations. He was the second provincial-level PLC secretary investigated since the Eighteenth Party Congress (per his Chinese Wikipedia entry, recorded at that source's grade). The fall was not wholly unheralded inside Hebei officialdom: the entry's controversies section relays reporting that rumours of Zhang's trouble had circulated in Hebei since 2014, with many beginning to distance themselves from him; it also quotes a mid-level Hebei PSB cadre describing him as overbearing in private and so poorly regarded that local talk ran "if Zhang Yue doesn't fall, the anti-corruption drive isn't finished". This site archives such colour strictly at relay grade — evidence that the talk circulated, not testimony about character.
The procedure after the fall can be fixed day by day. 16 April 2016: the CCDI announces the investigation. 24 April 2016: an official of the Central Organisation Department confirms that, Zhang being suspected of serious discipline violations, the Centre has decided to remove him from his leadership posts — eight days from announcement to removal. There followed three months of Party review. 28 July 2016: the expulsion bulletin (section 13). August 2016: the Supreme People's Procuratorate announces it has opened a case against him for investigation (per the Chinese Wikipedia entry's relay of the procuratorate's announcement). A man who had commanded a province's political-legal system for eight years passed from announced investigation to prosecutorial case-filing in under four months. This site archives the tempo without editorialising it — but one comparison is left for the reader's own eye: the Qu Long of section 8 went from seizure to sentencing in about a month; Zhang himself went from seizure to expulsion in three and a half. Both tempos belong to the same system, and the file places them side by side.
Sources: CCDI website announcement of 16 April 2016 (relayed by Xinhua and wire reporting); Central Organisation Department removal announcement of 24 April 2016 (via public reporting); Supreme People's Procuratorate case-filing announcement of August 2016 (as relayed by the Chinese Wikipedia entry); Chinese Wikipedia entry "Zhang Yue (born June 1961)" (second provincial PLC secretary investigated; controversies-section colour at relay grade).
13. The expulsion bulletin: the anti-cult chief who "long engaged in superstitious activities" (28 July 2016)
On 28 July 2016, with the approval of the Party Centre, the CCDI published its review findings and the decision of expulsion from the Party and public office — the "double expulsion" — confiscating his illicit gains and transferring his suspected crimes to the judiciary. This section follows the bulletin as carried by Xinhua. Its findings included: on political discipline, cutting corners and making unauthorised variations in carrying out major tasks, and resisting organisational review — Xinhua's English rendering adds that he was absent without official leave during important missions, violated political discipline and political rules, practised "superstitious" activities and resisted the investigation; on organisational discipline, using his office to benefit others in the selection and promotion of officials; on integrity discipline, extravagant banqueting at public expense, accepting banquets in violation of rules, playing golf, accepting gifts and money, and engaging in power-for-money, power-for-sex and money-for-sex transactions; on work discipline, interfering in construction projects and in judicial activities. The bulletin concluded that he had "lost his ideals and beliefs" and had not restrained himself even after the Eighteenth Party Congress.
One item in that list is where the archive speaks by itself, and it must be singled out. The bulletin found that he had "long engaged in superstitious activities" (Chinese reporting uniformly summarises the bulletin so). Zhang's post from 2003 to 2007 was director of the MPS Anti-Cult Bureau — the national operational bureau whose dedicated business was identifying, preventing and suppressing the very activities the state designates as cults and superstition. Seven years on, one of the charges his own Party's discipline organ wrote into his expulsion bulletin was long-term engagement in superstitious activities. Chinese reporting on his case routinely headlined exactly this contrast ("ran the anti-cult bureau yet engaged in feudal superstition" — recorded here as the reports' own wording). This site performs only the factual juxtaposition and offers no psychological speculation: anti-cult work was his office; superstition was his adjudicated personal conduct; both are in the file. One further cross-reference deserves the reader's attention: the bulletin's finding that he "interfered in judicial activities" and the verdict's finding that his bribe-earning favours included "case handling" (sections 8 and 15) are two official documents, under two different charges, confirming the same outline of fact — that he put political-legal power to private use.
