第75案 | 安彦魁Case 75 | An Yankui
太原郇城归正教会传道人安彦魁，2018年因成都六四祷告守夜与联署牧者声明被盯上；2020年1月持中国护照与马来西亚签证、经正规海关赴吉隆坡参加基督教大会，一年半后被以「偷越国（边）境」刑事拘留，2022年11月3日被汾阳市人民法院判处该罪最高刑一年、罚金五千元，2023年二审以圣经为「新证据」上诉被驳回。其妻姚聪娅被处延期执行的行政拘留，恰在他开庭前一天被启动。2025年、2026年，他又两次因主日聚会与「组织非法宗教活动」被拘留十五日。An Yankui, minister of Taiyuan’s Xuncheng Reformed Church, came to the authorities’ attention in 2018 at a Chengdu prayer vigil for the Tiananmen victims and as an early signatory of the national pastors’ declaration. In January 2020 he travelled to a Christian conference in Kuala Lumpur on a Chinese passport and a Malaysian visa, through regular customs; eighteen months later he was criminally detained for “illegally crossing the national border,” and on 3 November 2022 the Fenyang City People’s Court gave him that charge’s maximum term — one year — plus a 5,000-yuan fine. His 2023 appeal, in which he entered a Bible as “new evidence,” was dismissed. His wife Yao Congya’s deferred administrative detention was activated the day before his trial. In 2025 and again in 2026 he was detained for fifteen days over Sunday worship and “organizing illegal religious activities.”
First, three facts that are most often written wrong
An Yankui’s name is routinely entangled with those of two other churches in Shanxi, and this archive begins by drawing the lines. First, he is not from Linfen and he is not a member of the Linfen Covenant Home Church. He is a minister of the Xuncheng Reformed Church in Taiyuan; he lives in Taiyuan and his church is in Taiyuan. English-language reporting renders the congregation both as Xuncheng Reformed Church and as Zion Reformed Church, and ChinaAid and International Christian Concern use the two names interchangeably in the same reports for the same Taiyuan church. Second, the case in which Pastor Li Jie, Elder Han Xiaodong and Elder Wang Qiang of the Linfen Covenant Home Church were sentenced for “fraud” on 20 June 2025 — three years and eight months for the first two men, one year and eleven months for the third — has nothing whatever to do with An Yankui. Nor does the case of the ten members of Linfen’s Golden Lampstand Church sentenced for “fraud” on the same day. Attaching Linfen’s fraud verdicts to Taiyuan’s An Yankui is the error this archive’s own assignment brief made, and it is a common error in Chinese-language relaying online; this page corrects it throughout (see the Verification Note). Third, his wife, Yao Congya, has never been sentenced for fraud. This archive searched ChinaAid, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, International Christian Concern, Voice of the Martyrs Korea and court reporting exhaustively and found no such thing. The penalty Yao Congya actually received was fifteen days of administrative detention — activated, as it happens, on the day before her husband’s trial. Only once those three lines are drawn does the true outline of this case appear: it is not a new case of 2025 at all, but a long line running from 2018 to October 2026.
An Yankui’s personal biography is, in the public record, unusually thin: no year of birth, no native place, no education, no complete account of his conversion. This archive does not fill those blanks with conjecture; what can be documented is the church and the case. He is a house-church minister in the Reformed tradition. Xuncheng Reformed Church was planted by Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church — International Christian Concern states this expressly — holds to Reformed theology, and neither registers nor joins the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement. In 2018, when Early Rain’s Pastor Wang Yi launched the joint pastors’ statement “A Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith,” signed by more than four hundred pastors across China, An Yankui was among its earliest signatories; according to ChinaAid, his father had just died at the time, and he wrote a piece titled “The Gospel Marching Towards Prison.” Fellow believers read that signature as courage. In the authorities’ files it functioned as a self-nomination: a small church planted from another city, and a minister whose name now stood on a national document, were henceforth on a list. To understand An Yankui’s case, begin with the logic of that list — the stated reasons for each of his later seizures differ, but the list never changes.
Sources: ChinaAid reporting from November 2021 to October 2026 (the church’s names, Xuncheng and Zion, used interchangeably); International Christian Concern, 7 April 2022 (the church planted by Early Rain Covenant Church; the 2018 joint declaration); Christian Solidarity Worldwide, July 2025, and the Christian Post, 3 July 2025 (the sentences of Li Jie and the others in Linfen, unrelated to this case, cited for distinction only); Bitter Winter, 23 June 2025 (the two Linfen cases sentenced on the same day).
4 June 2018: a prayer vigil in Chengdu
The earliest seizure of An Yankui that this archive can pin to an exact date happened in Chengdu, not Taiyuan. Since 2009, Early Rain Covenant Church had kept the weeks between 12 May, the anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, and 4 June as a “prayer month,” remembering both the earthquake and the Tiananmen crackdown. On 4 June 2018 the church planned a prayer vigil for the twenty-ninth anniversary of 1989. Chengdu authorities moved first, raiding the church and summoning Pastor Wang Yi and Preacher Li Yingqiang; in the course of that afternoon some seventeen Christians, including Wang Yi and his wife, four preachers, and An Yankui, were taken away by police. International Christian Concern’s report of that day names them one by one, and An Yankui’s name is on the list. The same report records that Preacher Li Yingqiang was shoved against a wall, choked and slapped during the seizure, that the church’s electricity was cut, and that a notice was posted stating that the premises were not an approved place for religious gathering. Why An Yankui was in Chengdu that day, how long he was held, and when he was released are not in the public record, and this archive does not invent them. Two things only can be established: on 4 June 2018 his name already stood on a list of people taken away for commemorating Tiananmen; and Voice of the Martyrs Korea, reporting his appeal in 2023, looked back and said the authorities had targeted him and his church since that 2018 prayer vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen massacre. This archive takes that day as its sort date, not because the treatment that day was the heaviest — it was far lighter than the later prison term — but because it is the first link in the chain: named first for a prayer, he acquired the file into which everything later was placed.
The joint declaration of September 2018 is the other face of the same logic. Initiated by Wang Yi, the statement told the authorities that house churches would hold to their faith and would not trade restrictions on their preaching for registration; more than four hundred pastors signed it with their real names. In an environment where a real name is itself a risk, a signature is a public act of self-identification, and An Yankui was among the earliest to sign. For the following two years, Xuncheng Church in Taiyuan appeared to worship undisturbed. In retrospect, his two appearances of 2018 — once on a Chengdu seizure list, once on a national signature page — had already converted a local minister into a person with a file. When the blows began to fall on him in the autumn of 2020, the officers handling him will have needed no background research: the file had been opened in 2018.
Sources: International Christian Concern, 4 June 2018 (the raid on the Tiananmen prayer vigil; some seventeen people taken, An Yankui named; Li Yingqiang beaten; power cut; the notice); International Christian Concern, 7 April 2022 (the 2018 vigil arrest recalled; the joint declaration); Voice of the Martyrs Korea, 11 April 2023 (targeted since the 2018 vigil); ChinaAid reporting on the Zhao Weikai case, 2022 (An among the earliest signatories; his father’s recent death; “The Gospel Marching Towards Prison”).
