EndCCPWorld.com

第45案 | 阿里木江·依米提Case 45 | Alimujiang Yimiti

维吾尔族基督徒、喀什家庭教会带领人阿里木江·依米提（1973年生，前穆斯林），2007年先被喀什市民宗部门以非法宗教渗透定性、公司被关，2008年1月12日以涉嫌煽动分裂国家和向境外提供国家秘密被刑事拘留；第一次秘密审判中法院以证据不足退查，人仍被关押，联合国任意拘留问题工作组第29/2008号意见认定其拘留属任意拘留。2009年喀什地区中级人民法院以非法向境外提供国家秘密（绝密级）判处他十五年、剥夺政治权利五年——所谓秘密，不过是他向一位美国熟人讲述自己被约谈调查的经历。2010年上诉与此后再审申诉均被驳回，他在新疆第三监狱服满全刑，2023年3月传出获释回家，此后近况无公开记录。Alimujiang Yimiti (born 1973), a Uyghur former Muslim who led a house church in Kashgar, was branded a religious infiltrator by Kashgar's religious-affairs authorities in 2007 and saw his company closed, then criminally detained on 12 January 2008 on suspicion of inciting secession and providing state secrets overseas. At his first secret trial the court itself returned the case for insufficient evidence — yet he stayed in detention, and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, in Opinion No. 29/2008, declared the detention arbitrary. In 2009 the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to 15 years plus five years' deprivation of political rights for illegally providing state secrets (graded top secret) to overseas organisations — the alleged secret being nothing more than his account, to an American acquaintance, of his own official interrogation. His appeal in 2010 and a later retrial petition were both rejected; he served every day of the sentence at Xinjiang No. 3 Prison, was reported released to his family in March 2023, and has had no public record since.

Time span

Born 10 June 1973 in Hami; converted from Islam to Christianity in 1995; named in a Kashgar religious-affairs "infiltration" determination and his company closed on 13 September 2007; criminally detained on 12 January 2008; judgment dated 6 August 2009 imposing 15 years; appeal rejected 16 March 2010; reported in March 2023 to have been released on completion of his sentence and to be home with his family, with no public record of his situation since

Place

Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (arrest and trial; Kashgar Municipal Detention Center); imprisonment at Xinjiang No. 3 Prison in Urumqi; born in Hami, with his family living in Urumqi

Figures

Alimujiang Yimiti (also spelled Alimjan Yimit, known as "Alim", born 1973), a Uyghur former Muslim and Christian who led a Uyghur-language house church in Kashgar; his wife Guli Nuer (also spelled Gulinuer, Gülnur); their two sons; his mother Wuxiuerhan; defence lawyers Zhang Kai, Liang Xiaojun and Li Dunyong, and on appeal Li Baiguang and Liu Peifu

Charge and sentence

Detained initially on suspicion of inciting secession (splitting the state) and illegally providing state secrets to overseas organisations; the secession count was dropped at the second indictment. The Kashgar Intermediate People's Court convicted him of illegally providing state secrets or intelligence to overseas organisations — the alleged secret graded top secret — and sentenced him to 15 years in prison plus five years' deprivation of political rights. The judgment is dated 6 August 2009, but his wife and lawyer were not notified until 27 October 2009 and learned the sentence details only in December. The Xinjiang High Court upheld the verdict on 16 March 2010, and a petition for retrial review was rejected in February 2011

Characterisation

Religious persecution compounded by ethnic identity: a Uyghur Christian who preached to Uyghurs was first branded a religious infiltrator and then given a maximum state-secrets sentence. UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 29/2008 found his detention arbitrary and based solely on his religious faith and activities; USCIRF listed him as a Religious Prisoner of Conscience

Current status

ChinaAid confirmed through sources on the ground on 15 March 2023, and the USCIRF chair publicly welcomed the same day, that he had been released after serving the full 15 years and had returned to his family; the exact release date is a matter of no public record. Since March 2023 no source consulted gives any update on his health, work, surveillance, or the execution of the five-year deprivation of political rights — recorded here as no public record

Remember the man before the case

Alimujiang Yimiti was born on 10 June 1973 in Hami, Xinjiang, an ethnic Uyghur. People who knew him tended to notice two overlapping minority identities first. In a people who are overwhelmingly Muslim, he was a man who had converted to Christianity. In a region where Christians of any ethnicity are few, he was also a man who preached that faith to his own people. Organisations that later followed his case commonly estimated the number of Uyghur Christians at the time at only several hundred to about a thousand. A man like that is visible from every direction. To the authorities he was a bridge carrying a foreign religion into Uyghur society. To some of his own community, conversion itself could look like a betrayal of tradition. Both pressures existed long before his arrest. What nobody expected was that they would end in a fifteen-year prison sentence.

Before the case, his life was anything but marginal. He held a vocational-college qualification and, from 2002, worked as project manager of the Kashgar branch of a foodstuff company, running an orchard in Shule County — a salaried man who paid his taxes and supported a family. Together with his wife Guli Nuer he led a Uyghur-language house church. They had two sons, recorded in case materials at the end of 2009 as aged nine and three. In interrogation, according to the organisations that documented his case, he repeatedly told officials that as a Christian he loved his country and supported the government; the same materials describe a businessman who kept the rules, paid his taxes in full and avoided the local custom of buying favours with gifts. These details belong in the record not because only a law-abiding taxpayer deserves to stay out of prison, but because the official narrative later constructed around him — separatist, leaker of state secrets — sits at a visible distance from the life he was actually living. How that distance was stitched into a criminal charge is what this page records, step by step.

