第41案 | 常玮平Case 41 | Chang Weiping
陕西人权律师常玮平参加了2019年厦门聚会，又公开讲述自己在指定居所监视居住中遭受的老虎椅酷刑——2020年他再次被抓，2023年以颠覆国家政权罪获刑三年六个月。2024年刑满后，他被要求远赴海口居住，执业资格早已不存。Shaanxi rights lawyer Chang Weiping attended the December 2019 Xiamen gathering, then publicly described tiger-chair torture under residential surveillance — seized again in 2020, he was sentenced in 2023 to three and a half years for subversion. Released in 2024, he was ordered to live in distant Haikou, his licence long gone.
The Lawyer: The Cases He Took in Baoji
Chang Weiping was a human rights lawyer in Baoji, a mid-sized city in Shaanxi Province. Before he was taken away, colleagues and clients knew him as a careful, low-key practitioner whose caseload earned little money and touched, case after case, the subjects the authorities least wanted aired in a courtroom. According to profiles by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Amnesty International and other organizations, he represented clients facing discrimination on grounds of health status, including people living with HIV and hepatitis B who had been denied employment or education; he took cases involving gender and sexual-minority rights; he represented victims of forced demolition in administrative litigation; and he handled cases touching freedom of religion. These cases shared one feature. The people involved had found no remedy inside the ordinary system, so they hired a lawyer to carry their problem into courtrooms and administrative procedures. The lawyer's work itself was procedural: drafting complaints, appearing in court, filing requests for disclosure of government information, lodging appeals with the responsible departments. But precisely because those procedures dragged discrimination and forced demolition out of local obscurity and into the open, the lawyer who filed them entered the files of the security apparatus himself.
His fate cannot be understood apart from what happened to China's human rights lawyers as a group after 2015. After the nationwide crackdown of 9 July 2015, known as the 709 crackdown, large numbers of rights lawyers were disbarred, summoned, detained or imprisoned, and every lawyer who stayed in the field knew that each sensitive case carried a price measured in licences and personal freedom. Chang Weiping did not withdraw after 709. He kept taking the same kinds of cases, kept speaking publicly about rule of law and human rights, and kept in contact with civil-society advocates across the country. The two things that eventually brought him to prison were an informal gathering of friends and the decision to describe, on camera, the torture he said he had endured. Measured against the standards of any system that calls itself law-governed, neither act carries even the shadow of subverting state power. But in the logic of this case, the gathering was treated as illicit networking and the account of torture as defamation of the state, and the two together were assembled into a state-power crime. That method of characterization runs through the entire case and is the first thing this archive sets out to record.
His wife Chen Zijuan later repeated one detail in her public appeals: before he was taken away, the family lived an ordinary middle-class life, with a mortgage, a child in school, and a husband heavily invested in his family. This page records that detail not for sentiment but for contrast. A practising lawyer with a fixed address, a wife and child and a law firm was seized through the secret investigative methods reserved for state-security cases, held incommunicado for nearly a year, and his family waited six months for a notice that merely named the category of his alleged crime. Every step of that procedure was the mirror opposite of the rights Chang Weiping had spent his career trying to secure for his own clients.
First the Livelihood: Suspension, a Deregistered Firm and a Revoked Licence (2018–2020)
The pressure on Chang Weiping did not begin with an arrest. It began with the destruction of his professional status, and the sequence deserves to be recorded step by step. In October 2018 the Baoji Municipal Justice Bureau suspended his practice for three months. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Radio Free Asia, the punishment was connected to the sensitive cases he had taken, and he and his supporters regarded it as professional retaliation administered through disciplinary procedure. Before the suspension had even run its course, a heavier blow landed: on 22 November 2018 the firm where he practised, Shaanxi Ligang Law Firm, was deregistered. A lawyer without a firm cannot practise as a lawyer in China, so in practical effect this step ended his legal career in advance, and far more thoroughly than a three-month suspension. Who pressed for the deregistration and on what stated grounds was never explained in a form that could withstand questioning; this page records the result and the date, and invents no rationale for either side.