15 November 2020: armed police inside Sunday worship, a disbandment notice on the door
The 15th of November 2020 was a Sunday. At about 9 a.m., armed police burst into Taiyuan Xuncheng Reformed Church’s Sunday service and ordered it stopped. According to ChinaAid’s report of 17 November, the reason given on the spot was that worshippers were not wearing masks. An Yankui asked to speak with the officers after the service; they refused, and in the exchange one officer put him in a stranglehold while others assaulted him. An, his wife Yao Congya, and five other Christians were taken to a police station, interrogated, held until 10 p.m., and at one point transferred to an undisclosed location; the photographs and video they took on their phones are the reason the outside world knows of this raid at all. A second strand of detail comes through International Christian Concern, relayed by Light Magazine and others: the party that day included public security, ethnic and religious affairs, civil affairs and police-station personnel; the public security commander walked straight to the pulpit, confiscated the presider’s mobile phone, and demanded that co-worker Zhang Chenghao go with them. An answered, “We are in the middle of our worship; please wait until our service is over,” and on this account the team did wait; afterwards they interrogated him about whether his credentials as a preacher were state-approved and whether the gathering was registered, were dissatisfied with his answers, posted a disbandment notice from the religious affairs bureau, registered everyone’s personal information, and confiscated mobile phones, Bibles, hymnals and choir robes. The two accounts differ in detail — whether the officers waited for the service to end, and the physical assault — and this archive records them side by side rather than merging them by force. On the outcome there is no difference: that day, in official text, this church was “disbanded.” A notice went up on the door; in law the congregation ceased to exist; and its worship did not stop for a single week.
Worship after a disbandment can only move into homes. On the evening of 30 December 2020 (one ChinaAid report gives 31 December; see the Verification Note on the conflict), police came to An Yankui’s home, where he was studying the Bible with five church members, and took all six away. On his wife Yao Congya’s account, relayed by International Christian Concern through Evangelical Focus, nearly forty officials were involved; they restricted the movement of those present and confiscated choir robes and books. The five women detained with him were released one by one around midnight on New Year’s Eve; An alone was kept. The Xiaodian District branch of the Taiyuan Public Security Bureau gave him fifteen days of administrative detention and a 1,000-yuan fine for “organizing illegal religious activities,” the detention running from 31 December — which is why most reporting files the episode under that date. Six people sitting in a living room reading the Bible drew a turnout of nearly forty officers. That was the first full rehearsal of the post-disbandment normal: the smaller the gathering, the larger the response. In the six years since, that ratio has never inverted.
Sources: ChinaAid, 17 November 2020 (the armed-police raid of 15 November; the mask pretext; the stranglehold and assault; seven people held until 10 p.m.); International Christian Concern, relayed by Light Magazine (the multi-department party; the disbandment notice; confiscation of Bibles, hymnals and robes; the interrogation over credentials and registration); International Christian Concern, relayed by Evangelical Focus (the home Bible study of 30 December; nearly forty officials; the five women released at midnight); ChinaAid, 28 March 2023 and 29 September 2026 (fifteen days of administrative detention from 31 December 2020 and a 1,000-yuan fine).
The January 2020 trip to Kuala Lumpur: a one-week conference, a charge eighteen months later
What sent An Yankui to prison was neither a meeting nor a sermon, but a journey that had ended a year and a half earlier. From 28 to 31 January 2020, Kuala Lumpur hosted the “KL2020 Gospel and Culture Conference,” organized by the Chinese-Indonesian evangelist Stephen Tong, with speakers including the American pastor Tim Keller and the theologian D. A. Carson. An Yankui, Zhang Chenghao and five other co-workers of Xuncheng (Zion) Reformed Church travelled together and spent about a week in Malaysia. Every account is explicit about how the seven travelled: on passports of the People’s Republic of China issued by the Ministry of Public Security, with Malaysian visas, out and back through regular airport border-inspection channels, and through customs again on their return. No clandestine crossing, no river route, no forged document, no evaded checkpoint. In early 2020, with COVID-19 just emerging, the trip attracted no attention at all; the seven came home to their church and their families and life went on. Eighteen months later the journey was redefined: the Fenyang Public Security Bureau held that the seven had travelled on a tourist pretext while actually attending a religious conference, and that this constituted “illegally crossing the national border.” In other words, what was charged was not the manner of their crossing — the manner was entirely lawful — but the proposition that their real purpose in travelling differed from their declared reason. A plane ticket and a passport full of entry and exit stamps became, between them, the entire physical evidence in a criminal case.
The choice of charge deserves to be recorded word by word. “Illegally crossing the national border” under Article 322 of the Criminal Law was designed for clandestine border crossing and carries, where the circumstances are serious, up to one year of imprisonment, criminal detention or public surveillance, plus a fine. In the public mind it belongs with people-smugglers, stowaway boats and border footpaths. The case of An Yankui pushed the charge’s boundary to a new place: papers complete, channels regular, and criminality located solely in a purpose retrospectively found to have been “fabricated.” As relayed by ChinaAid in October 2026, the court’s reasoning was that the two men had fabricated their reasons for exiting and entering China. This archive sets out both positions plainly. The church and the families say: valid passports and visas, regular customs — where is the offence? The court said: the reason was false, therefore the crossing was illegal. The facts — the dates, the route, the documents — are disputed by no one. What is disputed is a definition: when the state may retrospectively audit the inner purpose of a journey abroad and convict on the impurity of that purpose, how much is left of the very concept of lawful exit? In his court statement An Yankui put the point more bluntly (see below), comparing himself with the monk Xuanzang: Xuanzang, he said, really did leave the country without permission; he did not — and where Xuanzang brought back scriptures of what An regards as idolatry, the Bible he carried teaches people to abandon idols and turn to the true God. The aptness of the comparison is open to argument; the legal question it identifies is not.
Sources: ChinaAid, 3 August 2022, December 2022 reporting, and 20 October 2026 (the conference, its organizer, the manner of travel, and the court’s “fabricated reasons” finding); Christianity Daily (the conference dates, 28–31 January 2020; speakers Keller and Carson; the five co-workers sentenced to six to eight months and fined up to US$475); International Christian Concern, 7 April 2022; An Yankui’s court statement as published by ChinaAid on 1 December 2022 (the Xuanzang comparison paraphrased; see the Verification Note on quotation rules).
28 July 2021: the five who were taken first — a trap at the detention-center gate
The criminal pursuit began with the co-workers, and the manner of its beginning is itself worth archiving. On the church side’s long account, published through China Partnership, the Fenyang home of co-worker Zhang Ligong was raided on 13 July 2021 and Zhang himself placed in administrative detention; family and even the state security officers involved expected him to come home when the term expired on 28 July. That day, two co-workers, Wang Runyun and Zhang Yaowen, drove to the detention center to collect him. What met them was not a release: staff “invited” the two men inside, closed the gate, and announced that they were now criminally detained on suspicion of “illegally crossing the national border.” The men who came to fetch their brother became, at the detention-center gate, his co-defendants. A third co-worker, Wang Shiqiang, was at home caring for a wife who had recently given birth (another ChinaAid report says she had just had their third child); officers telephoned him with the lie that a document required his signature, and seized him when he arrived. The fourth, the elderly Song Shoushan, a retired pastor, was guest-preaching that Sunday at a church in Wenshui and administering baptism when a telephone call asked him to come to the Xiying police station to “meet” — he went, and did not return. With Zhang Ligong himself, all five had been criminally detained by about 28 July 2021 under the one charge, and were formally arrested afterwards. After the five were taken, the authorities repeatedly pressed their families to move the church into the Three-Self system; the families, jointly relaying this to the outside, declined every time. That detail is the key corroborating evidence for the case’s motive: if the problem were truly border management, its solution would not be “join the Three-Self church.”
