第106案 | 程渊Case 106 | Cheng Yuan
他做的事，是替艾滋病人、乙肝患者和残障者打就业歧视官司：2013年，他参与办下中国第一起艾滋病就业歧视获赔案；2016年，他与杨占青创办长沙富能，用信息公开申请和诉讼为边缘群体维权。2019年7月，他在深圳被长沙国安带走，妻子被蒙上黑头套审讯了十七八个小时，三岁的女儿在场。此后是教科书式的隔绝：六名家属律师被一纸通知「解聘」，开庭不通知家属，判决不送达——他的五年刑期，是父亲收到监狱入监通知书才确认的：2021年5月25日，长沙市中级人民法院以颠覆国家政权罪判他五年。同案的刘大志二年、吴葛健雄三年。联合国任意拘留问题工作组早在2020年就认定这是任意拘留，要求立即释放；没有用。他在赤山监狱的高严管区被单独关押三个月，在缝纫车间里踩了不知多少个十三到十五小时。2024年7月21日他刑满出狱，视频里的妻子说，他老了二十岁。出狱后他仍被监视、被剥夺政治权利——多少年，没有任何公开记录写过这个数字；2025年至今，公开世界里没有他的新消息。His work was suing for people living with HIV, hepatitis B patients and persons with disabilities: in 2013 he helped win China's first compensated HIV employment-discrimination case, and in 2016 he co-founded Changsha Funeng with Yang Zhanqing, defending marginalised groups with information-disclosure applications and lawsuits. In July 2019 Changsha state security took him away in Shenzhen; his wife was hooded and interrogated for some seventeen to eighteen hours, with their three-year-old daughter present. What followed was textbook isolation: six family lawyers "dismissed" by a single notice, a trial the families were never told of, a judgment never served — his five-year term was confirmed only when his father received a prison-admission notice: on 25 May 2021 the Changsha Intermediate Court had sentenced him to five years for subversion of state power. His colleagues Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong received two and three years. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had already found the detention arbitrary in 2020 and demanded immediate release; it changed nothing. He spent three months in solitary confinement in Chishan Prison's high-security wing, and uncounted thirteen-to-fifteen-hour days at a sewing machine. He was released on 21 July 2024; on video, his wife said he had aged twenty years. He remains under surveillance and deprived of political rights — for how many years, no public record anywhere states; and since 2025 the public world has carried no fresh news of him.
The man: a decade from Justice for All to Changsha Funeng
Set the man's outline first, because everything in this case grew out of what he was doing. Cheng Yuan's birth particulars are not consistent across the sources, and this page carries the two versions side by side from the outset: Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) gives 18 October 1973, born in Nanjing; ChinaAid describes him as a native of Changsha, Hunan, who moved to Shenzhen. One version speaks to a birthplace, the other to ancestral home and upbringing, and they do not necessarily contradict each other — but this site holds no identity document by which to decide between them, so it carries both unmerged and avoids any precise age calculation in the text. His career timeline, by contrast, is supported by several sources. In the late 2000s he began providing legal aid to vulnerable groups, first with the public-interest organisation Justice for All （天下公， "Tianxia Gong"), and thereafter worked for years on anti-discrimination cases for hepatitis B carriers and people living with HIV/AIDS, helping to ease systemic prejudice against the two conditions in China (CHRD).
Among the cases he handled, one is recorded by several organisations as a landmark. In 2013 he worked on China's first-ever case in which a person living with HIV received compensation for employment discrimination — a case from Jinxian County, Jiangxi (Amnesty International has him "leading" the landmark lawsuit; ChinaAid has his client receiving compensation; CHRD has him "supporting" the case — the three verbs differ in strength, and this page takes their common core: he was one of the people who handled the case, and it was China's first compensated HIV employment-discrimination case). Amnesty International further records that over the past decade he represented clients in, or otherwise handled, roughly a dozen discrimination cases and contributed to reducing institutional discrimination against hepatitis B carriers. He also worked persistently, through litigation and advocacy, towards abolishing the one-child policy and reforming the household-registration system, and took part in anti-torture work (U.S. State Department 2020 human-rights report; CHRD). All of these activities shared one feature: they used only the instruments the system itself supplies — courts, lawsuits, and applications for the disclosure of government information. The disclosure application was later Changsha Funeng's most-used advocacy tool (CHRD).
One widespread error about his identity must be corrected before it travels further: Cheng Yuan is not a lawyer. Several of ChinaAid's English-language reports call him a "human-rights lawyer" and even say he ran a prominent law firm. That is wrong. His organisation did not employ human-rights lawyers; it connected public-interest groups with lawyers and coordinated training and advocacy campaigns (co-founder Yang Zhanqing's explanation to National Public Radio, as relayed by reporting). Cheng Yuan's own role was that of an NGO director and legal advocate. The U.S. State Department's 2019 report, which styles all three men "public interest lawyers", is equally loose. This page calls him throughout what he was: a public-interest worker and anti-discrimination advocate. The correction is not pedantry. An NGO staffer and a practising lawyer jailed for subversion in China are two different kinds of case, and the archive does not promote the first into the second even if the second sounds grander.