1995: from Islam to Christianity

In 1995, at the age of twenty-two, Alimujiang converted from Islam to Christianity. Public sources say little about the circumstances of the conversion, and this page adds nothing to them. The year itself matters: it predates his arrest by thirteen years and his job at the foreign-owned company as well. His faith was not a costume put on for an employer, and not a foreign arrangement that appeared suddenly in 2007. After his conversion he gradually became a leading figure among Uyghur Christians around Kashgar, pastoring a house church of mainly Uyghur believers together with his wife. A house church sits outside the official Three-Self system, and meeting, reading scripture and introducing others to the faith were always liable to be rewritten in official document language — as they duly were, in full, in the determination issued in 2007.

The background needs stating plainly. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang are mostly Muslim, and the Chinese Communist Party's control of Xinjiang has never been only about religion; it is also about ethnic identity itself. A Uyghur who becomes a Christian crosses two lines at once in the official classification: the regulatory line that religion may exist only in registered venues, with approved personnel, in approved forms; and the stability line that Uyghurs are permitted only one approved narrative of who they are. The Xinjiang United Front notice quoted in the determination against him says it without embarrassment: it is not permitted to develop believers among minorities who believe in Islam or Tibetan Buddhism, and it is not permitted to develop believers in border regions. In other words, preaching Christianity among Uyghurs had been written down in advance as a violation. The only open questions were in which year the machinery would move, and under which charge.

The orchard manager: a British company, Jiaerhao, and five years of work

His employment is often garbled in retelling, so this page follows the detailed case summary published by ChinaAid in December 2009. From 2002 he worked as project manager of the Kashgar District branch of Xinjiang Jiaerhao Foodstuff Co. Ltd., responsible for the company's orchard near Hancheng in Shule County. Jiaerhao had been established and funded in 2000 by Jirehouse, a British company. One widespread error should be corrected here: some English-language reports describe Jiaerhao as Alimujiang's own company. The detailed case summary says otherwise — he was an employed project manager, not the owner — and the claim that he used "his" company as a cover for preaching only works if employee and employer are confused with each other.

One further point must be left open. Some reporting indicates that officials first began interrogating him in connection with work for two foreign-owned companies over the years, and a second company name circulates in some tasking material. In the sources consulted for this page — the US State Department's International Religious Freedom reports, ChinaAid's long case summary, Compass Direct reporting — only the Jirehouse and Jiaerhao line is supported by documents. The second company's exact name could not be verified in any reliable source; it is recorded here as unverified and is not used as fact in this page. What can be confirmed is that because of this foreign-linked job he was repeatedly called in for questioning by state security and other departments from an early stage, his home was searched and his personal computer seized. And the content of those interrogations, he was told, was not to be discussed with anyone. That prohibition would later become the rope used to hang the charge on him.

The climate of 2007: Typhoon No. 5 and the expulsion of foreign believers

To understand this case, first look at what was happening in Xinjiang in 2007. According to ChinaAid's reporting at the time, citing sources inside the government, the authorities launched an anti-infiltration campaign codenamed Typhoon No. 5 in February 2007, aimed at drastically reducing contact between foreign Christians and Chinese believers, against the background of a security tightening ahead of the Beijing Olympics the following year. During the campaign at least fifty foreign Christians — by some counts more than a hundred — were expelled or forced to leave, many of them in Xinjiang, and several companies connected with Christians were shut down or had their licences revoked in the autumn of 2007. His friend Osman Imin, another Uyghur Christian who had worked for a company run by an American, was taken away by state security in Hotan on 19 November 2007 and sentenced on 27 November to two years of re-education through labour for assisting foreigners in illegal religious activities; the company was closed and the American employer was later expelled from China.

In that climate, the net around Alimujiang tightened step by step. On 16 April 2007 the Kashgar Municipal Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs interviewed and investigated him over alleged religious infiltration. On the morning of 20 April and again on the afternoon of 16 May, he twice visited the Kashgar home of an American acquaintance, a fellow Christian, and the two men compared notes on their respective interviews, on how the people under investigation had conducted themselves, and discussed how to respond. Nobody could have imagined that two ordinary visits and conversations would, two years later, constitute the entire factual core of a top-secret state-secrets case. On 10 May 2007 the American's legal residence was cancelled by the Kashgar Municipal Public Security Bureau on suspicion of Christian infiltration activities, and he was ordered to leave China before 31 May. Expelling the foreigner, closing the company and interrogating the local employee were, in 2007, one connected sequence of actions. Alimujiang was the point where that sequence finally landed on an individual.