The five men’s case moved faster than An Yankui’s. On 28 December 2021 the Fenyang City People’s Court tried the five; lawyers and family members were admitted, and no verdict was announced in court; each of the five defendants testified to his faith during the hearing. On 7 January 2022 the same court sentenced the five for “illegally crossing the national border” to terms of six months, seven months (two men) and eight months (two men), with fines — the public reporting gives the set of figures without matching each term and fine to each man, and this archive does not guess the matching (see the Verification Note). In the course of January 2022 the five completed their terms and were released one after another; church members met them at the detention center, and Wang Runyun posted a family photograph on social media: “Dear family, we are back home safely. Thank you for your prayers.” One correction of the record is required here: a ChinaAid report of June 2022 dates the five men’s conviction to 28 December 2021, which conflicts with the sequence of a 28 December trial and a 7 January sentencing; this archive follows the internally consistent sequence and flags the conflict in the Verification Note.
Beyond the five runs a parallel line. Co-worker Zhao Weikai was arrested on 17 May 2021 — his home raided, he and his wife summoned for “proselytism” — and on 30 December 2022 he was sentenced to two years in prison and a 30,000-yuan fine for “illegally possessing materials promoting terrorism and extremism.” According to ChinaAid, Zhao’s wife is disabled and the couple have a young daughter. His case has nothing to do with the Kuala Lumpur trip, yet it belongs to the same round of disposal of Xuncheng Church: within a single year, co-workers of one small congregation were sent to prison under two mutually unrelated charges, “illegally crossing the border” and “possessing extremism materials.” The charges are interchangeable; the list is the same. That sentence has now appeared twice in this case, and it will appear a third time.
Sources: China Partnership, December 2021, the church’s account (the raid and administrative detention of 13 July; the two men seized at the detention-center gate on 28 July; the signature deception; the pastor summoned from his sermon); ChinaAid, 31 December 2021 (the trial of the five on 28 December; the families’ testimony; the repeated demands to join the Three-Self church, refused); ChinaAid, 13 January 2022, and ChinaAid prayer materials, April 2025 edition (sentencing on 7 January 2022 to six, seven, seven, eight and eight months); Christianity Daily (the five released in January 2022; Wang Runyun’s message on release); ChinaAid reporting on the Zhao Weikai case, 2022 (arrested 17 May 2021; sentenced on 30 December 2022 to two years and a 30,000-yuan fine; his wife disabled).
21 November 2021: after Sunday worship, a pried-open door
An Yankui’s own turn came on 21 November 2021, another Sunday. After worship, he and Zhang Chenghao each went home, where police were already waiting outside — or inside — their doors. On Yao Congya’s account, the couple were expecting guests for lunch; they came home to find a large group of people already in their home, some in police uniform. Yao asked why the officers had pried open the door and entered; none of them produced identification, and one officer answered that their uniforms were their ID. Six or seven uniformed personnel then escorted Yao Congya and An Yankui out of the house together, and all of the family’s electronic products and some books were carried away. The scene at Zhang Chenghao’s home was nearly identical. Zhang and Guo Juan had married on 4 October 2021; that day the young couple had invited another couple to their home, the police were waiting outside, and after a search they took Zhang to the Wucheng police station, confiscating all electronic devices, flash drives, books and personal computers without providing any list of seized property. Guo Juan’s own phone was also confiscated; she learned what had happened to her husband only when his detention notice arrived. Both wives were subsequently summoned, and both homes had been raided. ChinaAid’s January 2022 report records that the wives’ confiscated phones, computers and other personal belongings had, to that date, never been returned.
The paper timeline runs as follows. The couple were taken on 21 November; the family received no formal notification for more than twenty-four hours. The Fenyang Public Security Bureau’s criminal detention notice is dated 22 November and states that, under Article 82 of the Criminal Procedure Law, An Yankui was criminally detained on 22 November on suspicion of “illegally crossing the national border” and was held at the Fangshan County Detention Center; whether Yao Congya received the notice on 22 or on 24 November is reported both ways (see the Verification Note). Zhang Chenghao was initially held at the Xiaoyi City Detention Center. In late November, Yao went with a lawyer to the Fenyang Public Security Bureau to request a visit, and there met Officer Deng, the man who had arrested her husband nine days earlier. The lawyer’s request to learn about the case was refused on the ground that it was still under investigation. Yao asked for the return of the phones and computers taken in the raid; Officer Deng said nothing could be returned until the investigation was complete. He apologized to her for the prying open of the door, but would not say whether it had been legal. As she left, Officer Deng warned her not to attend unapproved house churches any more, and to go instead to a government-approved Three-Self church; Yao Congya answered that the Chinese people should have freedom of religion. The lawyers’ applications for visits met a blunter wall: they were told that Zhang Chenghao’s case involved national security and state secrets, and the unit in charge issued a letter prohibiting all meetings. A case about passports and an overseas conference had been classified, at the investigation stage, as a state-secrets case — and that classification then served for seven months as the universal answer to every request for access.
At 10 a.m. on 28 December 2021, with the approval of Department 2 of the Fenyang City People’s Procuratorate (approval reference [2021] No. Z14), the Fenyang Public Security Bureau executed the formal arrest; the arrest notice gives An Yankui’s place of custody as the Xiaoyi City Detention Center. That same day, across town, the five co-workers were standing trial in the Fenyang court. After the arrest, visits remained impossible: Yao Congya and the lawyer went to the Xiaoyi Detention Center to deliver daily necessities and were refused on pandemic grounds. Only in late June 2022, seven months after the arrest, was the lawyer allowed to meet An Yankui for the first time. Yao relayed the lawyer’s report: An was in good spirits, but worried about the sisters of the church and his family, because inside he received no news at all. By then the case had been handed to the court, and the charge was still the same one: a man had left the country by entirely lawful means, and a year and a half later was charged with having sneaked across its border.
Sources: ChinaAid, November 2021, 1 December 2021, 6 January 2022 and 27 June 2022 (the pried door and “our uniforms are our ID”; the seizure lists; the detention notice dated 22 November and the Fangshan County Detention Center; the exchanges with Officer Deng; the arrest notice of 28 December; the first lawyer’s visit after seven months); Believers Portal, relaying the text of the detention notice published by ChinaAid (criminal detention on 22 November); ChinaAid, December 2021 (Zhang Chenghao’s recent marriage; Wucheng police station; property confiscated without a list; visits prohibited on national-security and state-secrets grounds).
3 April 2022: the husbands in prison, the wives in restraint chairs
While An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao were in custody, the church did not disperse, so the pressure moved to those who remained. The 3rd of April 2022 was a Sunday. Xuncheng (Zion) Reformed Church was meeting in the restaurant of a Home Inn hotel on South Inner Ring Street in Taiyuan’s Yingze District when police broke in, ostensibly on pandemic-prevention grounds, and took away seven Christians, among them Yao Congya and Guo Juan. On ChinaAid’s detailed account, the seven were taken in handcuffs to a holding room; two male Christians were handcuffed to stakes fixed in the ground, and three female Christians were fastened into interrogation restraint chairs; the whole group refused to sign a guarantee that they would never again attend a gathering of Xuncheng Reformed Church. The police imposed on each of them fifteen days of administrative detention and a 500-yuan fine, but because of the pandemic the detentions could not be executed; they were deferred, the fines paid on the spot, phones confiscated, and the seven released between midnight and 5 a.m. That single deferred detention decision then hung on the wall like a knife, to be taken down at the moment of greatest need: four months later, on the day before An Yankui’s trial, it was Yao Congya’s turn; more than ten months after that, it was the turn of another pastoral couple from the same gathering; and more than two years later, in September 2024, an ordinary woman member of the congregation (unnamed here under this archive’s rule) was made to serve the same fifteen days for the same 3 April 2022 gathering, from 23 September to 8 October 2024. The Administrative Penalty Decision she received describes that Sunday morning in full: at about 8 a.m. on 3 April 2022 she and some twenty others had illegally gathered in the restaurant in the name of an unregistered social organization, continuing to organize activities under its name after it had been banned; under Article 54(1)(1) of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law, fifteen days and 500 yuan. One gathering, one penalty, executed in instalments across two and a half years: that is the true function of the deferred detention as an instrument of control. What it punishes is not that one morning in 2022; it punishes every later moment at which someone might wish to attend a trial, attend a service, or bear witness.