Sources: CCDI expulsion bulletin of 28 July 2016 (Xinhua's Chinese and English reports of 28 July 2016: unauthorised absence on major missions, superstitious activities and resistance to review, promotion favours, public-fund banqueting, golf and gifts, power-for-money and sex transactions, interference in construction projects and judicial activities, "did not restrain himself after the 18th Congress", and the expulsion decision — cross-checked by this site in both languages); Chinese sentencing headlines stating the anti-cult/superstition contrast (recorded as the reports' wording).
14. Off-site indictment and trial: Changzhou, April 2017 (designated jurisdiction)
Zhang's judicial process did not take place in Hebei. That is this section's first fact, and the key to understanding how the case was handled. On 7 April 2017 the Supreme People's Procuratorate announced that Zhang's bribery case, investigated under the SPP's designation by the Jiangsu provincial procuratorate, had been transferred to the Changzhou city procuratorate, which had indicted him before the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court (Xinhua, 7 April 2017). Designated off-site jurisdiction is the standing practice for trying senior officials in their home territory, for a reason that needs no embellishment: a man who presided over Hebei's political-legal system for eight years could not be tried by Hebei's courts, staffed throughout by judges and prosecutors he had promoted or coordinated. The prosecution's summary charge was that he had used his posts to seek benefits for others and accepted an enormous amount of money and gifts.
On 20 April 2017 the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court heard the case in open first-instance trial. The prosecution's figure was bribes totalling RMB 157.885 million — note the number, because it exceeds the figure the court would eventually find, more than RMB 156.9 million, by roughly nine hundred thousand yuan; the gap between charge and finding is a normal part of judicial process, and this site books both numbers and never only the larger. Zhang pleaded guilty and expressed remorse in court. No sentence followed the hearing: judgment took another fifteen months, arriving only in July 2018 (section 15). Caixin Global's sentencing report indicates one direction in which to read the delay: the verdict bulletin records that Zhang surrendered himself and provided valuable leads that produced other criminal investigations, earning leniency — leads of that kind mean his case was temporally interlocked with others, which may form part of the background to the delay. This site labels that a reader's inference from the bulletin and the reporting, not a court-confirmed reason; the court never explained the delay.
Sources: Supreme People's Procuratorate announcement of 7 April 2017 (Xinhua English report: SPP designation of the Jiangsu procuratorate, transfer to Changzhou prosecutors, indictment filed); Changzhou trial reporting of 20 April 2017 (prosecution figure of RMB 157.885 million, guilty plea and remorse — via Xinhua and the Chinese Wikipedia entry); Caixin Global sentencing bulletin of 13 July 2018 (trial held in Jiangsu in April 2017, admission, surrender and leads as leniency factors).
15. The verdict: fifteen years, a RMB 5 million fine, more than RMB 156.9 million (12 July 2018)
On 12 July 2018 the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court publicly pronounced judgment in Zhang Yue's bribery case. This section follows the court's verdict bulletin — the highest-grade document in this entire file. The court found: from 2008 to 2016, the defendant Zhang Yue used the convenience of his posts as Party secretary of the Hebei Provincial Public Security Department, director of the Hebei Provincial Public Security Department, member of the Standing Committee of the Hebei Provincial Party Committee and secretary of its Political and Legal Affairs Commission, to seek benefits for relevant units and individuals in matters of land development, project contracting, case handling and job promotion, accepting property from others, directly or through specifically connected persons, totalling more than RMB 156.9 million. The sentence: fifteen years' imprisonment for bribery and a fine of RMB 5 million; the property and proceeds obtained from the bribery to be recovered and paid into the state treasury. Zhang stated in court that he accepted the verdict and would not appeal — the case closed at first instance, with no second instance.
