第61案 | 陈树庆Case 61 | Chen Shuqing
陈树庆（1965年9月26日生于浙江富阳新登镇，独立中文笔会档案；中文维基百科作1964年，分歧见正文核实说明），1989年在杭州大学读研究生期间参加民主运动，1995年起从事民主活动，1998年参与中国民主党浙江筹委会筹备工作，1999年因此被关押四个月，其间因发表文章失去工作。2005年他通过国家司法考试，却被浙江省司法行政机关以民主党身份拒绝颁发律师执业证，两次申诉均败诉。2006年9月中旬他被杭州市公安局刑事拘留、抄家，2007年8月16日被杭州市中级人民法院以煽动颠覆国家政权罪判刑四年、剥夺政治权利一年，在乔司监狱服刑，2010年9月13日刑满释放；同年11月他与另外五人向杭州市公安局申请游行许可，2014年又联署要求释放被关押者的声明，并撰文记述同道吕耿松被拒绝会见律师的经过。2014年9月11日下午约一时，杭州市公安局国保人员将他带走，三时半搜查其住所，抄走电脑、手机、文件与徽章且未留清单，拘留通知书却记载拘留时间为十八时；他被以涉嫌颠覆国家政权罪羁押于杭州市看守所。2015年9月29日杭州中院开庭约三小时，辩护律师傅永刚、刘树清作无罪辩护，辩方申请证人出庭被拒，检方以民主党活动、黄山聚会、吊唁活动与境外发表文章为据，他不认罪，妻张东红持家属旁听证旁听。2016年6月17日，杭州中院以颠覆国家政权罪判处他有期徒刑十年六个月，傅永刚转述判决书写明他在博讯、参与发表了十四篇文章并称其攻击抹黑国家政权与社会主义制度；傅永刚表示将上诉，二审结果无公开记录；附加剥夺政治权利有四年之说，未核。2019年联合国任意拘留问题工作组认定对他的拘留构成任意拘留（维权人士网络2026年声明转述）。他在乔司监狱服满第二个刑期，2025年3月10日刑满释放。2025年12月17日他到杭州市拱墅区人社局办理退休，统筹缴费二十四年四个月，因两次判刑被扣除服刑期间年限后只剩九年多（维权人士网络口径为九年十个月），退休资格被拒并被要求先退回服刑期间缴费；12月21日他提交政府信息公开申请，要求公开扣除依据，12月22日在个人Medium账号全文发表；2026年2月他又就人社部相关政策申请行政复议。截至2026年10月，两项程序结果均无公开记录，退休仍未落实。两次刑期合计十四年六个月，他全部服满。Chen Shuqing (born 26 September 1965 in Xindeng Town, Fuyang, Zhejiang, per the Independent Chinese PEN Center; Chinese Wikipedia gives 1964 — see the verification note in the main text) took part in the 1989 democracy movement as a graduate student at Hangzhou University, was active in the democracy movement from 1995, joined the preparatory work of the China Democracy Party's Zhejiang committee in 1998 and was detained for four months in 1999 for it, losing his job in that period over his published articles. In 2005 he passed the national judicial examination, but the Zhejiang judicial administration refused him a lawyer's licence because of his party membership, and he lost two appeals. In mid-September 2006 the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau criminally detained him and searched his home; on 16 August 2007 the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to four years and one year's deprivation of political rights for inciting subversion of state power, and he served the term at Qiaosi Prison, released on 13 September 2010. That November he and five others applied to the Hangzhou police for a demonstration permit; in 2014 he co-signed a statement calling for detainees' release and published an account of fellow activist Lü Gengsong being denied access to his lawyer. At about 1 p.m. on 11 September 2014 Hangzhou domestic-security officers took him away; at 3:30 p.m. they searched his home, seizing a computer, a phone, documents and badges and leaving no inventory, while the detention notice recorded the detention time as 6 p.m. He was held at the Hangzhou Detention Center on suspicion of subversion of state power. On 29 September 2015 the Hangzhou court tried him for about three hours; defence lawyers Fu Yonggang and Liu Shuqing argued innocence, the defence's request to call witnesses was refused, the prosecution relied on CDP activity, a Huangshan meeting, a condolence event and articles published overseas, he pleaded not guilty, and his wife Zhang Donghong attended on a family permit. On 17 June 2016 the court sentenced him to ten years and six months for subversion of state power; Fu relayed that the judgment stated he had published 14 articles on Boxun and Canyu and had thereby 'attacked and smeared the state power and the socialist system'. Fu announced an appeal whose outcome is not in the public record; an additional deprivation of political rights reported as four years is unverified. In 2019 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined his detention to be arbitrary (as reported by CHRD in 2026). He served the second term in full at Qiaosi Prison and was released on 10 March 2025. On 17 December 2025 he applied for retirement at the Hangzhou Gongshu District social security bureau: of 24 years and 4 months of pool contributions, the years inside his two sentences were struck out, leaving nine years and a bit (nine years and ten months in CHRD's account), retirement was refused and he was told to refund the in-prison contributions first. On 21 December he filed a government-information disclosure request demanding the legal basis, publishing its full text on his Medium account on 22 December; in February 2026 he applied for administrative review of the ministry policies invoked. As of October 2026 neither procedure's outcome is in the public record and his pension remains unpaid. His two sentences total fourteen years and six months, every day of them served.
First, what he actually did: he helped found a party and wrote fourteen articles
The facts of the Chen Shuqing case can be compressed into one sentence: he took part in organising the Zhejiang committee of the China Democracy Party, and he published articles on overseas Chinese-language websites. No weapons, no funds, no explosives, no instruction from abroad. Spread out on the table, the evidence that twice sent him to prison is this: a party organisation in preparation, a body of openly published political essays, and a few gatherings of fellow believers. In 2007 the Hangzhou Intermediate Court sentenced him to four years for it, under the name of inciting subversion. In 2016 the same court sentenced him to ten years and six months, the charge upgraded to subversion of state power itself. After the second verdict, his defence lawyer Fu Yonggang relayed its core sentence to reporters: Chen Shuqing had published 14 articles on the overseas websites Boxun and Canyu. Fourteen articles; ten and a half years. That sentence stands at the head of this file because everything that follows — the raids, the detention, the three-year wait for a verdict, the refusal at the pension counter — unfolds around it: over twenty years, a state deployed its domestic-security police, its procuratorate, an intermediate court, a prison and a social-security bureau to deal with one man's writing and organising.