This section carries the last of the corrections owed on Yao Congya. Her relation to this case is not a “fraud” sentence from nowhere — fraud is Linfen’s charge, not Taiyuan’s. Her relation to the case is this: while her husband was held incommunicado on a state-secrets rationale, she went again and again to detention centers with clothes and applications; while he was in prison, she sat in a restraint chair in a restaurant raid and refused to sign the undertaking to stop gathering; and at 11:40 on the morning before his trial, officers of the Yingze District police took her away “for questioning” and told her that April’s detention would be executed from that day. The choice of timing conceals nothing. ChinaAid’s report states the judgment outright: executing the detention one day before the trial was clearly intended to prevent Yao Congya from attending her husband’s hearing. This archive adopts that judgment and records it as part of the factual chain: the decision was written in April, its execution was scheduled for 4 August, and the only event that explains that date is the trial fixed for 9 a.m. on 5 August.
Sources: ChinaAid, 9 June 2023 (the restaurant gathering of 3 April 2022; the seven seized; the ground stakes and restraint chairs; the refusal to sign; fifteen days and 500 yuan deferred on pandemic grounds; execution against Yao Congya on 4 August); ChinaAid, 26 September 2024 (the ordinary member made to serve the same penalty from 23 September to 8 October 2024; the text of the penalty decision; Article 54 of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law); ChinaAid, 9 August 2022 (Guo Juan taken away after the trial to serve the same deferred detention).
The trial of 5 August 2022, and the verdict of 3 November
On the morning of 5 August 2022 the Fenyang City People’s Court tried An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao. The only family members able to attend were An Yankui’s son (An Xiongwei, in romanization in the English sources) and Zhang Chenghao’s wife, Guo Juan — Yao Congya had been taken into detention the day before. Those present observed that An looked healthy, while Zhang had visibly lost weight. In court, the two defence lawyers raised two procedural objections: the Fenyang court had no jurisdiction over the case, and the presiding judge was biased. They asked the court to withdraw the case; the presiding judge adjourned the hearing to deal with the lawyers’ complaint and application, with no date fixed for resumption. After the hearing, An’s son, Guo Juan and several Christians had lunch in a restaurant, when a large group of police suddenly rushed in and took Guo Juan away — on the same ground as Yao Congya the day before: execution of the deferred 3 April detention. Both defendants’ wives were now in detention, and both families’ places in the public gallery were empty. The public record contains no date for any resumed hearing after 5 August 2022: the verdict emerged from subsequent proceedings of which no public account exists, and this archive records that gap as such.
The verdict date is 3 November 2022. The Fenyang City People’s Court sentenced An Yankui, for “illegally crossing the national border,” to one year in prison and a 5,000-yuan fine, and Zhang Chenghao to one year and a 4,000-yuan fine. One year is the statutory maximum under Article 322. But the two wives were not informed of their husbands’ verdicts until 7 November: ChinaAid’s 9 November report is dated by the day the wives received the verdict, while the USCIRF case file records the sentencing date of 3 November. The two do not conflict; between them lie four days of information blockade. On 21 November 2022, exactly one year after they were taken, the two men were released and went home. Most ChinaAid reporting describes the release as completion of the sentence; one ChinaAid report of June 2023, however, says the Fenyang court that day “approved release on bail” for the two men — wording in conflict with “term completed.” This archive’s reading is that, their appeal being undecided, the men were procedurally on bail after release (at the second-instance hearing in 2023 a bailiff initially seated An as a detained defendant, then discovered he was on bail and moved him to a normal seat — see the next section); the release itself fell on the day the term expired, and the two formulations describe the substance and the procedure of the same event. On the fact itself — home on 21 November 2022 — every source agrees.
During the year inside, An Yankui wrote five works the church calls his prison hymns, the titles of which survive: “Verses in Prison,” “West of the Mountain,” “Beloved Wife of My Life,” “Man without Faith” and “Jesus’ Heel,” translated and published by ChinaAid. The piece written in July describes prison life in his own words: tasteless food, a view of the sky from inside four walls, days counted on the fingers, sixty per cent of his hair turned grey. These are his own writings and are recorded here as his account. A second bodily datum comes from a ChinaAid photograph caption stating that An and Zhang lost twenty-two pounds during their imprisonment; that figure rests on that single caption, with no second source, and is marked unverified. The one weight loss corroborated by an eyewitness is Zhang Chenghao’s: at the trial on 5 August, those present saw that he had clearly grown thinner.
Sources: ChinaAid, 9 August 2022 (the trial of 5 August; the jurisdiction and bias objections; the adjournment; Guo Juan seized in the restaurant after the trial; the son’s attendance and observations); ChinaAid, 9 November 2022 and late November 2022 (the wives informed on 7 November; the one-year terms and fines; the five prison hymns); the USCIRF case file on An Yankui (sentencing date 3 November 2022; a one-year term; detention date 21 November 2021); ChinaAid, 9 June 2023 (the “released on bail” wording, in conflict with the completion accounts); ChinaAid, 1 December 2022 (the photograph caption reporting a twenty-two-pound weight loss, unverified).
What he said in court: a case within a case
The heaviest text An Yankui left to the archive is his court statement. ChinaAid published its English translation, with commentary, on 1 December 2022 under the title “‘I implore you to fear God’: An Yankui’s statement in court.” As relayed there, the statement runs on three levels. First, characterization: he called his own case a case within a case — on the surface a criminal matter of illegal border crossing, inside it a religious case — and said he had asked the officers handling his case many times why they would not say plainly that they meant to suppress and persecute the church, instead of fabricating charges. Second, the comparison: he set himself beside the Tang-dynasty monk Xuanzang, saying Xuanzang was the true unauthorized traveller, whereas he had travelled on lawful documents; Xuanzang returned bearing scriptures of what An regards as idolatry, while the Bible teaches people to abandon idols and return to the true God. Third, the exhortation: he implored the presiding judge and the prosecutor to fear God, to look up at the stars and to judge righteously, saying that even if the day’s judgment was unfair, the judgment of history exceeds the judgment of today, and the eternal judgment exceeds the judgment of history; citing “blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,” he held that if he suffered, he suffered for keeping the faith and the truth, not for any crime. This archive renders all of this in paraphrase, with no long quotation (see the Verification Note on quotation rules). What needs recording is the statement’s afterlife: Elder Li Yingqiang of Early Rain Covenant Church read it and answered with a short poem of his own, summarizing An’s passage as small trials at the police station, torments in the detention center, the prison become a monastery, and the court become a mission field. That poem’s existence shows that An’s statement circulated inside the church network as a testimony text; its audience was never only the few men in that courtroom.