His family makes up the other main line of this archive: his wife Shi Minglei, and a daughter who was three years old in July 2019 (several sources agree). Before July 2019 the family's life was centred on Shenzhen: Cheng Yuan was taken away in Shenzhen, and his wife and daughter then lived there too (ChinaAid; U.S. State Department 2019 report). Shortly before he was taken, he had travelled to Hong Kong to deal with personal and organisational matters (CHRD); on the same source's account, he was not involved in the public protests then taking place in that city. That sentence belongs here, because what the interrogators returned to afterwards was exactly his Hong Kong trip, his organisation's funding sources and his role at Funeng (ChinaAid's case page). A public-interest worker makes a business trip to Hong Kong, and comes home to the outline of a state-security interrogation: that was China in 2019.
Changsha Funeng: an organisation that sued for the sick and disabled, and how it was characterised
Changsha Funeng was established in February 2016, co-founded by Cheng Yuan and Yang Zhanqing (CHRD). Yang is himself a prominent anti-discrimination activist who had been detained for several months in 2015 in reprisal for his advocacy (CHRD). The organisation's remit is described with unusual consistency across sources: legal assistance for marginalised groups — people living with HIV, hepatitis B patients, persons with disabilities — using litigation against employment discrimination, together with policy advocacy (Amnesty International; ChinaAid; the State Department reports). National Public Radio's 2019 reporting supplied an outside view: after Xi Jinping's rise set off a systematic purge of civil-society organisations, Changsha Funeng was one of the more established public-interest organisations still standing, and under Cheng Yuan it had won prominent court victories on discrimination against people with illnesses such as hepatitis B and AIDS; it had also begun supporting anti-discrimination litigation over the one-child policy and over restrictions on where citizens may live. The organisation had registered a branch in Hong Kong, where it received foreign funds and where Cheng Yuan regularly travelled on business (the same reporting).
Placed against this case's conviction logic, one attribution must be recorded as an attribution. Yang Zhanqing has said that the three men were targeted because their work had received overseas funding, which the ruling Communist Party regards as collusion with hostile foreign forces and a threat to national security (as relayed by Radio Free Asia; Front Line Defenders' reporting takes the same view). That is an explanatory judgement by a co-founder, and this page grades it as "Yang Zhanqing's account": it has great explanatory force, but not one line of any published indictment or judgment supports it — because this case's indictment and judgment have never been published. The structural background standing beside it does rest on documentary ground: the 2016 Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Non-Governmental Organizations gave the police power to investigate NGO activities, and activists who receive overseas funding stand at markedly greater risk of being treated as state-security threats (the Dui Hua Foundation's background note following its record of this case). In other words, Funeng was founded in the very year the foreign-NGO law was passed; the organisation lived under that law's shadow from its birth.
Funeng's way of working shows more concretely still in the biography of the co-defendant Liu Dazhi. Before joining Funeng, Liu founded the Changsha Chunyu Mutual Aid Team, which focused on workers' rights, help for victims of occupational diseases, and schooling for the children of families affected by workplace illness; he also worked on environmental questions — in 2014 he sought public disclosure of Changsha's tap-water quality data, and in 2017 he applied for disclosure of how biomedical waste in the city was disposed of, and in what quantities (CHRD). Wu Gejianxiong, by contrast, was a newcomer of twenty-four who had only recently joined the NGO field and worked mainly with lawyers on rights cases (the same source). Set the three men side by side — a sector veteran of ten years' anti-discrimination litigation, a middle-aged labour and occupational-disease organiser, and a young man born in 1995 who had barely started — and you have the trio later prosecuted together for "subversion of state power". The fullest arsenal they ever possessed consisted of information-disclosure forms, complaints filed in court, and training courseware. This page writes that sentence down without comment, as a point of comparison. The comparison arrives in the next section.
21 and 22 July 2019: two dates, and an arrest in front of a three-year-old
This case's timeline has two dates from its first day, and this page pins them both down unmerged. ChinaAid's case page records that on 21 July 2019 Cheng Yuan was suddenly taken away in Shenzhen by officers of Hunan's Changsha Municipal Bureau of State Security and immediately placed in residential surveillance at a designated location, the interrogation concentrating on his responsibilities at Changsha Funeng, its funding sources and his recent activities — above all his recent trip to Hong Kong. Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the International Service for Human Rights and most other case summaries record that the three men were criminally detained on 22 July; the U.S. State Department's 2019 report likewise dates the detention of 22 July, on suspicion of subversion of state power. The two dates are a day apart. The natural explanation — that being taken away and the issuing of a criminal-detention instrument are not the same day — is plausible, but no public document proves it, and this page records only: 21 July is the taking date (on a single ChinaAid chain), 22 July is the criminal-detention date (on multiple sources), and the case is sorted to 22 July throughout this site.