In January 2020 his lawyer's licence was formally revoked. The timing matters: the revocation came at the same moment as his first period of residential surveillance at a designated location, so the administrative track and the criminal track tightened together. Suspension first, then deregistration of the firm, then revocation of the licence: by the end of that sequence, a human rights lawyer was, in law, no longer a lawyer at all. From then on, whatever he said or did, the authorities could describe him as an unemployed person or a social agitator, and no longer had to answer the question why a practising lawyer was denied meetings and cases. This pattern — strip the status first, deal with the person afterwards — recurs throughout the post-709 cases against rights lawyers, and the Chang Weiping file is one of the most completely documented examples: every step from the October 2018 suspension to the January 2020 revocation rests on public administrative records, not on anyone's recollection.
Losing his profession did not silence him. Rights organizations record that he continued to take part in public discussion as a citizen and to meet with fellow advocates. In December 2019 he travelled to Xiamen, in Fujian Province, for an informal gathering of civil-society advocates, whose participants included Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi. By the participants' and rights organizations' later accounts, the gathering consisted of meals among friends and discussion of public affairs: no organization was founded, no programme adopted, and no violent plan of any kind existed. Yet from late 2019 into early 2020, participants in that gathering were seized one after another by police in different provinces, and the Xiamen gathering was built into a cross-provincial case. Chang Weiping was one of those caught in it. The gathering took place in December 2019, which this page takes as the starting point of the case timeline; but what actually carried him into the prison process was the second seizure, in October 2020, so the sorting date for this case is 22 October 2020. Both dates are preserved in this archive, and neither is allowed to impersonate the other.
The First Residential Surveillance: Ten Days and the Tiger Chair (January 2020)
In January 2020 Chang Weiping was taken away by police and secretly held for ten days under residential surveillance at a designated location, a measure known by its Chinese initials RSDL. RSDL exists in China's Criminal Procedure Law as a form of compulsory measure that is nominally not arrest, but in practice it is used above all in state-security cases: the detainee is held not in a detention center but in a hotel or secret facility chosen by the police, cannot meet lawyers or family, and the outside world does not even know where the person is. According to the records Amnesty International and Chinese Human Rights Defenders compiled from his own post-release account, during those ten days he was strapped to a tiger chair for prolonged periods — he later said twenty-four hours a day — interrogated repeatedly, and lost feeling in two fingers of his right hand. The tiger chair is a restraint device that fixes a person to an iron chair in a single posture for extended periods; it recurs in torture allegations by detainees across China, and the UN Committee Against Torture has for years called on China to abolish such practices.
The attribution of this section must be stated plainly. The details of the tiger chair and the numb fingers come from Chang Weiping's own account, delivered in a video he posted in October 2020, and from the records rights organizations made of that account; this site cannot send anyone into the detention site of January 2020 to verify them independently. Three surrounding facts, however, are verifiable. First, he was in fact secretly detained for ten days in January 2020 and then released: the records of multiple institutions and media outlets agree on this. Second, after that release he was neither indicted nor convicted, which means the detention produced no evidence capable of surviving a courtroom. Third, less than a week after he publicly described the torture, he was seized again and disappeared for nearly four years; that sequence rests on a complete public record. After the ten days he lived under heavy surveillance, in a state where he could be taken again at any moment. A man who had just passed through secret detention, who knew exactly what speaking again would cost, chose to tell the story anyway. That choice is the key to the video of October 2020.
Speaking the Torture Aloud: The October 2020 Video and the Seizure Six Days Later
On 16 October 2020 Chang Weiping posted a self-recorded video on YouTube describing what he said had been done to him during the January 2020 RSDL: being strapped to a tiger chair, repeated interrogation, and the loss of feeling in two fingers of his right hand. The video is short and his manner is calm, without shouting or denunciation; it resembles a witness statement more than a protest, item by item — the times, the place, the methods, the physical consequences. According to reporting by Agence France-Presse and Radio Free Asia, that video became one of the direct triggers of both the renewed police action and the international attention that followed. A human rights lawyer giving evidence about torture using his own body as the exhibit had almost no precedent in China's public sphere, for the simple reason that everyone understood the consequences.