At the first-instance trial the prosecutor asked him whether he would plead guilty. His answer, by his own later account in a prayer letter, was a question in return: I think it is you who should plead guilty — do you know that you are committing a crime? That exchange rests on An Yankui’s own account, with no trial transcript available to check it, and is recorded here as his account. Even confining ourselves to the verifiable statement, the structure of the trial is clear enough: on one side, a prosecution that wrote a journey’s purpose into a charge sheet; on the other, a defendant who treated the court as a pulpit. For a preacher, what he did in that courtroom and what he does on a Sunday are the same act. To the organs handling him, that is presumably the problem: they could sentence his travel; they could not sentence his speaking.
Sources: ChinaAid, 1 December 2022 (the court statement in translation with commentary; the “case within a case”; the Xuanzang comparison; the plea that the judge fear God; Li Yingqiang’s answering poem); ChinaAid, 28 March 2023 (the prosecutor’s question about a guilty plea and An’s retort, from his own prayer-letter account).
March 2023: an appeal whose “new evidence” was a Bible
After their release, An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao appealed. On 1 March 2023 the Lüliang Intermediate People’s Court heard the second instance in secret session, with Judge Liu Huiping presiding; the other two judges named on the verdict document did not attend, according to ChinaAid. The hearing opened with a telling detail: a bailiff seated An Yankui in a cage-like chair in the middle of the room; he protested at first, then submitted and sat. After the defence had laid out its evidence, the bailiff realized that An was a man on bail, and moved him to his proper seat. That detail independently corroborates the conflict noted in the previous section: after his release, An was indeed, procedurally, on bail. Asked his occupation by the presiding judge, he answered that he was a pastor. Judge Liu responded: “So you are jobless, is that correct?” An then submitted his “new evidence” — a Bible. He hoped to show the court, from the maps of the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys printed in it, that Christian leaders have travelled across borders since the beginning as an essential part of their ministry, and that his own journey on a tourist visa with his co-workers to an evangelical conference was travel in the same sense. The judge found the request unusual and asked him to confirm that he really intended to submit the Bible as evidence. An said it was an “invisible glory,” and that he would be glad to give the Bible to the judge as a gift. Afterwards he said he had never expected to win: what mattered to him was the process — testifying to God’s Kingdom in the courtroom.
On 15 March 2023 the Lüliang Intermediate People’s Court ruled: appeal dismissed, original verdict upheld. Voice of the Martyrs Korea reported the same scene on 11 April 2023, quoting its representative: Paul, every time he stood in court, defended the gospel rather than himself; An likewise used his appeal as an occasion of witness to those in authority. With that, the criminal procedure of the Kuala Lumpur journey was exhausted: one entirely documented journey abroad, a maximum first-instance term of one year, and affirmation on appeal. Both defendants had long since served their time, so the outcome no longer touched their personal liberty — which was exactly An’s own point: the outcome was not what he was after. With an appeal he could not win, he handed the court that judged him a Bible. The court accepted the procedure and returned the appeal. Whether that exchange was “worth it” is outside this archive’s judgment; the archive records only that this is, in the public record, a rare Chinese case in which a defendant entered a Bible as appellate evidence.
Sources: ChinaAid, 28 March 2023 (the secret second-instance hearing of 1 March; presiding judge Liu Huiping; the cage-like chair and the bail seat; the “pastor — so, jobless” exchange; the Bible as new evidence; the ruling of 15 March dismissing the appeal and upholding the verdict); Voice of the Martyrs Korea, 11 April 2023 (the appeal rejected; Paul’s journey maps; the Bible offered to the judge).
The family page: Yao Congya, Guo Juan, and two raided homes
It is this archive’s fixed practice to set out, person by person, what the family bore. Yao Congya: on 21 November 2021 she lived through the prying open of her door and the raid, was escorted out of her home together with her husband, and saw the family’s phones, computers and books carried away, still unreturned months later. In late November she argued her case at the Fenyang Public Security Bureau and was told to stop attending house churches and go to a Three-Self church instead. For the next seven months she went again and again to detention centers with the lawyer, with clothes and applications for a visit, and was refused every time, the reason shifting from the pandemic to state secrets. In late November 2021 she sent out a prayer request explaining that her husband had travelled on a Chinese passport and a lawful visa for at most a week, and warning other Christians to use great caution in travelling abroad, lest they be charged with illegally crossing the border. On 3 April 2022 she was handcuffed and fastened into a restraint chair at the restaurant gathering, and given the deferred fifteen-day detention; on 4 August that detention was activated, and on the day of her husband’s trial she was in a detention cell. Guo Juan: married on 4 October 2021; a little over a month later her husband was arrested, her new home raided, her phone confiscated, and she waited for a detention notice to learn where her husband was. On 5 August 2022 she was the only wife of the two families inside the courtroom; after the hearing, eating with companions in a restaurant, she was seized on the spot by a large group of police to serve the same deferred detention. An Yankui’s son attended the trial on 5 August 2022, the family’s only witness that day. Beyond that fact, the children of the two households — their number and ages — are not in the public record, and this archive does not write them.
Two material facts belong on the family page as well. The electronic devices and books confiscated from the two homes had still not been returned at the time of the January 2022 reporting; whether they were ever returned is not in the public record. And of the two families’ livelihoods and arrangements during the year the two men were imprisoned, the public record says nothing. This archive does not fill that page with imagination. What can be established is the structure: the raid takes the means of communication; the prohibition of visits cuts off information; the deferred detention is timed to a wife’s attendance at a trial; the unreturned property prolongs the everyday suffocation. Together, those four things form a set of measures aimed not at the defendant but at the family standing behind him. Unlike the Linfen Covenant Church case, where offerings were written up as “fraud,” the collective pressure in the Taiyuan Xuncheng case needed no new charge at all: it was accomplished by the choice of dates alone. The detention had been decided in April; it simply waited for the most painful day to be executed.
Sources: ChinaAid, November 2021 to August 2022 (Yao Congya’s prayer request in full substance; her representations and the refused visits; the confiscated property unreturned); ChinaAid, 1 December 2021 (Guo Juan’s marriage and the raid on her home); ChinaAid, 9 August 2022 (Guo Juan taken away after the trial; the son’s attendance).
After prison: the disposal did not end; it returned to the fifteen-day scale
On the morning of 9 June 2023, another pastoral couple of the same church suddenly became unreachable. Fellow Christians searched everywhere, even reviewing the apartment complex’s surveillance footage, before learning that the police had taken the couple away — to execute, once again, the deferred administrative detention arising from the gathering of 3 April 2022. Under this archive’s rule the couple, ordinary co-workers, are not named; the structure is what matters: a penalty decision from a single day, a single gathering, was still being executed in batches fourteen months later, and, as shown above, was executed again in September 2024 against an ordinary woman member. For Xuncheng Church, 3 April 2022 was never a date in the past; it was a list that could be drawn on indefinitely, in instalments.