That day, one other person's experience matters as much as Cheng Yuan's own: his wife's. On the combined record of CHRD and ChinaAid: on 22 July state-security officers forcibly entered Shi Minglei's Shenzhen home — the State Department's 2019 report records that they seized her identification card, passport, mobile phone, computer and bank cards, and questioned her repeatedly afterwards about her husband's work — and she was handcuffed, hooded with black cloth and taken away for interrogation, threatened over her three-year-old daughter, and released in the small hours of the next day after some seventeen to eighteen hours. The duration is recorded differently: ChinaAid says roughly seventeen hours; CHRD says she was held for eighteen hours and released early the next morning. This page carries both figures side by side. Her daughter was present in the home. Five years later, the single thing Cheng Yuan said, after his release, had saddened him most was having been taken away in front of his daughter, and how frightened she had been (Radio Free Asia, 23 July 2024, on his wife's relay). Shi Minglei was afterwards herself placed under residential surveillance on a subversion charge, with personal items confiscated, although she had no ties to her husband's advocacy work (CHRD). On 3 August 2019 she filed a formal complaint about her treatment with the Hunan Provincial People's Procuratorate, the Changsha Municipal People's Procuratorate and the Hunan Provincial State Security Department, accusing the Changsha state-security authorities of unlawful abuse of power in opening a criminal case against her (the same source). Whether any reply ever came is a matter of no public record.
The family's first search for the missing men belongs in the archive too, because it set the tone of the following five years. On 24 July, lawyers and relatives went to the Wangcheng District Public Security Bureau in Changsha to ask where the three were; the Wangcheng police denied having ordered any detention. Only from 25 July did the authorities begin to let the families know that state-security officers had taken the men. Of the three families, only Wu Gejianxiong's received a formal criminal-detention notice; it listed his place of detention as a Hunan national-security detention facility, and a relative of one of the three later confirmed that all three were in fact held in the same Changsha custody facility (CHRD). Cheng Yuan's elder brother Cheng Hao travelled to Changsha to search for news, and told National Public Radio the sentence that sums up the next five years: after his brother was seized, the family was kept completely clueless, with no information at all. State-security officers meanwhile passed a message to the families: since the case allegedly involved national security, it would be difficult for defence lawyers and relatives to meet the detainees (CHRD). That message proved an accurate forecast — except that "difficult" understated it. In five full years, the lawyers the families hired never met their clients once.
Designated-location surveillance and the "dismissed" lawyers: how the procedure closed, step by step
The legal trajectory after the detention has documentary nodes, set out item by item. On 26 August 2019, as the thirty-seven-day limit on criminal detention approached, Cheng Yuan's lawyer received a phone call from the authorities: all three men had been formally arrested, the charge being subversion; Cheng's family later received a written arrest notice listing "Hunan State Security Hall" as his place of detention (CHRD). Thereafter the three men were held incommunicado for a long stretch: no access to the lawyers the families had retained, no contact with their families. The legal characterisation of that state of affairs came quickly — in April 2020 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention held the detention arbitrary (see the section on the international response). The procedure itself, by then, stood thus: between July 2019 and March 2020, the six lawyers retained for the three men had not been allowed to meet their clients a single time.
On 16 March 2020 all six defence lawyers received simultaneous notice from the authorities: they had been "dismissed" by the three men, at the three men's own request — a request that could not be verified, since the six lawyers had never once met the three men. CHRD's judgement on the record is that the decision was likely coerced, or unilaterally arranged by the government. The authorities then assigned the three men official lawyers of their own, but as of 5 May 2020 the procuratorate had still not given the families the appointed lawyers' names, nor answered the families' calls after 30 March (CHRD). On 23 March the Changsha police transferred the case to the procuratorate for review for indictment. On 10 July, Shi Minglei telephoned the Changsha Procuratorate and was told orally that the three men had been indicted on 24 June and the case transferred to the Changsha Intermediate People's Court to await trial — the family had received no written notification of any of it. On 17 July she further learned that a pre-trial meeting had already been held at the Intermediate Court on some unknown date, and that a trial could follow soon (CHRD). Read that procedural line straight through: an arrest whose details are not notified; retained lawyers "dismissed"; the appointed lawyers' names kept secret; an indictment the family learns of only by telephoning to ask; a pre-trial conference already over before the family hears of it. Every step wore the shell of a formality, and every step had the same practical effect — keeping the families and their lawyers outside the case.