The consequences arrived quickly. On 22 October 2020, six days after the video was posted, Chang Weiping was seized again and placed once more in RSDL. This time it was not ten days. He vanished entirely from public view: no telephone calls, no letters, no lawyer visits, and a family that did not know where he was held, how his health was, or whether he was alive. That state of complete incommunicado detention lasted nearly a year. According to the continuing records of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Amnesty International, his family and lawyers repeatedly asked the handling authorities for information and received no substantive answer. Only in April 2021 was the family formally notified that he was held on a state-power charge, initially described as suspected incitement to subvert state power; the conviction eventually entered was subversion of state power. Between the seizure of 22 October 2020 and the family's notification in April 2021, nearly six months passed. A citizen was secretly detained by the state for half a year before his family was told what category of crime he was even suspected of. Those six months cannot be passed over as a gap in this archive; they are part of the case itself.
One timing detail must be kept straight, because it is easily confused. His first detention, in January 2020, was connected in time with the seizure of other Xiamen gathering participants. His second seizure, in October 2020, followed his torture video by six days. The handling authorities have never publicly stated whether the second seizure was connected to the video, and this page makes no causal claim on their behalf. But the two dates are six days apart, and that is a matter of public record on which readers may form their own judgment. When a system moves faster against the man who reports torture than it ever moved to investigate the torture he reported, the message it sends requires no commentary from this site.
A Second Round of Alleged Torture and the First Lawyer Meeting (14 September 2021)
After nearly a year of complete isolation, Chang Weiping was allowed to meet a lawyer for the first time on 14 September 2021. What emerged from that meeting, relayed by the lawyer and his family and recorded by rights organizations, was extensive and deeply disturbing. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Amnesty International, he described a second round of abuse during the second period of RSDL: fixed to a tiger chair again, this time for six days; interrogated around the clock in relays; deprived of sleep; and suffering blood in his stool. The torture he had described from January 2020 had, on his account, been repeated after October 2020 in a longer and more severe form. The old injury to his right hand, compounded by the new ordeal, made his physical condition a standing focus of his family and of international concern from that point on. These details likewise rest on his own account as relayed through his lawyer, and this page attributes them as such at every step rather than presenting them as independently proven. One further point, however, belongs to the documentary record: Chinese Human Rights Defenders and partner organizations compiled the torture allegations in his case into formal submissions to the UN Convention Against Torture processes, so the allegations entered the UN document system rather than remaining at the level of media coverage.
Access to a lawyer is among the most basic rights in criminal procedure, yet in this case it was first granted almost a year after the seizure, and even then under strict limits, with the lawyer's room to act remaining narrow throughout. The contrast with Chang Weiping's own career needs no embellishment: the rights he had once fought to obtain for his clients were, one by one, unavailable to him. The two belated milestones of the investigation phase — the family learning the charge in April 2021, the lawyer's first meeting in September 2021 — together compose the full picture of that phase: secret detention first, notification of the charge second, a lawyer admitted last, by which point the interrogations and the process described in the torture allegations were already over. All that remained for the lawyer was to carry his client's account out to the world and to defend, in a courtroom, a case that had been assembled in secret for more than a year.
A Wife's Campaign and Departure: Chen Zijuan (2020–2022)
After the second seizure, it was his wife, Chen Zijuan, who became the public voice of the case. She had no background as an activist; at first she was simply a wife who could not reach her husband. According to Radio Free Asia and rights-group records, she spent the months after his disappearance making inquiries, hiring lawyers and filing applications with the handling authorities, and when no substantive answer came, she began to speak publicly: giving media interviews, publishing open letters, and telling the international community about the torture her husband said he had suffered twice and about a family kept entirely in the dark. Her account always returned to concrete facts: she did not know where her husband was held, she did not know the state of his health, the lawyers could not see him, and her child asked where his father had gone and she had no answer. Carried by Agence France-Presse and other international media, her campaigning made the Chang Weiping case one of the reference cases cited whenever the international community examined the condition of China's human rights lawyers in 2021 and 2022.