One more figure belongs up front. His two sentences add up to fourteen years and six months. In the persecution roster compiled by Zhejiang CDP veteran Zhu Yufu, Chen is listed third among twenty-three sentenced Zhejiang party members — behind Zhu himself at sixteen years and Lü Gengsong at fifteen — and the twenty-three terms total 151 years. The roster matters because it shows Chen is not an isolated case but one line in the record of an entire provincial generation of party organisers sent to prison in batches. This page writes about one man; the reader should remember the roster exists, and that his fourteen and a half years are one segment cut from it.
The graduate student of 1989: where he starts
Chen Shuqing was born on 26 September 1965 in Xindeng Town, Fuyang, Zhejiang (so registered in the Independent Chinese PEN Center's file; the identity information in the government-information request he filed himself in December 2025 agrees; Chinese Wikipedia gives 1964, and the discrepancy is registered in the verification note — the main text follows the PEN file and his own document). In 1989 he was twenty-four, a graduate student at Hangzhou University — his field was biology, and CHRD's 2006 record describes him as holding a master's degree in the subject — and he took part in that year's democracy movement. Human Rights in China's file dates his democracy activism from 1995. The timeline deserves to be read word by word: he is not a man who fell silent for two decades after 1989 and took up writing in old age. From his student years to the age of sixty his public record is one unbroken line — joining the student movement, democracy activism, organising a party, writing, prison, release, writing again, prison again, and then, after release, an administrative fight over his pension. Each link in that chain is set out below.
Of 1989's meaning for him, he said plainly in a post-release interview that the year shaped his thinking and set him to reconsidering China's road to democratisation. This page does not embellish the remark; it sets it against the record that follows. A graduate student who marched at twenty-four and never changed direction over the next thirty-six years is precisely what the case-handling authorities knew him to be — and what they could least tolerate. What his case punished from first to last was arguably less any particular article than this refusal to change. At his 2006 trial he refused to plead guilty and rejected the very formula of the people's democratic dictatorship; at his 2015 trial he again pleaded not guilty and used his final statement to set out the Democracy Party's views. Two courtrooms, the same posture, with four years of prison in between.
1998: organising the China Democracy Party, and four months in detention
In June 1998 the China Democracy Party was openly prepared and founded in Zhejiang and elsewhere — the first attempt since 1949 to organise an opposition party in public on the mainland. Chen joined the preparatory work of the Zhejiang committee and became a core member of it (the files of Human Rights in China and of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China agree). The authorities answered with a nationwide sweep: in Zhejiang, Wang Youcai, Zhu Yufu, Wu Yilong, Mao Qingxiang and others were arrested and sentenced in turn. Chen was detained for four months in 1999 (so recorded by Human Rights in China and by the CECC's analysis). No public record of any indictment or judgment from that detention has been found; this page registers it, on the converging sources, as four months' detention for party-organising activity, its legal form and exact dates not in the public record.
This section must also record that he lost his job. Chinese Wikipedia's brief biography states that he lost his employment because of articles he published online. The sources give neither his former work unit nor the exact date, and this page registers those details as not in the public record, keeping only the outline: by the time he passed the judicial examination in 2005, he was already a man with no fixed employment, publicly identified by his writing and his democracy activism. Sever a party organiser's livelihood first, then net him for incitement when he writes — that sequence appears here for the first time in his file, and it will reappear, in social-insurance form, when he is sixty.
2005: he passed the judicial examination — and was refused a licence
This is the least-told and most important episode in understanding everything that followed. In 2005 Chen passed the national judicial examination — the qualification gate for practising law. The Zhejiang judicial administration then refused to issue him a lawyer's licence, on the ground of his China Democracy Party membership. He appealed twice and lost twice. The fact is recorded in the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2006 analysis, sourced to Radio Free Asia and Reporters Without Borders reporting of the time. One detail is worth isolating: he had tried the road inside the system. A biology master's and CDP preparatory-committee member, in his thirties, sat the state's own examination, under the state's own syllabus and pass mark — and was told at the issuing window that the result did not count because of who he was. The examination issued licences by score; in his case, the licence was decided by identity.
Read this section beside the two imprisonments and the logic completes itself. First the courtroom door was closed to him as a lawyer; then he was dragged into courtrooms as a defendant, twice. The lawful channels open to him were shut one by one: organise a party — four months' detention; write — lose your job; qualify as a lawyer — refused a licence; keep writing — four years; write again after release — ten and a half years. This file lays the sequence out so the reader can see the other face of the official phrase "repeatedly unrepentant": every time he turned to a milder, more procedural method, the procedural method was blocked in advance, until nothing was left but the defendant's dock. The name of the official who decided the 2005 refusal is not in the public record; this page registers that as no public record.
The first case: taken in September 2006, sentenced to four years in August 2007
On 13 September 2006 the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau placed Chen under criminal detention (Chinese Wikipedia's dating); CHRD's contemporary record says he was taken on 14 September when he attended a Hangzhou police station in answer to a summons. The two accounts differ by a day and this page records both: he was taken in mid-September 2006, his home was searched, and his computer hard drives and personal documents were seized. The CECC's account of that day carries a pointed juxtaposition: on the very day Zhu Yufu walked free at the end of his sentence, the authorities detained Chen Shuqing — one democracy party man out of prison, another sent in; that is how the Zhejiang roster rotated. After the arrest, Hangzhou police questioned CDP members Gao Haibin, Wu Yuanming and Wang Rongqing about Chen's contacts, his writings, and his part in a hunger strike proposed by the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng and other rights defenders. A public letter of 10 October 2006 from the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN described him as a leading member of the CDP's Zhejiang provincial branch.
The Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court tried the case in July 2007. In court Chen refused to plead guilty and stated that he rejected the polity formula of the people's democratic dictatorship. On 16 August 2007 the court sentenced him to four years' imprisonment and one year's deprivation of political rights for inciting subversion of state power. The judgment's evidentiary points, as preserved by Human Rights in China, fall into three classes: his role in organising the CDP's Zhejiang committee; his articles calling for democratic reform and supporting other CDP members' activities; and his statement that the government had used force to crack down on the 1989 democracy movement — this last class rendered in the judgment's language as slandering the government. His defence lawyer Li Jianqiang told Reuters the conviction was totally wrong: Chen had only been expressing his political views and should enjoy free speech. Li was afterwards suspended from practice for a year by the authorities in his home province of Shandong — he said the reason was that he had taken on too many sensitive cases. The professional price of defending Chen fell on the lawyer; this page registers it on the contemporary Reporters Without Borders and Reuters record.
The appeal must be written as it stands: Reuters reported in August 2007 that Chen would appeal but might need a new lawyer. This page has searched repeatedly and found no public record of any second-instance ruling in the first case; it is registered as no public record. After sentencing he was sent to Qiaosi Prison in Zhejiang to serve the term (Chinese Wikipedia and Human Rights in China agree).
Four years in Qiaosi, and release on 13 September 2010
On 13 September 2010, having served the full four years, Chen was released from Hangzhou's Qiaosi Prison (Human Rights in China's and Amnesty International's contemporary records agree). Release was not the whole of freedom: the additional year's deprivation of political rights now began, a year in which the rights taken from him included voting and standing for election, accepting interviews and giving speeches, and publishing. His lawyer Li Jianqiang said something at the time that Human Rights in China preserved: the punishment would extend beyond that one year, because in an autocratic state no one's civil rights can be guaranteed, let alone his. The sentence was written in 2010; the fourteen years of record that followed verified it item by item. This page keeps it in the file not because it is eloquent but because it was accurate.
Two months after release he was back in the public record: in November 2010 he was one of six people who applied to the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau for a permit to hold a demonstration calling for democratic reform (Human Rights in China's record). A man just out of an inciting-subversion sentence, still inside his year of deprived political rights, walked into the public security bureau sixty days after release to file for a march permit. The outcome of the application is not recorded in the sources and is registered here as no public record; the application itself is documented. Group it with two things he did in 2014: that year he co-signed a public statement calling for the release of detained people, and, after Lü Gengsong was seized, he wrote and published an account of Lü being denied access to his lawyer in detention. Writing for a fellow prisoner was the last category of act before the second arrest arrived. The causal chain needs no underlining from this site: Lü Gengsong was detained on 7 July 2014 and formally arrested on 13 August — and on 11 September, it was Chen's turn.
The second case: 11 September 2014 — taken at one o'clock, home searched at half past three
The events of 11 September 2014 survive, in his wife Zhang Donghong's account to Human Rights in China, as one of the few minute-by-minute records in this file. At about 1 p.m. that day, domestic-security officers of the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau took Chen away. At 3:30 p.m. officers searched the couple's home and carried off a desktop computer, a mobile phone, documents and some badges — leaving no inventory list of what had been seized. The detention notice issued by the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau gives the time of detention as 6 p.m. The charge was the same as the one used against Lü Gengsong seven weeks earlier: subversion of state power. Set the three times side by side and each says something: the man taken at one, the home searched at half past three, the paperwork saying six — the notice's clock runs five hours behind the real one; and a seizure with no list means the family has no receipt with which ever to reclaim so much as a computer.
He was held at the Hangzhou Detention Center (so listed in China Change's 2015 roster of prisoners of conscience). There followed nearly a year of investigation and prosecution: the public record contains neither the exact date of his formal arrest nor a complete account of his access to counsel, and this page registers both as no public record. The trial was first scheduled for May 2015 and then postponed (China Change's listing). In the detention centre, waiting for a courtroom, he was forty-nine — four years after he had last left prison. What he had done in those four years is written above: applied for a march permit, signed a statement, and written about a fellow activist denied his lawyer.
The trial of 29 September 2015: three hours, and a plea of not guilty
On Tuesday 29 September 2015 the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court tried Chen Shuqing and Lü Gengsong, the two men in separate proceedings. The hearing lasted about three hours. Chen's defence lawyers were Fu Yonggang and Liu Shuqing. Fu told Radio Free Asia afterwards that prosecution and defence had debated fiercely over the two men's CDP membership and activities and their articles published overseas; the exhibits of subversion offered by the prosecution included a meeting the men had attended in Huangshan and a condolence event. Fu asked in court: which part of those actions constituted incitement to subvert state power? Liu confirmed that the defence's application to call witnesses had been refused by the court. One point of charge-wording needs care for the reader: RFA's trial coverage and some wire reports used the wording "incitement to subvert" at the trial stage, while the 2014 detention notice and the 2016 judgment both read "subversion of state power"; this page's main text follows the notice and the judgment, registering the discrepancy here. It does not disturb the factual spine: the core of the accusation was always party activity and articles, and on that the prosecution's and defence's courtroom accounts agree.
The scene outside the court belongs in the file too: about a dozen supporters stood in the rain outside a courthouse ringed by police and plainclothes officers; supporters were barred from the courtroom, and each family received three entry permits. Zhang Donghong attended the whole trial. What she told reporters afterwards was this: her husband seemed in fairly good spirits and had neither visibly lost nor gained weight; in court he had explained the Democracy Party's views and spoken very well; in his final statement he had again insisted on his innocence; and everything lawyers Liu and Fu had said struck her as very reasonable. That is all a wife could say to the outside. Three family permits, a three-hour hearing, a court that would not hear witnesses — that is the whole of the open procedure in advance of a ten-and-a-half-year sentence. The court gave no verdict that day. The wait, this time, was nine months.