13 September 2007: the determination

On 13 September 2007 the Kashgar municipal ethnic and religious affairs authorities issued a formal determination concerning Alimujiang. It stated that since 2002, in the name of his work, he had engaged in illegal religious infiltration activities in the Kashgar area, disseminating Christianity among the Uyghur masses, distributing religious propaganda materials and raising up Christian believers, and that he had violated the Xinjiang United Front Department's notice on strengthening supervision of Christianity and Catholicism — the same notice prohibiting the development of believers among Muslim minorities. The company was then shut down and his livelihood cut off first. The US State Department's 2008 International Religious Freedom Report also records this episode, although it dates the bureau's notification to him as 9 October 2007, which differs from the determination's own date of 13 September. This page follows the document's own date and notes the discrepancy; the two dates may be those of issuance and of formal notification, but that cannot be verified and the two are not forcibly merged here.

The determination deserves to be read closely, because it shows the order in which the labels were applied. What it found was preaching, infiltration, developing believers among Uyghurs. There was no separatism in it, no leaking of secrets, not even the shadow of a criminal case. Four months later, how did a religious-administrative finding grow into a criminal case endangering state security? No new conduct appeared in between. He organised nothing and published nothing, and the two conversations for which he was eventually convicted took place in April and May 2007, before the determination was even written. What changed was not his behaviour. What changed was the level at which the case would be handled. That is the starting point for everything that followed procedurally.

What the "state secret" actually was

Lay the core passage of the judgment out in the open, and the case's absurdity has nowhere to hide. ChinaAid obtained through its channels and published excerpts of the criminal judgment of the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court — the case number appears in slightly differing transliterations in different retellings, so this page records only the content. The facts as the judgment found them were these: on 16 April 2007 he was interviewed in an investigation by the Kashgar Municipal Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs; on the morning of 20 April 2007 he went to the home of the American acquaintance and provided him with information about the reconnaissance and protection work, involving state secrets, being carried out by the ethnic and religious affairs department into the unlawful religious infiltration activities of himself, the American and others; on the afternoon of 16 May 2007 he went again, the two men exchanged information about their respective interviews with law-enforcement officials, about the persons interviewed and how they had performed, and they discussed what countermeasures to take. Two witnesses testified that they had seen him, then working at the orchard in Shule County, enter the foreigner's house. That was all.

Notice what is absent from that list of facts. There are no documents, no lists, no military, economic or diplomatic intelligence, and no classified material he had ever handled — an orchard project manager's job contains no state secrets in the first place. What he was found to have leaked was the fact that the religious affairs bureau had interviewed him, how that investigation was conducted, and how the interviewees had behaved. In other words, the secret was that you had been investigated; and telling another person who was under the same investigation that it had happened became providing top secrets to overseas organisations. His lawyer Li Dunyong put the resulting paradox plainly afterwards: the court refused even to tell Alimujiang what state secret he was supposed to have leaked. Lawyer Liang Xiaojun's objection was that the alleged proof lacked any legally verifiable form at all, and that the court never showed the defence the supposed secret itself. The secrecy appraisal was challenged by the lawyers as defective in both form and content, and unsigned by its appraiser; and as the lawyers observed, the authorities, knowing of the alleged leak at the time, still allowed the foreigner who supposedly received it to leave the country normally — which itself suggests the case was never about a secret. Some reports, incidentally, describe the two contacts as telephone conversations rather than visits; this page follows the judgment excerpts, which describe visits to the man's home, and notes the difference.

12 January 2008: criminal detention, and a lawyer turned away

On 12 January 2008 the Kashgar Municipal Public Security Bureau placed Alimujiang under criminal detention on suspicion of inciting secession — splitting the state — and illegally providing state secrets to overseas organisations, and he was held at the Kashgar Municipal Detention Center. A few sources give 11 January as the day state security took him away, one day earlier than the criminal detention date; this page follows 12 January, on which most sources agree, and notes the one-day discrepancy. On 20 February, with the procuratorate's approval, he was formally arrested. USCIRF's database gives 28 February as the date he was formally charged, which is a different procedural step from approval of arrest; the two dates are recorded separately here and not conflated. The charges he faced were described by those following the case at the time as carrying penalties up to death. For his family, that day began a wait that would last fifteen years.

The lawyers' experience is itself part of the evidence. His first lawyer, Zhang Kai of Beijing, travelled to Kashgar on 25 February 2008 and was refused both a meeting and permission to act as defence counsel, on the ground that the case involved national security. It was not until 28 April that another lawyer, Liang Xiaojun, first saw him in the detention centre. According to Radio Free Asia's interview record from that time, Alimujiang told the lawyer he was innocent, that the charge was fabricated and ridiculous, that the interrogators had questioned him at length about nothing but his religious beliefs, and that they had finally thrown this enormous blanket charge at him; he said he had been truly wronged. Organisations following the case also recorded that the lawyers who defended him were harassed and pressured afterwards. Taken one by one these look like procedural flaws. Taken together they form a pattern: everyone who might carry knowledge of the case out of Xinjiang — lawyers, family, the foreign acquaintance — was separated or removed one by one, and the case was processed inside a room nobody outside could see into.