On Sunday 12 October 2025 police raided Xuncheng Reformed Church’s Sunday worship again. Eleven church members, An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao among them, were taken away, all given fifteen days of administrative detention, and released on 28 October. It was, nearly three years after the two men completed their prison terms, the same act — Sunday worship — measured out in the same fifteen-day unit. No detailed public account of that raid’s scene exists (the departments attending, their numbers, property confiscated), and this archive does not fill the gap with the details of 2020 or 2022. What ChinaAid’s October 2026 reporting establishes retrospectively is only this: eleven people, a Sunday, fifteen days, release on 28 October. Then, at 10:30 on the morning of 29 September 2026, officers of the Taiyuan Municipal Public Security Bureau came to An Yankui’s home and took him away for questioning on suspicion of “organizing illegal religious activities.” The church’s account and a police document were reviewed by ChinaAid: a summons issued by the Taiyuan Municipal Public Security Bureau names An, states the suspicion, directs him to report to the bureau’s law-enforcement case-handling center, and cites Article 96 of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law — a provision about the procedure of summons. At the moment he was taken, the nature and length of his detention were unclear; the following day, his family was notified that it was fifteen days of administrative detention (this link rests on a secondary relay channel — see the Verification Note). On 14 October 2026 An Yankui came home; ChinaAid reported on 20 October that he had returned home to recuperate. That is the latest verifiable status as of this archive’s publication on 24 October 2026: at home, his church still meeting, and no public sign whatsoever that control over him has been lifted.
Line up the measures from 2020 to 2026 in a single column and their shape is unmistakable: fifteen days (December 2020); a one-year prison term (2021–2022); the fifteen-day decisions executed in batches (2022–2024, falling on his wife and his co-workers); fifteen days (October 2025); fifteen days (September 2026). Having used the heavy instrument once, the machine returned to the tool it handles most easily — a detention that needs no procuratorate and no court, never exceeds fifteen days at a time, and can be repeated without limit. For An Yankui, walking out of the detention center on 21 November 2022 was not the end of the story, nor even its midpoint: he has since been taken at least twice more, and the reason written on the summons has been the same line of text both times — organizing illegal religious activities.
Sources: ChinaAid, 9 June 2023 (the pastoral couple of the same church made to serve the deferred detention from the 3 April 2022 gathering); ChinaAid, 20 October 2026 (the eleven detained on 12 October 2025 and released on 28 October; home to recuperate on 14 October 2026); ChinaAid, 29 September 2026 (taken from his home at 10:30 on 29 September; the summons and Article 96 of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law); International Christian Concern, 2 October 2026 (the same seizure; the police record); CPAD News, relaying a secondary account (the family notified on 30 September of fifteen days of administrative detention, unverified).
Not Linfen: a necessary disambiguation
This archive devotes a whole section to disambiguation because the confusion has actually happened — including in this page’s assignment brief. Shanxi has seen at least three major church cases in recent years, all in the province’s centre and south, their dates interleaved, and they are easily cross-wired. The first is the Linfen Golden Lampstand Church case: that church was raided as early as 2009 and its building demolished in 2018; from August 2021 a succession of co-workers were arrested for “fraud,” and on 20 June 2025 ten members were sentenced for fraud, the heaviest term being nine years and two months; its founding pastor and his wife were handled in a separated case. The second is the Linfen Covenant Home Church case: a congregation holding the Westminster Confession under Presbyterian government, whose Pastor Li Jie and Elder Han Xiaodong were seized during a parent-and-child camp in August 2022, whose Elder Wang Qiang was arrested that November, and which was “liquidated” on 16 November 2022. Prosecutors charged the three with forming a “criminal clique” and treating the church’s offerings as “illegal income”; they were indicted for fraud in June 2023, tried in secret on 8 May 2025 — with Li Jie’s wife, mother and children barred from the court and removed by force — and sentenced on 20 June 2025: Li Jie and Han Xiaodong to three years and eight months each, Wang Qiang to one year and eleven months, his term deemed served. Defence lawyers had been told that if they cooperated with the court’s security demands, surrendering phones and laptops, the sentences would not exceed three years; the verdicts exceeded the assurance. The third case is this page’s: Taiyuan Xuncheng Reformed Church — charged with illegal border crossing and organizing illegal religious activities, with no fraud count and no allegation about offerings, located in Taiyuan, and dating from 2021–2022. The three cases share exactly two things: none of the churches registers or joins the Three-Self system, and in each the proceedings were worked on procedurally — in Linfen through control of the courtroom and a broken sentencing assurance, in Taiyuan through prohibited visits and the timing of a detention’s execution. Beyond that, the people, the churches, the charges and the years are all different, and they must never be interchanged in citation. The man in this page’s title answers for the Taiyuan case alone.
Sources: Christian Solidarity Worldwide, July 2025, and the Christian Post, 3 July 2025 (the three Linfen Covenant sentences; the trial of 8 May 2025; the family removed; the three-year assurance given to lawyers); Bitter Winter, June 2025 (the Covenant church’s liquidation in 2022; the ten Golden Lampstand sentences of 20 June 2025); ChinaAid statement of 20 June 2025 on the Golden Lampstand case.
The international record: this time, the database has his name
Unlike some cases previously recorded by this archive, An Yankui has left a complete cell in the international record. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s database of religious prisoners of conscience (FoRB Victims) carries his personal entry: name An Yankui, religion Christian–Protestant, religious leader, date of detainment 21 November 2021, date of sentencing 3 November 2022, sentence one year’s imprisonment, nature of charges in the illegal-migration and entry/exit category, grounds of persecution given as religious activity, religious belief, religious leadership and travel abroad, current status released, with a related case entry for Zhang Chenghao. Britain’s Christian Solidarity Worldwide published within three days of his arrest, on 24 November 2021; its Founder President Mervyn Thomas called in that statement for an end to the harassment and arrest of members of the Early Rain, Qingcaodi and Xuncheng churches. International Christian Concern has recorded the case from its report of the very day of the 2018 Tiananmen vigil: its profile of 7 April 2022 called the charge against him fabricated and noted his signing of joint letters calling on Beijing to respect religious freedom; it reported his latest seizure again on 2 October 2026. Voice of the Martyrs Korea devoted a special report to his appeal in April 2023. At the level of the U.S. Congress, his case entered the testimony record: Bob Fu’s written testimony to the Global Human Rights Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a section on new charges as a trend of 2022, names one by one the five co-workers of Shanxi’s Zion Reformed Church and An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao — charged with secretly crossing the national border for lawfully travelling abroad to a gospel conference — and records co-worker Zhao Weikai’s two-year term in the same passage. Open Doors’ 2023 China country dossier likewise logs the detention of 21 November 2021 by date. This archive also checked the Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s Political Prisoner Database and found, in the public materials cited here, no standalone entry under his name; that is written as “not found,” not as a claim that no entry exists anywhere in that database. The shape of the international record matches the shape of the case: the reporting networks captured the whole course, the official database captured the sentence, and the judicial system that imposed the sentence has never published a complete judgment.
Sources: The USCIRF FoRB Victims database entry for An Yankui (checked by this archive in October 2026); Christian Solidarity Worldwide press release, 24 November 2021; International Christian Concern, 4 June 2018, 7 April 2022 and 2 October 2026; Voice of the Martyrs Korea, 11 April 2023; Bob Fu, written testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights (the “illegally crossing the border” passage naming the defendants); Open Doors, Full Country Dossier: China 2023 (the entry for 21 November 2021).
Full Timeline
4 June 2018: An Yankui is taken away by police at Early Rain Covenant Church’s Tiananmen prayer vigil in Chengdu (named in ICC’s same-day report; the length of that detention and his release are not in the public record). This archive’s sort date.
About September 2018: An Yankui is among the earliest signatories of the pastors’ joint “Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith” initiated by Wang Yi (signed by more than four hundred pastors nationwide; his father had recently died).