17 June 2016: ten years and six months, and the fourteen articles in the judgment
On 17 June 2016 the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court delivered its verdict: Chen Shuqing was guilty of subversion of state power and sentenced to ten years and six months; the same day, Lü Gengsong received eleven years. The verdict came nearly nine months after the trial and twenty-one months after Chen had been taken away. What the judgment said became public through Fu Yonggang's account to reporters: it stated that Chen had published 14 articles on the overseas websites Boxun and Canyu (rendered "Participation" in some translations), and that through those proclamations, statements and articles he had attacked and smeared the state power and the socialist system. Fu said his defence argument had been that writing articles should not constitute a crime, and that Chen would appeal. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued its statement the same day (New York, 16 June); the words of its Asia programme coordinator Bob Dietz deserve their substance preserved in this file: Lü and Chen had already spent years in Chinese prisons merely for writing and expressing their opinions, and to sentence each of them to more than another decade was beyond absurd; the Committee called for their immediate release and for the sentences to be overturned on appeal. The statement also fixed the two men's place in that year's record: both stood among the 49 journalists held in China in CPJ's most recent prison census, which showed China to be the world's worst jailer of journalists.
Two procedural matters must be registered here exactly as they stand. First, the appeal: Fu stated on sentencing day that Chen would appeal, but this page's repeated searching — which did find the public record of Lü Gengsong's appeal being rejected by the Zhejiang Higher People's Court in late November 2016 — found no public record of any second-instance ruling for Chen himself; it is registered as no public record. Readers must not transfer Lü's appeal outcome onto Chen's name: same case cluster, different men, and this page registers only what stands under each name. Second, the additional penalty: the first sentence's one year of deprivation of political rights is multiply attested; for the second sentence, a figure of four years' deprivation circulates, but this page found neither the judgment text nor a second independent source, and it is registered as unverified and kept out of the statement of sentence. An archive leaves a blank here deliberately: for whoever cites this page in ten years, the blank is more honest than a wrong number. He was then sent back to Qiaosi Prison to serve the second term — the same prison, the same prisoner, with four years of freedom and another round of writing in between.
The second Qiaosi decade: the UN Working Group's finding, and "re-education" inside
The public record of the second term is thinner than the first, as expected: a man serving ten and a half years disappears from public view for its early years. The nodes this page can register are these. In 2019 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the Chinese authorities were arbitrarily detaining Chen — the determination as reported by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders in its March 2026 statement; this page did not find the opinion's number or full text, so its category and reasoning are registered as unverified detail while the determination itself is recorded on CHRD's report. In Zhu Yufu's November 2024 roster of persecuted Zhejiang democracy party members, Chen's status is: still serving, term expiring in March 2025. CHRD's 2026 statement confirms that the second term was served at Hangzhou's Qiaosi Prison, the same prison as the first.
Of his own time inside, Chen gave an account after release in an interview with a pro-democracy magazine (the Opposition Party magazine's interview; a single source, registered here as his own account and not expanded): he described the prison's so-called re-education regime applied to all inmates — thought, discipline and labour — with workshop production of prison-made goods, much of the labour compulsory and unpaid; and he said he had made his position plain to the staff early on: if something is right, I will change on my own without your re-education; if it is wrong, you can beat me to death and I will not change. He added that the staff later reached a workable coexistence with him, and that he believed the measure of protection he enjoyed inside owed something to the continuing attention of his family, of overseas democracy activists and of international human-rights organisations. His summary of himself in that interview was: I'm a fighter. This page quotes it without commentary and sets it beside one fact: from 11 September 2014 to 10 March 2025 he spent ten and a half years in a detention centre and a prison, and walked out at fifty-nine.
The impact on the family: Zhang Donghong's fourteen and a half years
The family line of this case has one central figure: his wife, Zhang Donghong. She appears in the public record at three moments. On the afternoon of 11 September 2014, officers searched her home in front of her and carried away the computer, the phone and the documents without leaving a list; her account to Human Rights in China is why the discrepancy between the notice's six o'clock and the real one o'clock is in the public record at all. On 29 September 2015 she sat in the courtroom on one of the family's three permits and afterwards relayed her husband's condition and statement to reporters. And across the two terms — fourteen years and six months in all — the social-insurance contributions in Chen's name were kept up by his family and by the work unit through which his insurance was attached: his own December 2025 information request states that for more than twenty years the contributions had been paid by the applicant, the applicant's family, and the applicant's employing or host unit. In other words, through all the years he was in prison, the pension payments never stopped — and among those paying them was his wife.
Draw the line through: over fourteen and a half years this family lived through two home searches, two trials, and two prison terms in what was in fact the same prison, and a decade and a half of visiting journeys. Of any children, and of Zhang Donghong's own work and health across those years, the sources carry no public record; this page registers that as no public record and writes no invented detail into a family's life. What can be confirmed sits at the two ends of a structure: at one end, a computer and documents taken without a receipt; at the other, a social-insurance account whose payments never lapsed. The first is what was taken from this family; the second is what this family preserved for him through the years of his absence. When the social-security window announced in December 2025 that contributions paid during imprisonment did not count, what was being nullified was not only Chen's nine-plus years of contributions — it was also the money Zhang Donghong and the family had paid in, instalment by instalment, across fourteen years.