27 May 2008: the first secret trial — insufficient evidence

On 27 May 2008 the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court tried the case behind closed doors. No family member or friend was allowed into the courtroom; only his two lawyers, Liang Xiaojun and Li Dunyong, appeared in his defence. That evening the court announced that the evidence was insufficient, the trial could not proceed, and the case would be returned to the public security organ for supplementary investigation. Under any normal understanding of the rule of law, when a court itself says the evidence is insufficient against a man who has already been held for more than four months, the next step should be release, or at the very least a change in the coercive measures against him. What actually happened was that he stayed in the detention centre, his detention extended without visible limit, and the file travelled back and forth between police, procuratorate and court. That first hearing's conclusion later became the most telling footnote in the whole case: it was not outsiders who said the evidence was insufficient. It was the Chinese Communist Party's own court that said so, in May 2008 — and, having said it, kept him locked up anyway, and eighteen months later used the same body of facts to sentence him to fifteen years.

In that same year, the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report wrote his case into its China section: a Uyghur Christian employed by a foreign-owned company arrested, his company closed on suspicion of foreign religious infiltration, his case returned by the court to prosecutors for insufficient evidence, and the man still in jail. That matters for how the later sentence should be judged. From its first year this was not an unknown case in an unobserved corner. It was turned into a heavy sentence step by step under international attention. The officials handling it did not act in ignorance of the outside world's gaze. They acted in knowledge of it, and did not care.

The United Nations finding: Opinion No. 29/2008

On 12 September 2008 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, under the Human Rights Council, adopted Opinion No. 29/2008 devoted to Alimujiang's case. The Working Group found that he had been arrested and was being kept in detention solely for his religious faith and religious activities, that the detention contravened articles 7, 9, 10, 11(1), 12 and 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that it was therefore arbitrary, and it called on the Chinese government to correct the situation. The Group pointedly noted that freedom of religion is recognised by article 18 of the Universal Declaration and by article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed but not ratified. The weight of the opinion lies in its timing: it was issued before the case had even been decided. The Working Group was, in effect, telling the Chinese government in advance that the detention itself was already unlawful.

The date of this opinion is reported confusingly in public retellings, and this page untangles it here. USCIRF's entry gives April 2008 as the point at which the Working Group sent a communication to the authorities; that was the stage at which the Group received the complaint and transmitted it to the government. Christian Solidarity Worldwide's 2023 release statement dates the opinion's publication to April 2009, which does not match the opinion text itself. This page follows the text: Opinion No. 29/2008, adopted on 12 September 2008. The Chinese government made no response that changed anything about his detention. After the opinion was adopted he was held for another year before judgment — and the judgment, when it came, was the maximum fifteen years. A formal opinion by a UN expert body produced no braking effect whatsoever on this case machinery. That fact, too, is part of the archive.

31 March 2009: the scene at the hospital gate

At about ten o'clock on the morning of 31 March 2009, an eyewitness saw Alimujiang being taken to the Nongsanshi Hospital in Kashgar. The US State Department's 2009 International Religious Freedom Report records that he was under police escort with his hands bound. The eyewitness said he cried out to onlookers that he had been beaten in the detention centre; Compass Direct reporting cited sources confirming that he had been beaten in custody. The procuratorate's explanation afterwards was that he had been taken to hospital for a routine physical examination. On 21 April his lawyer Li Dunyong met him in the detention centre and asked about the hospital trip. Alimujiang said he was not allowed to talk about it. This page keeps the layers of that episode strictly separate: the escorted hospital visit with bound hands is supported by both the State Department report and the eyewitness account; the beating rests on the eyewitness's account of his shouting and on Compass's sources, against an official explanation of a routine examination, and is recorded here as an allegation, not as a fact established by a court. A detainee who may not tell even his own lawyer why he was taken to hospital has already testified by that silence alone.

The second indictment, the second secret trial, and fifteen years

On 11 July 2009 the Kashgar procuratorate indicted him again — this time on a single charge, providing state secrets to overseas organisations. The inciting-secession count had been quietly withdrawn, with no public explanation. On 28 July the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court held a second closed trial. His wife's and mother's applications to attend were refused on secrecy grounds. Liang Xiaojun and Li Dunyong defended him. No verdict was announced at the close of the hearing. Afterwards the lawyers made two points that go to the heart of the case: the alleged secret evidence was not in any legally verifiable form, and the court refused even to tell the defendant what the secret he had leaked was. If he had already leaked it, they argued, it was no longer secret from him — so why would they not tell him? The court gave no answer.

The way the judgment then landed is the procedural black box of this case in concentrated form. The judgment is dated 6 August 2009: the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court convicted him of illegally providing state secrets or intelligence to overseas organisations, graded the alleged secret as top secret, and sentenced him to fifteen years — the maximum under article 111 of the Criminal Law for that offence — plus five years' deprivation of political rights. But the court did not deliver the judgment to his family or his lawyer. Only on 27 October did it notify his wife Guli Nuer and lawyer Li Dunyong that the verdict had been announced to Alimujiang in the detention centre and that the document had been mailed to the lawyer in Beijing. It later emerged that the document had never been mailed at all, and the family was barred from seeing the judgment. Not until 7 December, when Li Dunyong reached Kashgar, were the details of the sentence confirmed — by which time Alimujiang had already lodged his appeal. This sequence also explains why the sources give such a tangle of sentencing dates: some give 6 August, the date on the judgment; some give 27 October, the day the court notified the family; a date of 25 November circulates in Chinese-language web material with no reliable provenance and is not adopted here. A trial in which a wife needs four months even to learn how many years her husband received is not being described metaphorically when it is called a secret trial.