28–31 January 2020: An Yankui, Zhang Chenghao and five co-workers travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the KL2020 Gospel and Culture Conference (organized by Stephen Tong; speakers including Keller and Carson), entering and exiting on Chinese passports and Malaysian visas through regular customs, staying about a week.
15 November 2020: Taiyuan Xuncheng Reformed Church’s Sunday worship is raided by armed police and a multi-department party; An Yankui, his wife and five Christians are taken and interrogated until 10 p.m.; the church receives a disbandment notice, and Bibles, hymnals, choir robes and phones are confiscated (accounts differ in detail — see the main text).
Evening of 30 December 2020 (one report gives 31 December): An Yankui is seized at a Bible study in his home with five church members by nearly forty officials; the five women are released around midnight; the Xiaodian branch of the Taiyuan Public Security Bureau gives An fifteen days of administrative detention and a 1,000-yuan fine for “organizing illegal religious activities,” running from 31 December.
17 May 2021: Co-worker Zhao Weikai is arrested (home raided; he and his wife summoned); his case develops separately (see 30 December 2022).
13 July 2021: Fenyang co-worker Zhang Ligong’s home is raided and he is administratively detained. 28 July: on the day the term expires, Wang Runyun and Zhang Yaowen, who have come to the detention center to collect him, are converted on the spot into criminal detainees; Wang Shiqiang is lured out by a false signature request and seized; Song Shoushan is summoned from his guest sermon in Wenshui and seized. All five are criminally detained on suspicion of “illegally crossing the national border” and later formally arrested; the authorities repeatedly press the families to move the church into the Three-Self system, and are refused.
4 October 2021: Zhang Chenghao marries Guo Juan.
21 November 2021 (Sunday): After worship, An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao are taken from their homes by the Fenyang Public Security Bureau; both homes are raided, electronic devices and books confiscated without lists; the An family’s door has been pried open and no officer produces identification. Yao Congya issues a prayer request explaining that her husband travelled on lawful documents.
22 November 2021: The Fenyang Public Security Bureau’s criminal detention notice is dated this day, placing An Yankui in the Fangshan County Detention Center (Yao Congya’s receipt of the notice is also reported as 24 November). Late November: Yao and the lawyer’s request for a visit at the Fenyang bureau is refused, and she is told to attend a Three-Self church instead; the lawyers are told the case involves national security and state secrets and that meetings are prohibited.
28 December 2021: With the Fenyang City People’s Procuratorate’s approval, An Yankui is formally arrested at 10 a.m. and held at the Xiaoyi City Detention Center; the same day, the five co-workers are tried in the Fenyang City People’s Court (no verdict in court).
7 January 2022: The five co-workers are sentenced by the Fenyang City People’s Court for “illegally crossing the national border” to six months, seven months (two men) and eight months (two men), with fines; they are released in the course of January on completion of their terms.
3 April 2022: Seven members of Xuncheng Church, including Yao Congya and Guo Juan, are seized at a restaurant gathering in Taiyuan; several are handcuffed and fastened into restraint chairs; all refuse to sign an undertaking not to gather again; each is given fifteen days of administrative detention and a 500-yuan fine, execution deferred because of the pandemic.
Late June 2022: Seven months after the arrest, the lawyer is permitted to meet An Yankui for the first time; the case has been transferred to the court.
About 11:40 a.m., 4 August 2022: Yingze District police in Taiyuan take Yao Congya away “for questioning” and activate her deferred fifteen-day detention from 3 April — the day before her husband’s trial.
Morning of 5 August 2022: The Fenyang City People’s Court tries An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao; An’s son and Guo Juan attend; the defence raises jurisdiction and judicial-bias objections and the hearing is adjourned; after the hearing, Guo Juan is seized by police in a restaurant to serve the same deferred detention. Subsequent hearing arrangements are not in the public record.
3 November 2022: The Fenyang City People’s Court delivers its verdict: An Yankui, one year in prison and a 5,000-yuan fine; Zhang Chenghao, one year and a 4,000-yuan fine. 7 November: the two wives are finally informed of the verdicts.
21 November 2022: An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao are released and go home (most reports say on completion of the term; one report says released on bail with the court’s approval — see the Verification Note). In prison An writes five hymns.
1 December 2022: ChinaAid publishes An Yankui’s court statement (“I implore you to fear God”). 30 December 2022: Co-worker Zhao Weikai is sentenced to two years in prison and a 30,000-yuan fine for “illegally possessing materials promoting terrorism and extremism.”
1 March 2023: The Lüliang Intermediate People’s Court hears the second instance in secret, Judge Liu Huiping presiding; An Yankui submits a Bible to the court as “new evidence” and offers it to the judge as a gift. 15 March 2023: the appeal is dismissed and the original verdict upheld.
9 June 2023: Another pastoral couple of the same church is taken away to serve the deferred administrative detention from the 3 April 2022 gathering (deferred for over fourteen months).
23 September to 8 October 2024: An ordinary member who attended the 3 April 2022 gathering is made to serve the same penalty decision: fifteen days of administrative detention and a 500-yuan fine (the decision cites Article 54 of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law).
12 October 2025 (Sunday): Xuncheng Church’s worship is raided again; eleven members including An Yankui and Zhang Chenghao are administratively detained for fifteen days and released on 28 October.
10:30 a.m., 29 September 2026: Taiyuan Municipal Public Security Bureau officers take An Yankui from his home for questioning on suspicion of “organizing illegal religious activities”; the summons cites Article 96 of the Public Security Administration Punishments Law; the next day his family is notified of fifteen days of administrative detention (secondary channel). 14 October 2026: An Yankui returns home. 20 October 2026: ChinaAid reports that he is home recuperating.
October 2026 (at publication): No public record exists of the authorities lifting their control over An Yankui or his church; the congregation still refuses registration and the Three-Self system, and its worship continues. Latest verifiable status: living at home in Taiyuan, continuing his ministry, under continuing control.
Verification Note
The factual spine of this page is ChinaAid’s item-by-item case reporting from 2018 to 2026, and its nature must be stated plainly: ChinaAid is a religious-freedom advocacy organization with a declared position, and its reporting rests on accounts from the families (Yao Congya and Guo Juan), church co-workers and defence lawyers, together with the texts of detention and arrest notices — a party-side source. This archive cross-checked it item by item against the USCIRF case file, Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s press release, International Christian Concern’s same-day and later reporting, Voice of the Martyrs Korea, China Partnership’s church account, Christianity Daily, and Bob Fu’s written congressional testimony. The key nodes — detention on 21 November 2021, formal arrest on 28 December 2021, the trial of 5 August 2022, the one-year sentence of 3 November 2022, the affirmation on appeal of 15 March 2023, and the administrative detentions of October 2025 and September 2026 — are each supported by at least two source chains. Evidence grading: facts backed by a notice text or by multiple independent relays are treated as second-grade reliable records; anything resting on a single source chain is marked unverified, including the twenty-two-pound weight loss in custody (a ChinaAid photograph caption only), the notification to the family on 30 September 2026 of the fifteen-day detention (a secondary relay channel only), and An Yankui’s retort to the prosecutor about a guilty plea (his own prayer-letter account). His year of birth, native place, education, and the number of his children (beyond his son’s attendance at the trial on 5 August 2022) are not in the public record, and this archive does not compute or invent them. Ordinary members of the congregation are anonymized under this archive’s rule: neither the pastoral couple detained in June 2023 nor the woman member made to serve detention in 2024 is named.