The international response: from Reporters Without Borders to the United Nations to a pension statement
The international record of this case spans twenty years, registered here item by item. In 2006–2007: Reporters Without Borders spoke out repeatedly at his arrest and sentencing, said the court that tried him took its orders from the Communist Party, and called for the release of Chen and of the fifty-odd cyber-dissidents then held in China; the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China published its 2006 analysis recording his detention on the day of Zhu Yufu's release, the 1999 four-month detention, and the 2005 refusal of a lawyer's licence after he passed the judicial examination, and entered him in its Political Prisoner Database; International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee's October 2006 letter confirmed his standing as a leading member of the CDP's Zhejiang branch. On his 2010 release, Amnesty International UK's weekly China briefing registered his release alongside those of Wu Yilong and Qin Yongmin. At the 2015 trial: Agence France-Presse and Radio Free Asia reported continuously, carrying the Huangshan-meeting evidence, the refused witnesses and the supporters barred outside into the international record. At the 2016 sentencing: the CPJ statement of the day (see the preceding section); a report by the New York Times' Chris Buckley, filed from Beijing on 20 June 2016, recorded the two men's sentences (registered in Chinese Wikipedia's references); and Freedom House's Freedom of the Press 2017 recorded his sentence and the fourteen-articles charge. In 2019: the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's determination of arbitrary detention (as reported by CHRD; opinion number unverified). On 2 March 2026: CHRD's pension statement named Chen one of nine prisoners of conscience refused their retirement benefits, and quoted his January 2026 article: the judgments in my two cases deprived me only of my personal liberty and political rights for a set period; they did not deprive me of my socio-economic rights, including the right to social insurance.
What these responses achieved must be written plainly: they did not shorten his imprisonment by a single day — he served both terms in full, and the 2016 call to overturn on appeal changed nothing. But they left two things behind. One is the record: the 2005 licence refusal, the 2014 listless seizure, the 2015 refused witnesses, the fourteen articles in the judgment — were these details not written into international files at the time, they would be unverifiable today; the factual skeleton of this page is built from those records. The other became visible after 2025: when the social-security window moved to erase the contribution years of his imprisonment, twenty years of international documentation proved exactly where those years had been spent and why — the pension dispute was never an arithmetic question but always the question whether those two judgments were just, and the international record is the earliest link in that chain of argument.
10 March 2025: released at the end of the full term
On 10 March 2025 Chen Shuqing was released for the last time at the completion of his sentence — the date stands in the text of his own December 2025 information request: after the applicant's final release on completion of sentence on 10 March 2025. CHRD's statement agrees: he completed the ten-and-a-half-year term at Hangzhou's Qiaosi Prison in March 2025. He walked out at fifty-nine — thirty-six years after the twenty-four-year-old graduate student of 1989, twenty-seven years after he joined the founding of a party in 1998. Fourteen and a half years of his life had been spent in prisons and a detention centre, and four months more in the detention of 1999. His public acts after release were few: the magazine interview that preserved his "cannot be reformed" account; and catch-up social-insurance payments — by his own statement, after his release he went several times to the Gongshu District government service centre and paid up the lapsed years of contributions, including some periods falling inside his sentence, and every payment was completed smoothly, no one telling him that contributions for prison years were invalid. That entry must be recorded on its own, because it is the factual foundation of the dispute to come: when the money was being taken, it was taken; when the time came to pay out, it did not count.
The pension fight: twenty-four years and four months of contributions, nine years and ten months recognised
At about 9 a.m. on 17 December 2025 Chen went to the Gongshu District Human Resources and Social Security Bureau's service point at the district government service centre in Hangzhou to process his retirement. By his own request's account: as of that day he had reached the statutory retirement age of sixty years plus three months, and had actually paid into the social-insurance pool for 24 years and 4 months — more than the fifteen-year minimum. The staff answer was: he had been sentenced in 2007 to four years for inciting subversion and in 2016 to ten years and six months for subversion; his contribution years must be reduced by both prison terms, leaving only nine years and a bit — below the fifteen-year minimum — so retirement could not be processed; and he was pressed, repeatedly, to first refund the contributions paid during his imprisonment. CHRD's March 2026 statement gives the more precise figure: the Gongshu social-security office told him that of his more than 24 years of contributions only 9 years and 10 months would count toward eligibility, that he must apply for a refund of the contributions deemed ineligible, and then repay them over a number of years. The two accounts differ slightly on the remainder (nine years and a bit; nine years and ten months); this page records both, treating CHRD's figure as the more precise.
What he did next is the same method he has used all his life: run the procedure to the end, and leave a written record. On 21 December 2025 he submitted a government-information disclosure request to the Gongshu bureau with two demands: first, disclosure of the specific legal and policy basis — instrument name, article and paragraph, with the text set out — for treating contributions paid during imprisonment as invalid and refundable; second, disclosure of the concrete refund procedure, the refund amounts or calculation standards period by period, and the follow-up process and projected outcome once refunds were complete. His stated reasoning: in more than twenty years of contributions no one had ever told him contributions during imprisonment were impermissible, and his post-release catch-up payments covering even in-prison periods had gone through without objection; for the bureau to accept the money and then, at the moment of performance, renege behind the phrase "according to relevant policies" shook the principle that citizens' reliance on government commitments is protected; and he demanded a specific written reply, not further oral "consultations" or "suggestions" that no one would stand behind. On 22 December he published the full text of the request on his own Medium account, in an essay titled "Social Pension Insurance and the Credibility of Government". The sourcing levels for this section are stated expressly: the handling at the counter and the request's contents rest on the request text he himself published — a party's own document, a first-order text; the 9-years-10-months figure and the February 2026 step are independently confirmed and relayed by CHRD's statement of 2 March 2026. In January 2026 he published his position: the two judgments deprived him only of liberty and political rights, not of socio-economic rights including social insurance; and if the criminal cases were overturned and he were cleared, the pension problem would resolve itself. In February 2026 he applied for administrative review of the ministry policies the bureau had invoked (CHRD). As of this page's October 2026 check, neither the information request's answer nor the review's outcome is in the public record, and his retirement and pension remain unimplemented.