The price of speaking publicly soon reached her directly. Rights organizations record that she herself was summoned and pressured by police and told to stop speaking to the outside world. Under that continuing pressure, and fearing for her child's safety, Chen Zijuan left China with their son in 2022 and travelled to the United States. From that point the family's geography was fixed: the husband inside Shaanxi's detention and prison system, the wife and son on the far side of the Pacific, and between them a trial the family was forbidden to attend. She continued to speak for him from the United States through the sentencing of 2023 and the release of 2024. Her departure must be characterized accurately in this archive: it was not an immigration choice but a measure of self-protection forced on a family whose head had been secretly detained and whose spokesperson was being pressured in her turn. Even if she wished to return to care for her husband after his release, she would face the same environment of pressure, and the family's reunion has not taken place to this day.
The Secret Trial and the Verdict Announced in a Detention Center (2022–2023)
On 26 July 2022 the case was tried in secret at the Feng County People's Court in Shaanxi. Feng County is a mountainous county administered by Baoji, and the choice to try an internationally watched human rights lawyer's case in secret at county level was itself a form of arrangement. According to Amnesty International, Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Agence France-Presse, the hearing was closed, family members were blocked from attending, Chen Zijuan and the relatives could not enter the courtroom, and no public information about the proceedings or the evidence was released before or after. The full text of the indictment, the trial transcript and the full text of the judgment remain matters of no public record to this day. The outline of the prosecution case known to the outside world comes only from fragments relayed at different stages by family and lawyers: his attendance at the Xiamen gathering, his association with Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi and others, his public statements on rule of law and human rights, and the video in which he described his torture were all folded into the framework of subversion of state power. Assembling a gathering, speeches and an account of torture into the crime of subversion is the core of the conviction logic in this case, and this page records that outline as what it is — a relayed account, not a public judicial document.
Nearly another year passed between the hearing and the sentence. On 8 June 2023 the verdict was announced at Feng County Detention Center: Chang Weiping was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for subversion of state power. According to Agence France-Presse's June 2023 reporting and the statement Amnesty International issued the same day, the announcement took place in the detention center rather than a courtroom, and the family was again not present. Counting from his seizure on 22 October 2020, he had already been in custody for more than two years and seven months when the verdict came, so the three-and-a-half-year term still left close to a year to serve. In its statement on the day of sentencing, Amnesty International demanded his immediate and unconditional release, stating that he had been convicted solely for peaceful human rights work and for describing the torture he had endured. The Chinese authorities offered no substantive public response to the international criticism, and the judicial documents of the case were not published. For a lawyer's subversion case, everything from investigation to sentencing was closed, and all the public was permitted to see was a single figure: three years and six months. The process was kept entirely behind the door.
Release Without Homecoming: Haikou, the Travel Ban and a Licence That Never Came Back (2024)
Around 8–9 July 2024, Chang Weiping was released at the end of his term. According to Radio Free Asia, the release date fell on the ninth anniversary of the 709 crackdown, a coincidence widely noted among those who follow China's human rights lawyers. But release did not mean going home, still less the restoration of a normal life. Radio Free Asia reported that he was ordered to travel to Haikou, in Hainan Province, to live, on the ground that his household registration lies there — while his family has neither a home nor relatives in Haikou, his wife and son were already in the United States, and Baoji was the city where he had practised and lived for years. A man released at the end of his sentence was directed to live in a city where he knew no one, subjected to travel restrictions, unable to travel freely to rejoin his wife and child, and with no possibility of resuming practice, his licence having been revoked back in January 2020. The prison term had ended; the punishment continued in another form. The assigned place of residence, the travel ban and the permanent loss of his profession, taken together, made the release resemble a transfer from a detention center into a different kind of control.
This page records his post-release condition with restraint. Beyond Radio Free Asia's reporting that he lives in Haikou under travel restrictions, there is to date no systematic public record of his health, his livelihood, his means of contact with his wife and son, or any progress toward reunion, and this page records those subjects as matters of no public record rather than speculating about them. Whether the two fingers of his right hand that lost feeling have recovered, and whether the symptoms described in custody — including the blood in his stool — were ever treated, are likewise matters of no public record. How a man who worked by the law now earns a living and where he receives medical care ought to be the most basic information about a released prisoner; in this case all of it is blank, and the blank itself belongs in the archive. On paper his sentence was three years and six months. Counting from the suspension of his practice in 2018, he has lost his profession for far longer; counting from his seizure in October 2020, his separation from his wife and son has lasted years — and it continued after his release.