The bulletin's leniency findings must be entered in full, not the sentence alone: the court found that Zhang had surrendered himself and had provided valuable leads that led to other criminal investigations (Caixin Global's summary: "he turned himself in and also provided authorities with valuable leads that led to other criminal investigations"), and it punished him leniently on that basis. That a sitting provincial standing-committee member announced by the CCDI as "under investigation" appears in a court judgment as having "surrendered himself" is a tension this site records without reconciling: the CCDI's April 2016 wording was "suspected of serious discipline violations, under organisational investigation"; the court's 2018 wording was "self-surrender". How the two documents join has never been publicly explained. Three further accounts must then be squared. The money account: charged at 157.885 million, found at more than 156.9 million, a difference of roughly 985,000 yuan (section 14). The time account: the bribery period, 2008 to 2016, matches his Hebei tenure seam for seam — the adjudicated corruption begins when he became PSB Party secretary and ends when he fell. The subject account: among the four favour categories — land development, project contracting, case handling, job promotion — "case handling" is the PLC secretary's distinguishing mark: what some of his bribers were buying was not land or contracts but the direction of cases themselves. As arithmetic only: a fifteen-year term, if counted from his 2016 detention with pre-trial custody credited, served in full with no reduction or parole, would expire around 2031; the actual execution of the sentence is a matter of no public record (see the status entry and section 17), and this arithmetic asserts nothing about a release date.
Sources: Changzhou Intermediate People's Court verdict bulletin of 12 July 2018 (as carried verbatim by Xinhua and other reporting: the 2008–2016 period, the four posts, the four favour categories, more than RMB 156.9 million, fifteen years, the RMB 5 million fine, recovery to the treasury, acceptance of the verdict with no appeal); Caixin Global bulletin of 13 July 2018 (age 57, "157 million yuan over eight years" in its summary wording, surrender and leads as leniency factors, the April 2017 Jiangsu trial and admission).
16. Sanctions check: he is on neither the US nor the UK list (checked 2 November 2026)
The conclusion is stated first: Zhang Yue has never been sanctioned by the United States or the United Kingdom. The method and dates of this site's and the coordinator's check are set out item by item. The US line: on 2 November 2026 the coordinator took the full OFAC SDN List as published on 28 October 2026 (19,484 entries) and scanned every "ZHANG" entry, name by name — no "ZHANG, Yue" entry exists (check record: daily-2026-11-02/checks/sanctions-note.md, personally verified by the coordinator). One misreading must be headed off: the SDN List does contain other people surnamed Zhang, and namesakes designated under unrelated programmes (this site's Peng Bo page handles an identical namesake problem); measured against birth data, birthplace and office, no entry corresponds to this page's subject — June 1961, Guangrao, Shandong, Hebei PLC secretary. The UK line: a search of the full UK Sanctions List (report date 27 October 2026) for "Zhang Yue" returns zero hits. This page's wording is therefore: as of the SDN List of 28 October 2026 and the UK Sanctions List of 27 October 2026, Zhang Yue has no US or UK designation on record.
The absence itself deserves one paragraph of context, as a contrast the file should preserve. He commanded a province's 610 system and had himself headed the national anti-cult bureau; after 2018 the US Global Magnitsky regime, the EU's global human-rights regime of 2020 and the coordinated US-UK-EU-Canada designations over Xinjiang in 2021 successively brought Chinese political-legal and 610-system officials onto Western lists in some numbers — but no list ever reached him. This site offers no speculation about why, and records only two checkable background facts: first, he fell in 2016 and was imprisoned in 2018, so when Western sanctions machinery turned at scale toward China's political-legal officials he was already a prisoner in the CCP's own jails; second, his name and posts do appear in the 2021 Minghui.org list of responsible persons submitted to more than thirty governments (section 4) — submission of a name to governments and designation by a government are two different things: the first happened; the second, on this site's check, did not. The file keeps the two apart, and any account that converts "named on a submitted list" into "sanctioned" is one this site does not adopt.