The institutional background belongs here too, because it decides whether this concerns one man. CHRD's investigation points out that no Chinese statute — the Social Insurance Law included — contains any provision barring prisoners from contributing to or drawing a pension; the basis local offices invoke is a 2001 reply letter of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (predecessor to today's human-resources ministry) and provincial reply letters of the same kind — administrative interpretations, not laws or regulations, their texts marked as available on request rather than published. CHRD documented nine such cases in the same statement, including Chen Xi (eighteen years of contributions, eight recognised, after his 2021 release), Xu Qin and Dong Hongyi. Chen Shuqing is among those with the longest terms and the largest number of struck-out years. This page records the background to make one thing plain: the "relevant policies" quoted at that counter rest not on any statute, but on a reply letter whose full text an ordinary citizen cannot obtain.
Current status and the questions still open
As of this page's October 2026 check, the confirmable position is as follows. First, he was released on completion of sentence on 10 March 2025 and lives at home in Hangzhou; his public activity consists of writing and the pension fight, and the post-release interview and Medium essays show him still publishing. Second, his retirement remains unapproved: of 24 years and 4 months of pool contributions, the parts falling inside his sentences have been struck out wholesale, leaving some nine years and ten months on the official reckoning. Third, the outcomes of his 21 December 2025 information-disclosure request and his February 2026 application for administrative review (per CHRD) are not in the public record as of this check. Fourth, the legal loose ends persist: the result of the second case's appeal and the exact length of its additional deprivation of political rights remain outside the public record; if the additional deprivation were four years (unverified), the deprivation period would run to about 2029, but this page publishes no such computation before verification. Open questions include whether the information request has received a written answer, the acceptance and result of the administrative review, whether he will sue over the pension decision, the circumstances of Zhang Donghong and the family, and details of his health — each registered here as no public record, to be updated on future checks. A sixty-year-old man, twice imprisoned for fourteen and a half years in total, whose first fight after release is over a retirement certificate: the outcome of that fight will decide the old age of every prisoner of conscience who walks out after him, and this page will follow it to the end.
Complete timeline
- 26 September 1965 — Born in Xindeng Town, Fuyang, Zhejiang (Independent Chinese PEN Center file; Chinese Wikipedia gives 1964 — see the verification note).
- 1989 — Aged 24, takes part in the democracy movement as a graduate student at Hangzhou University (China Change; CHRD records).
- From 1995 — Engaged in democracy activism (Human Rights in China file).
- From June 1998 — Joins the preparatory work of the China Democracy Party's Zhejiang committee and becomes a core member.
- 1999 — Detained for four months for party-organising activity; no public record of indictment or judgment (Human Rights in China; CECC analysis).
- 2005 — Passes the national judicial examination; the Zhejiang judicial administration refuses him a lawyer's licence because of his CDP membership; two appeals fail (CECC 2006 analysis, on RFA and RSF reporting). By this period he has already lost his job over his published articles (Chinese Wikipedia; exact date not in the public record).
- 13–14 September 2006 — Criminally detained by the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau (one account dates the criminal detention 13 September, another his seizure at a police station on summons 14 September); home searched, computer drives and documents seized; police then question CDP members Gao Haibin, Wu Yuanming and Wang Rongqing. Zhu Yufu is released from prison the same day.
- 10 October 2006 — International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee issues a public letter naming him a leading member of the CDP's Zhejiang provincial branch.
- July 2007 — Tried by the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court; refuses to plead guilty and states his rejection of the people's-democratic-dictatorship formula.
- 16 August 2007 — The Hangzhou court sentences him to four years and one year's deprivation of political rights for inciting subversion of state power; defence lawyer Li Jianqiang tells Reuters the conviction is totally wrong. He serves the term at Qiaosi Prison. Li is afterwards suspended from practice for a year by the Shandong authorities.
- 13 September 2010 — Released from Qiaosi Prison at the end of the full term; the one-year deprivation of political rights follows, covering interviews, speeches and publication.
- November 2010 — With five others, applies to the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau for a permit to hold a demonstration calling for democratic reform (Human Rights in China; outcome not in the public record).
- 2014 — Co-signs a public statement calling for the release of detained people; after Lü Gengsong's seizure, writes and publishes an account of Lü being denied access to his lawyer.
- 7 July / 13 August 2014 — Fellow activist Lü Gengsong is criminally detained / formally arrested (background node).
- 11 September 2014 — Taken away by Hangzhou domestic-security officers at about 1 p.m.; at 3:30 p.m. his home is searched and a desktop computer, a mobile phone, documents and badges are seized with no inventory left; the detention notice records the detention time as 6 p.m. and the suspicion as subversion of state power. Held thereafter at the Hangzhou Detention Center.
- May 2015 — The originally scheduled trial is postponed (China Change listing; reason not in the public record).
- 29 September 2015 — Trial at the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court, about three hours; defence lawyers Fu Yonggang and Liu Shuqing argue innocence; the defence's application to call witnesses is refused; the prosecution relies on CDP activity, the Huangshan meeting, a condolence event and articles published overseas; he pleads not guilty; his wife Zhang Donghong attends on a family permit.
- 17 June 2016 — The Hangzhou court sentences him to ten years and six months for subversion of state power; the judgment cites his 14 articles on Boxun and Canyu (relayed by Fu Yonggang). Lü Gengsong receives eleven years the same day. Fu announces an appeal; its outcome is not in the public record. The additional deprivation of political rights is reported as four years — unverified.
- 16–20 June 2016 — The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for the two men's release and for the sentences to be overturned on appeal; the New York Times' Chris Buckley reports the sentences on 20 June.
- 2019 — The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determines his detention to be arbitrary (as reported by CHRD in 2026; opinion number unverified).
- 20 November 2024 — Zhu Yufu's roster of persecuted Zhejiang CDP members records Chen's combined imprisonment as fourteen and a half years, still serving, term expiring March 2025.
- 10 March 2025 — Released from Qiaosi Prison on completion of the ten-and-a-half-year term (date from his own information request; CHRD confirms the month and the prison).
- During 2025 — After release, pays up lapsed contribution years, including some in-prison periods, without objection (his request); gives the post-release magazine interview preserving his "cannot be reformed" account.