Appeal, retrial petition, and Xinjiang No. 3 Prison in Urumqi

On 16 March 2010 the Higher People's Court of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region upheld the original verdict on appeal. Reporting on the case consistently records that this hearing too was closed, and that his lawyer was not permitted to present the defence argument in court. Lawyer Li Baiguang told Radio Free Asia at the time that the ruling was illegal and void, because it had never at any point shown how Alimujiang had provided state secrets to people overseas. On 12 April Guli Nuer received a telephone call notifying her that her husband had been transferred from the Kashgar detention centre to serve his sentence at Xinjiang No. 3 Prison in Urumqi. On 20 April the family was finally allowed a visit — the first since his arrest more than two years earlier — through a glass barrier, by telephone, for fifteen minutes. Afterwards the family told friends he was noticeably thinner but in good spirits. At the same time, according to ChinaAid, his lawyers Li Baiguang and Liu Peifu were refused a meeting with him by the prison, despite having obtained permission from the Xinjiang Bureau of Prison Management. Monthly family visits were thereafter authorised — and visiting rights, from that point, became a rope that could be tightened at will, as the next section shows.

The legal process had one more door. In November 2010 the Xinjiang High Court accepted a petition for retrial filed by Guli Nuer and her mother-in-law Wuxiuerhan, and the Beijing lawyers the family engaged arrived in Urumqi on 17 November. A collegial panel made its decision on 20 December 2010. In February 2011 Alimujiang, serving his sentence, was notified of the outcome: the original fifteen years stood, his petition had no basis, and the court in substance declared that the facts of his crime were clear and the evidence complete. With that, trial, appeal and retrial review had all closed. The manner of each closing deserves recording: the trial was secret, the judgment was concealed from the family, the appeal hearing did not let the lawyer speak, and the retrial review never held a hearing at all. An orchard manager who had talked with an American acquaintance about being interviewed by officials went through that entire apparatus over more than three years, and emerged with fifteen years, not one day less.

What the fifteen years did to his family

The other half of this case is written on Guli Nuer and the two boys. When he was taken, the elder son was nine and the younger three. For more than two years his wife was not granted a single visit. The younger son was four years old before he was first allowed to see his father — which means that this child's earliest memory of his father is of speaking to him by telephone through prison glass. The Irish organisation Church in Chains, compiling years of visit reporting, says Guli Nuer for a time visited monthly, that the visits were later stopped on the vaguely stated ground that the family was "non-cooperative" — possibly, it speculates, because she had contact with other Uyghur Christians or spoke to a reporter. The same chain of sources records that his siblings blamed Guli Nuer and considered that she had brought disgrace on the family, that his mother Wuxiuerhan consistently supported him, that Guli Nuer suffered from depression, and that security agents followed and monitored her around the clock. These family details rest mainly on a single organisation's compiled chain of sources; this page marks them unverified and reports them only in that organisation's terms, not as multiply corroborated fact. The main thread — the tightening of visits — is, however, independently documented, as follows.

In January 2013 ChinaAid and Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported in parallel that Guli Nuer's visits, previously twenty minutes once a month, had been cut to ten minutes once every three months, and that on 23 January she travelled to Xinjiang No. 3 Prison hoping to see her husband and was refused entry. Her last meeting with him had been in November 2012 and had lasted fifteen minutes. In between there had been a single telephone call, on New Year's Day, in which he said he hoped that she and their two sons could come and see him. In June 2014, a Voice of the Martyrs worker who had visited Guli Nuer reported that visits stood at fifteen minutes every three months, that he had lost a lot of weight and looked pale but was doing well spiritually, that her eight-year-old dreamed constantly of his father coming home, and that the elder son had lost hope and was sad and discouraged — a single-source account, marked unverified here. Set the official numbers out in a row and they speak for themselves: across a fifteen-year sentence, the time this family was permitted to spend together was measured in minutes per quarter. Visits in this system were never a right. They were a reward whose conditions were never stated and whose withdrawal never needed a reason.

Two later episodes circulated in reporting from 2014 and 2015. Church in Chains' compiled timeline says that in 2014 the Xinjiang High Court, under new leadership, approached Guli Nuer to discuss a further appeal; she applied, the application was processed, and it then stalled inside the court system. In late 2015, the same timeline reports, his case came to the attention of officials involved in the central anti-corruption campaign, and he was offered a pardon on condition that he admit guilt — which he refused, maintaining his innocence and saying his sentence was the product of provincial-level corruption. A further entry records that around Christmas 2016 a Han Chinese Christian in Urumqi who had been helping Guli Nuer was detained for a day and interrogated in a hotel. All three episodes rest on that single compiled chain, with no second reliable source found; all are marked unverified in this page and are recorded as claims, not adopted as facts. Even if every one of them were true, they would show only this: that even the occasional flicker of corrective intent inside the system itself never, in this case, walked the last step.