Sources: coordinator's check record of 2 November 2026 (daily-2026-11-02/checks/sanctions-note.md: full OFAC SDN List as published 28 October 2026 scanned entry by entry across all ZHANG entries, no "ZHANG, Yue"; UK Sanctions List, report date 27 October 2026, zero hits); Minghui.org list of 21 July 2021 (Zhang named therein — a civil-society submission, not a government designation).
17. Attribution discipline: what is booked to him, and what is not
At the close of this page this site fixes its attribution boundaries, in seven articles. First, two tenures, two levels: MPS 26th Bureau director, 2003–2007, booked as an "operational-bureau chief tenure account"; Hebei PLC secretary, June 2008 – April 2016 (standing-committee member from December 2008), booked as a "provincial PLC secretary tenure account". Within both tenures, the institutional acts of the systems he headed are booked institutionally, with him as highest responsible official; this site claims no individual case was ordered by him personally unless a source records it. Second, matters sourced to his personal level currently come in only two kinds: the adjudicated personal account — bribes of more than RMB 156.9 million, with favour categories including "case handling" (Changzhou verdict, the highest grade); and the case attributions in Caixin's investigative reporting — Ma Jian's reported confession that he asked Zhang to arrange the investigation of Qu Long, and Zhang's reported intervention in the Shijiazhuang Commercial Bank share sale in the Minzu transaction (investigative-reporting grade, below court findings; labelled at every occurrence and never upgraded). Third, the Zhou Yongkang relationship, the reported attachment through his wife, and any specific sum Guo Wengui paid Zhang: none carries an official finding; this site archives only the existence of the media reporting, and on the last item even Caixin states the amount is unclear — this site prints no rumoured figure. Fourth, the Nie Shubin case: the miscarriage was made thirteen years before he reached Hebei and is not booked to him; the review delay partly overlapped his tenure and the SPC's off-site review order fell within it — institutional timeline only; personal obstruction by Zhang has no file-grade source and is not adopted. Fifth, Hebei Falun Gong cases of his tenure: that the provincial 610 system operated under his PLC and that his former subordinate directed its office are both matters of public reporting and are booked institutionally; individual case names not verified up to provincial responsibility level are not entered in his responsibility column. Sixth, sanctions status is written strictly from the list documents: no entry on a full entry-by-entry SDN scan, zero hits on the UK list — the conclusion is "no US or UK designation on record"; his presence on a civil-society submitted list is not a government sanction. Seventh, current status is written only as the judgment's natural state: serving his sentence; prison location, reductions, parole and the exact expiry date are all matters of no public record, and the year arithmetic at section 15 is arithmetic only, asserting no fact. These seven articles apply uniformly to every people file on this site.
18. Timeline
June 1961: Zhang Yue is born in Guangrao, Shandong (official-CV wording; no public record of the specific date). October 1979: enters the Beijing Public Security School. August 1980: police officer, Xuanwu Branch, Beijing Municipal PSB. Thereafter: Screening Section officer and deputy head at the Beijing Railway Station district branch; junior cadre in the bureau's First Division, deputy head of its Fifth Section and of its Illegal Organisations Reconnaissance Office, deputy director and director of the First Division; assistant to the bureau director, concurrently heading the Domestic Security Protection Department and then the Domestic Security Protection Corps. November 1984: joins the CCP. April 2001: deputy director of the Beijing Municipal PSB, Party committee member. November 2003: director of the MPS 26th Bureau (Anti-Cult Bureau) (per the 2021 Minghui.org list materials, its first director after establishment — not confirmed by any official document). Around 2006: per Caixin's informed-source account, he introduces Ma Jian to Guo Wengui. December 2007: "parachuted" into Hebei as Party secretary of the provincial PSB. January 2008: assistant to the provincial governor and director of the provincial PSB. May 2008: his former subordinate Ma Yucia becomes a provincial PLC member and director of the provincial Preventing and Handling Cult Problems Leading Group Office (the provincial 610 Office). June 2008: secretary of the Hebei Provincial PLC. December 2008: provincial Party standing-committee member, retaining the PLC secretaryship. 2009–2011: per Caixin, Zhang intervenes in the Minzu Securities share transactions to help Guo Wengui's Zenith Holdings (reporting grade). March 2011: Qu Long, who had reported Guo and others, is detained in Beijing by Hebei police; a month later a Hebei court sentences him to fifteen years for embezzlement; per Ma Jian's confession as reported by Caixin, the investigation was arranged by Zhang at Ma's request (reporting grade). September 2013: gives up the provincial PSB directorship. December 2014: the Supreme People's Court orders the Shandong High Court to re-examine the Nie Shubin case off-site — the case is removed from Hebei's political-legal system during his tenure. January 2015: Ma Jian falls. March 2015: gives up the PSB Party secretaryship (the PLC secretaryship retained). 