- 17 December 2025 — Applies for retirement at the Gongshu District bureau's service centre: 24 years and 4 months of pool contributions, reduced by both sentences to nine years and a bit (nine years and ten months in CHRD's account); retirement refused; told to refund the in-prison contributions first.
- 21 December 2025 — Files a government-information disclosure request with the Gongshu bureau, demanding the legal and policy basis for striking out the contribution years and the refund procedure.
- 22 December 2025 — Publishes "Social Pension Insurance and the Credibility of Government" on his Medium account, with the full text of the request.
- January 2026 — Publishes his position: the two judgments deprived him only of liberty and political rights, not of socio-economic rights including social insurance (quoted by CHRD).
- February 2026 — Applies for administrative review of the ministry policies invoked by the bureau (CHRD statement, 2 March 2026).
- October 2026 — This page's check: no public record of the information request's answer or the review's outcome; retirement still unimplemented.
Verification note
The core facts of this page — birth on 26 September 1965; participation in the 1989 movement as a graduate student; the 1998 CDP Zhejiang preparatory work; the four-month detention of 1999; the 2005 licence refusal after passing the judicial examination; the September 2006 detention; the 16 August 2007 sentence of four years and one year's deprivation for inciting subversion; the Qiaosi term; release on 13 September 2010; the seizure and listless search of 11 September 2014; the trial details of 29 September 2015; the 17 June 2016 sentence of ten years and six months for subversion with the fourteen articles in the judgment; release on completion in March 2025; and the December 2025 pension refusal and disclosure request — are attested across Human Rights in China's successive records, the CECC's 2006 analysis, Reporters Without Borders' and Reuters' 2007 reporting, Radio Free Asia's 2015 trial report and AFP's wire of the same days, the Committee to Protect Journalists' June 2016 statement, the New York Times' 20 June 2016 report, Freedom House's Freedom of the Press 2017, Zhu Yufu's roster (carried by the Rights Defence Network in November 2024), the full text of Chen's own December 2025 information request, and CHRD's pension statement of 2 March 2026, with the key nodes attested by two or more independent sources. The main disputes and choices are as follows. First, the birth year: the Independent Chinese PEN Center gives 26 September 1965, the identity details in his own information request agree, and Chinese Wikipedia gives 1964; the main text follows the former and the discrepancy is registered here. Second, the 2006 detention date: Chinese Wikipedia dates the criminal detention 13 September, CHRD records his seizure at a police station on summons on 14 September; the text records both as 13–14 September. Third, at the 2015 trial stage some reports (including the AFP wire's headline) used the wording "incitement to subvert", while the 2014 detention notice and the 2016 judgment both read "subversion of state power"; the main text follows the notice and the judgment, with the discrepancy registered here. Fourth, Chinese Wikipedia states that in 2016 he was sentenced to ten years and six months for "inciting subversion"; this contradicts the CPJ, RFA, and Chen's own description in his information request (2016, "subversion of state power", ten years and six months), and this page does not adopt the Wikipedia version. Fifth, the second sentence's additional deprivation of political rights is reported as four years; this page found neither the judgment text nor a second independent source, and it is registered as unverified and kept out of the statement of sentence. Sixth, appeals: no public record was found of the first case's second-instance result or of the second case's appeal ruling; both are registered as no public record, and it is expressly noted that Lü Gengsong's November 2016 appeal rejection is Lü's record, not Chen's, and must not be merged into it. Seventh, the UN Working Group's 2019 determination is recorded on CHRD's 2026 report; the opinion's number and category were not found, so the determination is registered as reported and its details as unverified. Eighth, the surviving contribution years: his request says nine years and a bit, CHRD's statement says nine years and ten months; both are recorded with their sources. Ninth, his in-prison "re-education" account comes from a single post-release interview with a pro-democracy magazine and is presented as his own account. Tenth, Zhu Yufu's roster of Zhejiang CDP members contains a further line stating that the China Democracy Party has been listed by the Ministry of Public Security as a hostile organisation since 1998 — this page checked the judgment summaries, trial reporting and human-rights records of Chen's two cases and did not find that formulation anywhere in the materials of Chen's own case; the claim is therefore not attributed to this case, and only the roster's sentencing statistics are used. Eleventh, his own published request contains his identity-card number, telephone number and full address; for his safety this page registers his residence only at district level and does not reproduce identity numbers or contact details. Evidence grading: human-rights organisations' records of judgment points and wire reporting of the time are grade one; the party's own published procedural documents are grade one; U.S. congressional-body and international-organisation files are grade one to two; human-rights organisations' thematic statements are grade two; encyclopaedias and secondary compilations are grade three; any detail found only at grade three has been downgraded, recorded in parallel, or marked unverified. This page uses no unsourced social-media rumour.
Our Take
Our Take rests only on this case's facts. First, read the evidence list. Two judgments totalling fourteen years and six months; spread out, the evidence is a party in preparation, a body of openly published articles, one meeting in Huangshan, one condolence visit. Not one page of it touches violence, money or foreign direction — and the question Fu Yonggang asked in court still has no answer: which part of those actions constitutes subversion? If a regime truly believes articles can subvert it, what it fears is not the articles but their being read. The judgment is candid on the point: fourteen articles that "attacked and smeared the state power and the socialist system". Fourteen articles for ten and a half years — nine months apiece, on average — is itself a price list for speech, fit to be posted on a wall. Second, the licence that was never issued in 2005. He passed the judicial examination — the state's own examination, the state's own pass mark — and the issuing authority told him it did not count because of who he was. Block a party organiser's road to the bar; then put him in the dock twice for organising and writing; then finish the job at the social-security counter. Three steps across twenty years, one logic: this man's civic standing is to be withdrawn item by item. Third, the substance of the pension fight. Inside the counter clerk's answer sits this case's most complete sentence: prison time is convertible, deductible against contribution years. Yet no statute anywhere says so; the authority invoked is a departmental reply letter whose full text cannot be obtained. The judgments deprived him of liberty and political rights, and that stands written in the judgments; the pension deduction stands written in no document at all — the man himself must refund first, repay later, and run every procedure to chase it. His January 2026 sentence is exact: the judgments did not deprive him of his socio-economic rights. Fourth, record the man's own sense of time. In prison he told the staff that what is right needs no re-education and what is wrong he would not accept if beaten to death; after release, the first great thing he did was to carry his contribution records to the social-security hall and demand, item by item, that the other side produce its legal basis. A sixty-year-old fighting an administrative procedure is still using the faith of the man who sat the judicial examination in 2005: rules, once written down, ought to count. This page places his request beside the roster and the judgment summaries because they are in truth a single file: on one side, a man's fourteen and a half years of cells and twenty-four years of contribution receipts; on the other, a judgment over fourteen articles and one unsigned reply letter. Which weighs more is left to the reader's scales.