The Family: One Household Scattered Across Three Places
The family line of this case has three people in it. Chang Weiping himself moved from practising lawyer to detainee to a released man assigned a place to live. Chen Zijuan moved from a wife making inquiries about a missing husband, to a public campaigner, to an exile who carried their child to the United States. Their son, still young when his father was taken, appears in his mother's accounts through one recurring question: when is father coming home. Before 2018 this family lived in Shaanxi and led the ordinary life of a lawyer's household. After the 2018 suspension, the income went first. After the seizure of 2020, the home itself broke. After the wife's departure in 2022, the family was scattered geographically across Shaanxi, Hainan and the United States — the place of the father's detention, the mother's place of exile and the assigned place of residence after release, no two of them coinciding.
The family also endured an informational form of torment. For nearly six months, from October 2020 to April 2021, Chen Zijuan did not know whether her husband was alive or dead. The news carried out of the lawyer's meeting in September 2021 — torture, and blood in his stool — was the entirety of the substantive information she received about his physical condition in almost a year. At the hearing in July 2022 she could not enter the courtroom. At the sentencing in June 2023 she was not present. At every decisive point the family was kept outside the door and left to assemble the picture of his situation from relays by rights organizations and media. This exclusion of families from procedure has become routine in state-security cases, but routine is not the same as reasonable, and the duty of an archive is to record each exclusion as it happened. After Chen Zijuan left for the United States with their son in 2022, no immediate family member remained in China to visit Chang Weiping or deliver money and necessities, and the flow of information about his condition in custody thinned accordingly — a thinning directly visible in the public record after 2022.
International Response: From UN Torture Procedures to Amnesty's Statements
The international response to this case ran along three lines. The first was the UN human rights machinery. Chinese Human Rights Defenders and partner organizations compiled the torture allegations in his case into materials submitted to the processes under the UN Convention Against Torture and to the special rapporteur system, seeking to have the tiger chair, the sleep deprivation and the around-the-clock interrogation formally put to the Chinese government. UN mechanisms normally handle individual cases by writing to the government and asking for explanations; Beijing's customary response to such letters is that cases are handled according to law and that interference in internal affairs is rejected. In preparing this page, this site found no standalone numbered formal opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention devoted to Chang Weiping individually; the existing record consists of organizational submissions and special-procedures attention, and that distinction is stated here plainly rather than inflated into a UN adjudication. The second line was the international rights organizations. Amnesty International issued its statement on the day of sentencing in June 2023, demanding his immediate release and condemning the use of a subversion charge to punish peaceful work and the telling of torture; Chinese Human Rights Defenders updated his case file continuously from 2020 onward, fixing point by point the dates of the two RSDL periods, the two rounds of torture allegations, the lawyer's meeting and the family's notification, and this page's timeline rests heavily on that file. The third line was international media. Agence France-Presse reported the October 2020 video and the June 2023 sentencing, and Radio Free Asia followed the wife's campaigning and the 2024 arrangement under which he was sent to live in Haikou, keeping the case visible beyond the Chinese-speaking world.
The practical effect of all this must be assessed honestly: no statement at any point altered the course of the case. After the video was posted, the man was seized. At the height of international attention, the trial remained closed. The verdict was still announced inside a detention center, and the sentence was not shortened by a single day. But the responses had a second function — leaving a trace. Precisely because these point-by-point records exist, the timeline of this case can be fully reconstructed today: the day he was taken, the day the family was finally notified, the day a lawyer first saw him, each date checkable against at least two sources. Without the international record, this case might survive in the public world as nothing more than a single line in a court notice. The meaning of documentation and protest, in the first instance, is that a disappeared person is not allowed to have disappeared.