The prison years: what the outside world could learn were fragments

From his transfer to Xinjiang No. 3 Prison in 2010 to his release in 2023, news of him reaching the outside world across thirteen years can be counted on one hand: the 2013 reports of the visit cut, the wife's 2014 account of his weight loss and pallor, and one brief report from a local source in July 2018 — that he was allowed to telephone his family once a month and called it his happiest moment, that his elder son had just taken the college entrance examination and done very well, and that he was described as peaceful and stable in body and spirit. That 2018 item likewise rests on a single chain of sources and is marked unverified here. Whether he was subjected to forced labour in prison, what state his health was in, and whether, after the mass internment-camp system spread across Xinjiang from 2017, he was ever drawn into it: ChinaAid stated plainly in its 2023 release report that it was unclear whether the authorities had ever sent him to any of the camps during his sentence. This page takes the same position. Where there is no record, it writes that there is no record; it does not fill fifteen years of blank with imagination. The blank itself is what this system leaves to a family.

International response

This case carries one of the most complete international files of any Xinjiang religious case. The UN Working Group's opinion has been set out above. The US State Department's International Religious Freedom Reports for 2008 and 2009 followed the case continuously, from the company's closure and the return of the case for insufficient evidence, all the way to his appearance at a hospital with his hands bound under police escort. USCIRF entered him in its Religious Prisoners of Conscience database, finding that he was imprisoned purely for his religious belief and activity. He was also adopted under the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission's Defending Freedoms Project, with Representative Rick Allen as his congressional advocate, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's political prisoner database carries his entry. On 29 October 2009 the Tom Lantos Commission held a special hearing on China's legal system, at which Zhang Kai — the first lawyer, the one turned away in Kashgar — testified about this case as an instance of persecution for religious belief. On 9 December 2009 the then US Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, met five rights lawyers in Beijing, and the lawyers raised Alimujiang's heavy sentence with him specifically. When the news of the judgment came out that December, a lawyer on the case put it heavily and plainly: the whole case was about religious faith being used against a man for his conversion to Christianity, by biased law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and court.

China's official responses to this entire sequence of international findings, within the range of sources consulted for this page, never went beyond general denials of persecution and general assertions that everything was handled according to law. No point-by-point public answer to the UN opinion has been found, and no public corrective procedure was ever set in motion because of it. International attention did not buy him an early release — he served the fifteen years in full, not a day short. What it bought was something else: the record. Because a UN opinion, State Department reports and a prisoners-of-conscience database exist, when he walked out of prison fifteen years later the world knew why he had gone in, and knew that the judgment had never stood up. A record cannot repay fifteen years. But fifteen years without a record can be erased altogether.

March 2023: reports of a completed sentence — and the blank after release

On 15 March 2023 ChinaAid reported that, confirmed through sources on the ground, Alimujiang Yimiti had been released from prison after completing his fifteen-year sentence and had returned to his family — and that, beyond that, other details were unconfirmed. The same day, USCIRF Chair Nury Turkel publicly welcomed the news of the pastor's release, adding that he remained concerned for Yimiti's safety and wellbeing given the oppressive environment in the Uyghur region. On 22 March Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued a statement welcoming the reports and restating that he should never have been detained at all — that an innocent man had been robbed of fifteen years of his life on unfounded charges designed to punish him because of his religion. Voice of the Martyrs Canada and other organisations followed with reports in the same terms: he was home; the details were unknown.

This page has verified the release as far as it can be verified — and no further. The fact of release is supported by ChinaAid's confirmation from sources on the ground and by the public statements of USCIRF and CSW, and is credible. But the exact release date is a matter of no public record: counting from his detention in January 2008, the fifteen years expired in early 2023, and 15 March is the date of the reports, not a confirmed date of release. The place and procedure of release and the circumstances of that day are matters of no public record. His health on leaving prison is a matter of no public record. Whether he returned to a home in Kashgar or in Urumqi is not specified beyond "home with his family" in any report consulted. And from March 2023 to this page's research in October 2026, no public source gives any update at all on whether he has resumed work, whether he has taken part in church life again, whether he remains under surveillance, or whether the additional five years' deprivation of political rights has run its course. After the handful of March 2023 reports, the name falls silent in the public world again. Silence admits two readings — a quiet life finally left alone, or control that does not permit a voice. This page does not choose between them for the reader. It leaves the blank here, as found.

Current status and the questions still unanswered

As of this page's last check in October 2026, the current status that can be confirmed consists of one sentence: Alimujiang Yimiti was released in 2023 on completion of his sentence and returned to his family, and there has been no public record since. The unanswered questions include: the exact date and circumstances of his release, no public record; his health after release, no public record; how the five years' deprivation of political rights was calculated and executed, no public record; the full text of the judgment, never officially published — the outside world has seen only excerpts obtained and published through an aid organisation's channels; the content of the top-secret appraisal and the identity of its appraiser, no public record; whether the 2009 detention-centre beating allegation was ever investigated, no public record; and the reported 2014 further-appeal approach and 2015 admit-guilt-for-a-pardon offer, both unverified. Listing these questions is not padding. A man sentenced by the state to fifteen years in the name of top secrecy has been out for more than three years, and society has no way of knowing how he is. That not-knowing is precisely the longest tail left behind by the practice of secret trials.