16 April 2016: the CCDI announces Zhang under investigation; 24 April 2016: the Central Organisation Department announces his removal from leadership posts. 28 July 2016: expelled from the Party and public office, the bulletin finding, among other things, long-term superstitious activities, interference in judicial activities and power-for-money deals. August 2016: the SPP opens a case against him. 2 December 2016: the SPC acquits Nie Shubin on retrial (Zhang already fallen). 7 April 2017: the SPP announces indictment by Changzhou prosecutors under designated jurisdiction; 20 April 2017: trial at the Changzhou Intermediate People's Court, prosecution figure RMB 157.885 million, guilty plea in court. 12 July 2018: the Changzhou court finds bribes of more than RMB 156.9 million and sentences him to fifteen years with a RMB 5 million fine, proceeds recovered to the treasury; he accepts the verdict and does not appeal. 2021: Minghui.org's list of responsible persons submitted to more than thirty governments carries his name (a civil-society list). 2022: his former subordinate Ma Yucia comes under Hebei discipline investigation, with reporting recounting their relationship and the 610 Office appointment line. 2 November 2026: the coordinator checks — no "ZHANG, Yue" entry in the OFAC SDN full list as published 28 October 2026, zero hits in the UK Sanctions List of 27 October 2026: no US or UK designation on record. Current status: serving his sentence; prison location and sentence-execution details are matters of no public record.
19. Verification note
This page was verified as follows. The career spine follows Zhang Yue's official CV text (republished verbatim and consistently across post-fall Chinese reporting): birth month and birthplace, work and Party-entry dates, the Beijing posts, the 26th Bureau tenure, the Hebei posts and the 2013 and 2015 relinquishment dates, each cross-checked against the career section of the Chinese Wikipedia entry "Zhang Yue (born June 1961)". Caixin Global's "now 57" at the July 2018 sentencing corroborates a June 1961 birth. The reasoning for this page's tag year is stated here: in June 2008 he became secretary of the Hebei Provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and his signature responsibility — command of one province's police, courts, procuratorate, state security and 610 system stability apparatus — ran from then until his fall in 2016; sort_year and tag year are therefore 2008, not his birth year, fall year or sentencing year. On one point of tenure detail this page departs from the commissioning brief's summary, corrected on the sources: the brief (following Caixin Global's summary phrasing) had him as PSB director until 2015; the itemised Chinese CV gives September 2013 for the directorship and March 2015 for the department Party secretaryship, and this page follows the itemised dates, noting the discrepancy at sections 5 and 6. The character of the 26th Bureau (the Anti-Cult Bureau, the MPS organ interfacing with the 610 system) is established by the uniform wording of Chinese reporting cross-checked against Minghui.org's 2021 list materials; the "first director" claim rests on those list materials alone, no official document having been found, and is downgraded accordingly. Ma Yucia's May 2008 appointment as provincial 610 Office director is taken from Hebei discipline reporting and multiple relays of it, at reporting grade. The Qu Long and Minzu Securities sections rest wholly on Caixin's investigative report of 21 April 2017 as their single backbone source; the report materials, confession video and informed-source accounts it cites are labelled at its grade throughout and never blended with court findings. All judicial facts of Zhang's own case follow the Changzhou verdict bulletin of 12 July 2018 as the highest-grade source, with the prosecution figure (RMB 157.885 million) and the found figure (more than RMB 156.9 million) both recorded. The expulsion bulletin was cross-checked between Xinhua's Chinese and English reports of 28 July 2016. On Zhou Yongkang, only the existence of media reporting is archived, marked as not independently verified. The Nie Shubin timeline follows SPC retrial reporting; this site found no file-grade source for personal intervention by Zhang in that case and states so expressly. The sanctions section rests on the coordinator's personal check of 2 November 2026 (entry-by-entry scan of the SDN full list as published 28 October 2026; search of the UK Sanctions List of 27 October 2026; method and results at daily-2026-11-02/checks/sanctions-note.md); no equivalent check of the EU or Canadian lists was performed and none is asserted. Prison location, sentence reductions and the exact term-expiry date were searched in public sources without reliable result and are recorded as no public record; the year figure at section 15 is pure arithmetic and is labelled as making no factual assertion. Statements by others quoted in this page (Ma Jian's confession, quotations from Guo Wengui's circle, the Hebei PSB cadre's relayed assessment) are confined to public reporting with clear provenance, with relay grade marked at each occurrence.