Five corrections to the assignment brief are required, each of which changes the nature of the case. First, the church: the brief names An Yankui as pastor of the “Linfen Covenant Home Church.” That is wrong. Every source identifies him as a minister of Taiyuan’s Xuncheng Reformed Church, also rendered Zion Reformed Church; the Linfen Covenant Home Church is a different congregation, whose pastor is Li Jie. Second, the detention date: the brief assigns 28 July 2021 to An Yankui. That is wrong. The people criminally detained on 28 July 2021 were the five co-workers, two of them seized at the detention-center gate where they had come to collect a colleague; An Yankui himself was detained on 21 November 2021. Third, the sentence: the brief states “sentenced in January 2025.” That is wrong and supported by no source. An Yankui’s verdict was delivered by the Fenyang City People’s Court on 3 November 2022: one year in prison and a 5,000-yuan fine. What entered judgment in 2025 were the cases of the Linfen Covenant Home Church (20 June 2025) and others unconnected with him, from which the brief evidently cross-wired its facts. Fourth, the wife: the brief states that Yao Congya was “sentenced separately in a fraud case.” This archive’s exhaustive search found no such record, and the claim is expressly not adopted. Yao Congya’s actual record is fifteen days of administrative detention and a 500-yuan fine imposed on 3 April 2022, execution deferred, and activated on 4 August 2022 — the day before her husband’s trial. The fraud charge belongs to the two Linfen cases, Golden Lampstand and Covenant Home. Fifth, the co-defendant’s name: the brief writes the Chinese characters as 張乘豪; English-language sources give only the romanization Zhang Chenghao, and this archive could not independently verify the Chinese characters from any accessible source; the page follows the brief’s characters provisionally and flags them here as unverified, and readers citing the name should rely on the judgment document or a family-published text.
Six conflicts among the sources are flagged individually. First, the date of the December 2020 home Bible study seizure: one ChinaAid report gives the evening of 30 December, another the evening of 31 December, and most sources date the detention and fine to 31 December; the main text accordingly reads “seized on the evening of 30 December, detention running from 31 December,” with the conflict preserved here. Second, the detention notice: the notice is dated 22 November 2021, while Yao Congya’s receipt of it is reported both as 22 November and as 24 November; the date of the seizure itself is 21 November in every source. Third, the place of custody: the earliest reports put An Yankui in the Fangshan County Detention Center and Zhang Chenghao in the Xiaoyi City Detention Center, while the arrest notice of 28 December 2021 places An in Xiaoyi — evidently a transfer in the interim — and the main text sets the two out in chronological order. Fourth, the five co-workers’ conviction date: one ChinaAid report gives 28 December 2021, which was the trial date, while its prayer materials and another report give sentencing on 7 January 2022 with terms of six, seven, seven, eight and eight months; this archive follows the latter; which specific term and fine attaches to which of the five men is not matched in the public reporting, and this archive does not guess the matching. Fifth, the character of the release: most reports say the two men were released on 21 November 2022 on completion of their terms, while one report says they were released on bail with the Fenyang court’s approval; read together with the 2023 second-instance record that a bailiff “discovered he was on bail,” this archive interprets the event as release on the day the term expired, procedurally on bail because the appeal was pending, and preserves both formulations. Sixth, the day count of the October 2025 detention: reporting states fifteen days, a seizure on 12 October and release on 28 October, which is sixteen days by the calendar; this archive reproduces the reporting as it stands and does not silently amend it. The details of the 15 November 2020 raid (whether officers waited for the service to end; the physical assault) also differ between ChinaAid and the ICC relays, and are set out side by side in the main text. The details of the March 2023 second-instance hearing are corroborated by two source chains, ChinaAid and Voice of the Martyrs Korea.
All quotations on this page are paraphrase and summary; direct quotation from any single source is kept under fifty words. Matters for which no public record exists are flagged as such in the text and in the timeline, and are not filled in by conjecture.
Our Take
What most deserves recording in the case of An Yankui is the imagination of the charge. A citizen of a country leaves it on a passport issued by that country’s own Ministry of Public Security, on a visa issued by the destination state, queuing through a regular channel at an airport and collecting the stamps — and eighteen months later is told that the journey was called “illegally crossing the national border,” and is given that charge’s maximum sentence. The organs handling the case never at any point denied the authenticity of the documents or the channel. What they denied was the purity of his purpose in travelling. Once the object of conviction shifts from the act to the purpose, any journey abroad can be re-tried after the fact: you said tourism; the conference photographs say church. You said visiting family; the itinerary says you met a pastor. Once that door is opened, the people at risk are not only preachers, but every ordinary person who has ever taken part abroad in any religious, academic or civic activity. The question the defendant put in court — why not say plainly that you mean to suppress the church, instead of fabricating charges? — has never been answered. The fabrication is itself part of the answer: because “disbanding a church” looks ugly on a judgment, while “illegally crossing the border” looks, at least, like an ordinary criminal case.
Notice, too, the use made of that deferred detention. One restaurant gathering in April 2022 generated a single fifteen-day penalty decision, and that decision was then executed in batches over two and a half years: first against the defendant’s wife, on a date chosen to be the day before her husband’s trial; then against a co-worker couple, fourteen months later; finally against an ordinary member, nearly two and a half years on. That is not delay in law enforcement. It is a penalty deposited in a bank, to be drawn at need. Combine it with the confiscated phones and computers that were never returned, the seven months in which visits were barred in the name of state secrets, and the ninety seconds it took to declare a church non-existent by pasting up a notice — none of the components is heavy in itself: fifteen days, a thousand yuan, five thousand yuan, one year. Assembled, they have ensured that one small congregation and two families have not had a single truly settled quarter in eight years, from 2018 to 2026. This archive records the whole long line precisely because each of its segments, taken alone, is so “light” as to be easily skipped — and anyone who skips every segment will never see the line. On 14 October 2026 An Yankui walked out of a place of detention and came home once again, “home to recuperate,” as the single sentence of reporting puts it. This man has now been put inside and let out in at least five rounds; the summons for a sixth is presumably already on its way. To record that is the reason this archive exists.
Sources
ChinaAid: report of 17 November 2020; reports of November 2021, 1 December 2021 and 31 December 2021; 6 January, 13 January, 27 June, 3 August, 9 August, 9 November and 1 December 2022; 28 March and 9 June 2023; 26 September 2024; 29 September and 20 October 2026. U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, FoRB Victims Database: the individual entry for An Yankui (checked by this archive in October 2026). Christian Solidarity Worldwide: press release of 24 November 2021; July 2025 briefing on the Linfen Covenant Home Church sentences. International Christian Concern: 4 June 2018; profile of 7 April 2022; 2 October 2026; its November and December 2020 reporting as relayed by Light Magazine and Evangelical Focus. Voice of the Martyrs Korea: 11 April 2023. China Partnership: “120 Years of Hard Soil,” December 2021 (the seizure of the five co-workers). Christianity Daily: the release of the five co-workers. The Christian Post: 3 July 2025 (the Linfen Covenant sentences) and 5 October 2026 (An Yankui’s seizure). Bitter Winter: June 2025 reporting on the two Linfen cases. Bob Fu: written testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights (the passage on the “illegally crossing the border” cases). Open Doors: Full Country Dossier — China 2023. ChinaAid prayer materials, April 2025 edition (the five men’s terms and the An–Zhang verdicts in summary). CECC Political Prisoner Database: this archive’s search record of October 2026 (no standalone entry found).