Full timeline

• 10 June 1973 — Alimujiang Yimiti is born in Hami, Xinjiang, an ethnic Uyghur.
• 1995 — He converts from Islam to Christianity and later becomes a leader of a Uyghur-language house church in Kashgar, pastoring together with his wife Guli Nuer.
• From 2002 — He works as project manager of the Kashgar District branch of Xinjiang Jiaerhao Foodstuff Co. Ltd., responsible for its orchard in Shule County; Jiaerhao was established in 2000 by the British company Jirehouse. He is repeatedly interrogated by officials; his home is searched and his computer seized.
• From February 2007 — According to aid-organisation reporting citing internal sources, the authorities launch an anti-infiltration campaign codenamed Typhoon No. 5; large numbers of foreign Christians are expelled and several connected companies closed (the codename rests on a single chain of sources; unverified).
• 16 April 2007 — The Kashgar Municipal Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs interviews and investigates him over alleged religious infiltration.
• 20 April and 16 May 2007 — He twice visits the home of an American Christian acquaintance and they compare notes on their respective official interviews — the entirety of the conduct later found by the judgment to constitute leaking state secrets.
• 10 May 2007 — The American's legal residence is cancelled by the Kashgar Municipal Public Security Bureau and he is ordered to leave China before 31 May.
• 13 September 2007 — The Kashgar ethnic and religious affairs authorities issue a determination that since 2002 he has used work as a cover for illegal religious infiltration, preaching Christianity and developing believers among Uyghurs; the company is shut down. The US State Department report dates the notification to 9 October; the discrepancy is noted.
• 19 November 2007 — His friend and fellow Uyghur Christian Osman Imin is detained in Hotan and later sentenced to two years of re-education through labour.
• 12 January 2008 — The Kashgar Municipal Public Security Bureau criminally detains Alimujiang on suspicion of inciting secession and illegally providing state secrets to overseas organisations; he is held at the Kashgar Municipal Detention Center (some sources give 11 January for his being taken away).
• 20 February 2008 — He is formally arrested with the procuratorate's approval (USCIRF's entry gives 28 February for formal charging).
• 25 February 2008 — His first lawyer, Zhang Kai, reaches Kashgar and is refused any meeting or permission to defend him, on national-security grounds.
• 28 April 2008 — Lawyer Liang Xiaojun meets him in the detention centre for the first time; he says the charge is fabricated and that interrogation dwelt entirely on his religious beliefs.
• 27 May 2008 — The Kashgar Intermediate People's Court holds a first closed trial; the family is barred. That evening the court returns the case to the public security organ for supplementary investigation for insufficient evidence. He remains in detention.
• 12 September 2008 — The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopts Opinion No. 29/2008, finding his detention arbitrary and based solely on his religious faith and religious activities.
• 31 March 2009 — An eyewitness sees him taken under police escort, hands bound, to the Nongsanshi Hospital in Kashgar, and says he cried out that he had been beaten in the detention centre; the procuratorate calls it a routine physical examination; on 21 April he tells his lawyer he is not allowed to discuss it.
• 11 July 2009 — The Kashgar procuratorate indicts him again, on the single charge of providing state secrets to overseas organisations; the inciting-secession count is dropped without public explanation.
• 28 July 2009 — A second closed trial is held; his wife's and mother's applications to attend are refused; no verdict is announced in court.
• 6 August 2009 — Date of the judgment: the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court sentences him to 15 years in prison plus five years' deprivation of political rights for illegally providing state secrets or intelligence (graded top secret) to overseas organisations.
• 27 October 2009 — The court finally notifies his wife and lawyer that the verdict has been announced, claiming the document was mailed; it never was, and the family is barred from seeing the judgment.
• 29 October 2009 — The US Congress's Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission holds a hearing on China's legal system, at which lawyer Zhang Kai testifies about this case.
• 7 December 2009 — Lawyer Li Dunyong confirms the details of the sentence in Kashgar; Alimujiang has already lodged an appeal.
• 9 December 2009 — US Ambassador Jon Huntsman meets rights lawyers in Beijing; the lawyers raise this case's heavy sentence with him specifically.
• 16 March 2010 — The Xinjiang High Court upholds the verdict on appeal, in a closed hearing at which his lawyer is not permitted to present the defence.
• 12 April 2010 — His wife is notified by telephone that he has been transferred to Xinjiang No. 3 Prison in Urumqi to serve his sentence.
• 20 April 2010 — The family is allowed its first visit: fifteen minutes by telephone through glass; he is noticeably thinner. Lawyers Li Baiguang and Liu Peifu are refused a meeting despite holding Prison Management Bureau permission. Monthly visits are thereafter authorised.
• November 2010 – February 2011 — The Xinjiang High Court accepts his wife's and mother's retrial petition; a collegial panel decides on 20 December 2010, and in February 2011 he is notified that the 15-year sentence stands.
• January 2013 — Visits are cut to ten minutes once every three months; on 23 January Guli Nuer travels to the prison and is refused entry.
• 2014 — The Xinjiang High Court is reported to have discussed a further appeal with Guli Nuer; the application is processed and then stalls (unverified).
• Late 2015 — He is reported to have been offered a pardon conditional on admitting guilt, which he refuses, maintaining his innocence (unverified).
• July 2018 — A local source reports that he may telephone his family once a month and that his elder son has just taken the college entrance examination (unverified).
• 15 March 2023 — ChinaAid confirms that he has been released after completing the 15-year sentence and has returned to his family; the USCIRF chair publicly welcomes the release the same day while expressing concern for his safety; the exact release date is a matter of no public record.
• 22 March 2023 — Christian Solidarity Worldwide issues a statement welcoming the release reports and restating that he should never have been detained.
• After March 2023 — No public record of his health, work or circumstances, as of this page's check in October 2026.