Sources
Zhang Yue's official CV text (born June 1961, Guangrao, Shandong; Beijing police posts; MPS 26th Bureau directorship; Hebei posts and the 2013 and 2015 relinquishment dates — as republished verbatim in fall and sentencing reporting). CCDI website: announcement of 16 April 2016 that Zhang was under investigation. CCDI: expulsion bulletin of 28 July 2016 (Xinhua's Chinese and English reports of that date: unauthorised absence on major missions, superstitious activities, interference in judicial activities, power-for-money deals, and the expulsion decision). Central Organisation Department: removal from leadership posts, 24 April 2016 (via public reporting). Supreme People's Procuratorate: case-filing announcement of August 2016; designation of Jiangsu jurisdiction and indictment announcement of 7 April 2017 (Xinhua English report). Changzhou Intermediate People's Court, Jiangsu: trial reporting of 20 April 2017 (prosecution figure RMB 157.885 million, guilty plea in court); verdict bulletin of 12 July 2018 (bribes of more than RMB 156.9 million found; fifteen years; RMB 5 million fine; proceeds recovered to the treasury; verdict accepted, no appeal; self-surrender and provision of important leads as leniency factors). Caixin: Global report of 21 April 2017, "Tycoon Guo Wengui's Power Play in Netting Securities Firm" (the Guo–Ma–Zhang network, the Minzu Securities acquisition, Qu Long's report, detention by Hebei police and sentencing, Ma Jian's confession video); Global sentencing bulletin of 13 July 2018 (age 57; "157 million yuan over eight years" in summary wording; PSB leadership to 2015 in summary wording; surrender and leads). Hebei discipline authorities and public reporting: the 2022 investigation of Ma Yucia and career retrospectives (provincial 610 Office director from May 2008; formerly Zhang's subordinate). Minghui.org: list of responsible persons of the "Office for the Prevention and Handling of Cult Crimes", 21 July 2021, submitted to more than thirty governments (first-director claim and institutional genealogy, at list grade). US Department of State International Religious Freedom Reports and Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual reports (nationwide Falun Gong persecution picture, 2008–2016, as policy environment only). Supreme People's Court Nie Shubin retrial reporting (December 2014 off-site review order to the Shandong High Court; acquittal on 2 December 2016). Sanctions check: OFAC SDN full list as published 28 October 2026; UK Sanctions List full table, report date 27 October 2026; coordinator's check record, daily-2026-11-02/checks/sanctions-note.md (2 November 2026). Chinese and English Wikipedia: entries "Zhang Yue (born June 1961)", "Zhang Yue (born August 1961)" and "Nie Shubin case" (career cross-checks, namesake disambiguation, relayed colour and media reports — used at the grades marked in the text, key facts verified against primary sources).
Contact: endccpworld@proton.me