Sources
- Independent Chinese PEN Center, Chen Shuqing file: birth date 26 September 1965 and birthplace Xindeng Town, Fuyang; and its republication of Human Rights in China's 15 September 2014 bulletin (Zhang Donghong's account of the 11 September 2014 seizure at about 1 p.m., the 3:30 p.m. search seizing a computer, phone, documents and badges with no inventory left, and the notice's 6 p.m. detention time) and of Radio Free Asia's 29 September 2015 trial report (Fu Yonggang and Liu Shuqing for the defence; witnesses refused; Zhang Donghong's account from the gallery).
- Human Rights in China, 2010 record: release from Qiaosi Prison on 13 September 2010 after the full four years; the rights covered by the one-year deprivation of political rights; the 2007 judgment's points on his organising role and articles; lawyer Li Jianqiang's comment; and the 2014 bulletin's background of the 1999 four-month detention, the November 2010 march-permit application, the 2014 joint statement and his account of Lü Gengsong's denied lawyer access.
- U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2006 analysis, "Authorities Release One China Democracy Party Leader, Detain Another Member": Chen's detention on the day of Zhu Yufu's release in September 2006; police questioning of Gao Haibin, Wu Yuanming and Wang Rongqing; the 1999 four-month detention; the 2005 licence refusal by the Zhejiang justice authorities after he passed the judicial examination, and his two failed appeals.
- Reporters Without Borders, August 2007 statement, and Reuters reporting of the same days (as transcribed by The Register and the Digital Media Law Project): the 16 August 2007 sentence of four years for inciting subversion of state power; Li Jianqiang's statement that the conviction was wrong; Li's subsequent one-year suspension by the Shandong authorities; the planned appeal.
- Amnesty International UK, China Human Rights Briefing, week of 14–21 September 2010: Chen's release at the end of his term, registered alongside those of Wu Yilong and Qin Yongmin.
- Agence France-Presse, 30 September 2015 (as carried by SpaceDaily): the 29 September 2015 Hangzhou trial; Fu Yonggang on the charges resting on CDP membership; both men's not-guilty pleas; the background of the 2007 first case.
- Committee to Protect Journalists, June 2016 statement, "Two Chinese writers sentenced for 'subversion'" (issued New York, 16 June; published 17 June): the 17 June 2016 sentences of eleven years and ten years six months; Fu Yonggang's relay of the judgment's fourteen-articles wording and the "attacked and smeared" formula; Fu's statement that writing articles should not be a crime and that Chen would appeal; Bob Dietz's statement; both men counted among the 49 journalists in CPJ's prison census.
- Chris Buckley, New York Times, 20 June 2016 (as registered in Chinese Wikipedia's references): the 17 June 2016 sentences of the two men.
- Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2017, China chapter: Chen's sentence of ten years and six months; the articles published on Boxun and Canyu.
- China Change, 2015 roster of prisoners of conscience: the renewed criminal detention of September 2014; custody at the Hangzhou Detention Center; the postponed May 2015 trial date; his 1989 graduate-student status.
- Zhu Yufu (compiler), "Roster of Persecuted Zhejiang China Democracy Party Members" (20 November 2024; carried by the Rights Defence Network on 21 November 2024 and reposted on Chen Shuqing's Medium account): twenty-three Zhejiang party members sentenced; a combined 151 years; Chen's combined fourteen and a half years; his term expiring in March 2025.
- Chen Shuqing, "Social Pension Insurance and the Credibility of Government", with the appended Government Information Disclosure Request (his own Medium account; published 22 December 2025; request dated 21 December 2025): the final release on completion of sentence on 10 March 2025; the 17 December 2025 retirement application at the Gongshu bureau and its refusal; 24 years and 4 months of pool contributions; nine years and a bit remaining after deduction of both terms; the demand to refund first; the post-release catch-up payments, including in-prison periods, completed without objection; the contents and reasoning of the two disclosure demands. (His identity-card number, telephone number and full address, printed in the original, are not reproduced here.)
- Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, 2 March 2026, "China: Reinstate Pension Benefits to Freed Prisoners of Conscience": Chen's completion of the ten-and-a-half-year term at Hangzhou's Qiaosi Prison in March 2025; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's 2019 determination that his detention was arbitrary; the Gongshu office's figure of only 9 years and 10 months of more than 24 years counting, with refund first and repayment over years; his February 2026 application for administrative review of the ministry policies; the quotation of his January 2026 article; and the nine parallel cases and the 2001 departmental reply letter as institutional background.
- Opposition Party magazine, post-release interview, "You Can Imprison My Body but You Cannot Reform My Beliefs": his account of the prison re-education regime and labour; the coexistence reached with staff; his thanks to family, overseas activists and international organisations; the self-description "I'm a fighter". (Single-source personal account, presented as such in the text.)
- Chinese Wikipedia, Chen Shuqing entry: criminal detention on 13 September 2006; the July 2007 trial and refusal to plead guilty; Qiaosi Prison; release on 13 September 2010; the loss of his job over his articles. (Where its birth year and 2016 charge wording conflict with grade-one sources, see the verification note; not adopted.)