Verification note

The core facts of this page — the year of conversion, the employing company, the determination of 13 September 2007, the criminal detention of 12 January 2008 and arrest of 20 February, the dates of the two secret trials, the return of the case for insufficient evidence, UN Opinion No. 29/2008, the judgment date and the sentence of 15 years plus five years' deprivation of political rights, the upholding of the verdict on 16 March 2010, the transfer to Xinjiang No. 3 Prison, the first family visit, the 2013 cutting of visits, and the March 2023 release reports — are each corroborated by at least two independent sources, principally the text of the UN Working Group's opinion, USCIRF's Religious Prisoners of Conscience database, the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Reports for 2008 and 2009, ChinaAid's detailed case summary of December 2009 and its reporting over the following years, and reporting by Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Compass Direct. The main disputes and the choices made are these. First, the competing sentencing dates: this page treats 6 August 2009 as the date of the judgment and 27 October 2009 as the date the court notified the family; other datings in circulation (a conviction in October, or 25 November) are either confusions with the notification date or have no reliable provenance and are not adopted. Second, the date of the UN opinion follows the opinion text, 12 September 2008; April 2008 was the transmission of the communication, and the April 2009 publication date given in CSW's 2023 statement does not match the text, as noted. Third, the one-day difference between 11 and 12 January for his being taken away, the difference between the determination's own date of 13 September and the 9 October notification date in the State Department report, and the difference between accounts describing the two contacts as visits and as telephone conversations are each noted where they occur. Evidence grading: the UN opinion and the judgment excerpts are first-level documentary evidence; US official databases and annual reports are second-level; the continuous reporting of aid and advocacy organisations is third-level, and any detail resting solely on such reporting is downgraded accordingly. The following details rest on a single chain of sources and are marked unverified wherever they appear in the text and timeline: the Typhoon No. 5 campaign codename; his association with two foreign-owned companies and the second company's name; Guli Nuer's depression, round-the-clock surveillance, blame from her husband's siblings, and the stopping of visits for "non-cooperation"; the 2014 High Court approach about a further appeal; the 2015 admit-guilt-for-a-pardon offer and refusal; the Christmas 2016 interrogation of a Han Christian who helped his wife; the wife's 2014 account of the two sons' condition; and the 2018 monthly telephone calls and elder son's examination. The 2009 detention-centre beating is an allegation from an eyewitness and Compass's sources, against an official explanation of a routine examination, and is recorded as such. No source consulted gives any update on his situation after his release, and that absence is recorded as no public record. This page does not use unsourceable social-media rumour and does not write speculation as fact.

Our Take

Our Take rests on this case's facts alone. First, the foundation of the charge in this case is unusually thin, and it is a matter of record: at the first trial the court itself said the evidence was insufficient. The same body of facts then sat for over a year; the evidence did not grow, yet the outcome changed from a case sent back for further investigation to the maximum fifteen years. What changed in between was not evidence but patience — the handling authorities used time to demonstrate that "insufficient evidence" was never a reason to release anyone, only a reason to go away and find another formulation. Second, the content of the "top secret" was that the religious affairs bureau had interviewed him. A man is summoned and questioned by a government department; he tells another man, who was questioned in the same investigation, that it happened; and the state has thereby suffered a top-secret-grade loss. On that logic of classification, any interview and any interrogation can first be sealed and then prosecuted, and the words state secret function here — as in other cases on this site — not as an instrument of confidentiality but as a shield that leaves the person targeted with nowhere even to begin a defence: the court would not tell him what secret he had leaked, and he served fifteen years for a sentence of speech without ever learning why that speech was secret. Third, the manner in which the judgment was delivered says everything about the system's attitude to this family: dated in August, notified in October, the document falsely said to have been mailed, the wife forbidden to read it. Even the act of telling a wife how many years her husband had received was delayed four months and accompanied by a lie. Fourth, he was a Uyghur, and a Christian, and a Christian who preached to Uyghurs — three identities stacked on top of each other in Xinjiang, each of them an object of control in its own right. The United Nations said it plainly before any verdict existed: this was arbitrary detention arising from his faith. The verdict came down anyway, the appeal was rejected anyway, and a pardon required a confession first. He served the fifteen years in full, not one day short. When he walked out, his elder son was a grown man, and his younger son's memory of him began at the age of four, through glass. What did the state purchase with those fifteen years? An orchard manager who never spoke again, and a family whose life together was measured out in visiting minutes for a decade and a half. That is not national security. It is a regime demonstrating to everyone watching that identity itself can be the charge.