Verification Note
This page was compiled by cross-checking the case file of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, statements by Amnesty International, reporting by Agence France-Presse and Radio Free Asia, and the records of other human rights organizations. The evidence is graded as follows. The dates of the professional punishments and the deregistration of the firm (the three-month suspension of October 2018, the deregistration of 22 November 2018, the licence revocation of January 2020), the date of the Xiamen gathering (December 2019), the dates of the two seizures (ten days of RSDL in January 2020; the second seizure on 22 October 2020), the posting of the torture video (16 October 2020), the family's notification of the charge (April 2021), the first lawyer meeting (14 September 2021), the hearing date and venue (the secret hearing of 26 July 2022 at the Feng County People's Court), the sentencing date, venue and term (announced on 8 June 2023 at Feng County Detention Center; three years and six months for subversion of state power), and the release and Haikou residence arrangement of July 2024 as reported by Radio Free Asia are each recorded by at least two institutions or outlets and are treated as cross-verified. The torture details (the tiger chair on two occasions, sleep deprivation, around-the-clock interrogation, the loss of feeling in two fingers of the right hand, and blood in the stool) rest on Chang Weiping's own video account and on his account relayed through his lawyer, recorded by rights organizations and submitted to UN processes; they are attributed as his account throughout the text and are not presented as independently verified. The change between the initial formulation of the charge (suspected incitement to subvert state power) and the final conviction (subversion of state power) is presented from the family notification and the sentencing record side by side. The indictment, the trial transcript and the full judgment are matters of no public record; his life in Haikou after release, the recovery of his health, and any lifting of the travel restrictions are likewise matters of no public record. All sources are paraphrased and summarized; direct quotation from any single source is far below this site's ceiling.
Our Take
Our Take is tied to the facts of this case alone. The sequence used against this one lawyer is what most deserves to be pinned down. First the suspension of his practice, then the deregistration of his firm, then the revocation of his licence — and only once he was no longer a lawyer in law was he secretly detained. Each step, viewed alone, looks like administration; assembled, they form a complete procedure of dispossession. Then, when in October 2020 he described what it was to be strapped to a tiger chair, the response he received was not an investigation of the torture allegation. It was a second seizure six days later, nearly a year of total isolation, and, on his own account, a second round on the tiger chair. How a system treats allegations of torture says more about it than almost anything else: not one person accused of carrying out the torture has been publicly investigated, while the man who described the torture was sentenced to three and a half years for subverting state power. The rights and wrongs of that arrangement require no rhetoric.
Look, next, at the materials out of which the conviction was built: a gathering of friends, some statements about the rule of law, and a video describing his own torment. Not one of the three involved violence; not one involved any concrete act aimed at overthrowing the government. Yet they were fitted into one of the gravest crimes in the criminal code. A secret hearing, a family barred from the courtroom, a verdict announced inside a detention center, and the full text of the judgment withheld from the public: when a case must hide this completely from public view, what it is hiding from is probably not any state secret but the public's examination of the evidence. And after the term was served, he still did not receive anything that could be called freedom. The licence was gone, his place of residence was assigned to Haikou, where he has no home and no relatives, and his wife and child are in the United States while he cannot leave. The sentence of three years and six months is written in the judgment; the punishment outside the judgment has no term at all. This site records the whole chain, from suspension to assigned residence, because Chang Weiping is not an isolated case. He is a standard specimen of the condition of China's human rights lawyers after 709: licence stripped, secret detention, torture allegations no one investigates, a grave charge on thin evidence, and control that continues after the sentence ends. Every element of the pattern is present in his file. Remembering the specimen is how the cases that follow it can be understood.
Sources
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD): Chang Weiping case file (professional punishments and firm deregistration, the two periods of residential surveillance at a designated location, the lawyer meeting, the family notification and the torture allegations), and its documentation of submissions to UN Convention Against Torture processes.
- Amnesty International: statement of 8 June 2023 issued on the day of sentencing (demanding his immediate and unconditional release and condemning the use of a subversion charge to punish peaceful human rights work and the account of torture), and its earlier urgent attention records on his arbitrary detention.
- Agence France-Presse (AFP): reporting of October 2020 on Chang Weiping's torture video and his subsequent seizure; reporting of June 2023 on the three-and-a-half-year sentence announced at Feng County Detention Center.
- Radio Free Asia (RFA): reporting on Chen Zijuan's public campaign and her 2022 departure for the United States with their son; reporting of July 2024 on his release, the order to live in Haikou and the travel restrictions.
- Records of Human Rights Watch and other international organizations on the condition of China's human rights lawyers and on the Xiamen gathering cases (Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi and other connected figures), used to cross-check the character of the gathering and the context of the case.