The disagreement over the place of custody belongs in this section too, because it is itself part of the isolation. The arrest notice gives a Hunan Provincial State Security detention facility; Wu Gejianxiong's criminal-detention notice gives a national-security custody facility; CHRD's case page records the place of incarceration as the Changsha Kaifu District Detention Center; ChinaAid's 2021 reporting gives the Hunan Provincial State Security Department Detention Center. Four formulations very likely point at the same cluster of Changsha custody facilities, but the public record cannot align them into one exact address, and this page carries them side by side. When a family must guess where a man is held from four mutually inconsistent documents, that is not a clerical slip: it is the designed effect of residential surveillance at a designated location. First the disappearance; then, perhaps, the procedure.
The shifting name of the charge: from "inciting subversion" to "subversion" — a line this case requires in graded layers
This page gives the name of the charge a section of its own, because it is the easiest line in the case to write wrongly, and the one that must not be written wrongly. The conclusion shared by this site's commissioning check and its own re-check is that the charge's wording in the public record was never a straight line: it must be set out in layers, by stage and by source, and any account that merges the two offences into one falsifies the archive.
The first layer is the wording at the detention stage, and the summaries do not agree. Most case summaries used the graver name from the start: CHRD records the three men as criminally detained in July 2019 on suspicion of subversion of state power; the State Department's 2019 and 2020 reports both give subversion; the editor's note to Shi Minglei's anniversary memoir, carried by Human Rights in China, likewise gives criminal detention on suspicion of subversion. But some summaries used the lesser offence at the same stage: ChinaAid's report of 12 July 2022 states plainly that the three men were criminally detained on 22 July 2019 on the charge of "inciting subversion of state power" — and note that this is no stray slip, because the same article later records them convicted of subversion, so that the whole arc, "inciting subversion at detention → subversion at conviction", exists inside that single text. This page's treatment: the detention-stage charge is carried side by side as "suspected subversion (most summaries) / suspected inciting subversion (the wording of one ChinaAid report)"; this site retrieved neither the criminal-detention notice nor the arrest notice in any image or full text by which to rule between them. The only family confirmed to have received a detention notice at all was Wu Gejianxiong's, and the original wording of the charge on that notice has never been publicly transcribed.
The second layer, the conviction wording, is clear, and it holds this case's only quasi-documentary anchor. The Dui Hua Foundation's Prisoner Updates 2021 #8, on the admission notice issued by Hunan's Jinshi Prison on 17 September 2021, records precisely: Cheng Yuan was sentenced on 25 May 2021 by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court to five years for subversion of state power. Radio Free Asia's reporting throughout, Amnesty International's statement of 6 August 2021 and the State Department's 2021 report all give the conviction offence the same way: subversion of state power. That is to say, whatever appeared on the detention-stage paperwork — "inciting" or the thing itself — what sent Cheng Yuan to prison for five years was paragraph 1 of Article 105 of the Criminal Law, the offence of organising, plotting or carrying out subversion of state power and the overthrow of the socialist system — not paragraph 2's incitement. What that one word's difference means in this case is taken up in this site's commentary: the three Funeng men organised no subversive act that any public record shows; what the record shows them doing is litigating, applying for information disclosure and running training sessions. And the offence the court applied was not "incitement". It was subversion itself.
The third layer is the confusion sown by relay reporting, and this page names it item by item, so that later readers are not led by it. ChinaAid's report of 15 September 2021 turns 20 July 2021 into the date of the "secret trial" and gives the term's end as 2 July 2024 — both wrong: the hearing fell between 31 August and 4 September 2020; 20 July 2021 was the day the sentences of Liu and Wu surfaced; and Cheng's term expired on 21 July 2024. Radio Free Asia's release report of 23 July 2024 contains, in one passage, a swap of the co-defendants' terms — giving Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong three years and two years respectively, the reverse of the convergent record through Wu Youshui, Amnesty International and Dui Hua (Liu two, Wu three): this page follows the convergent record and flags the passage as that report's error. The State Department's 2019 report styling the three men "public interest lawyers" is likewise a broadening of identity, treated above. These errors are kept in the archive not to fault fellow reporters, but because this case's judgment has never been published: every relay error in a case without a text lives for years in the citation chain, and an archive's duty is to leave the next reader an errata table.
The secret trial: sometime between 31 August and 4 September 2020, and no notice to the families
The hearing's date range is one of the few facts in this case pinned down by several organisations in common: sometime between 31 August and 4 September 2020, the Changsha Intermediate People's Court tried Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong behind closed doors for subversion of state power (Front Line Defenders; Amnesty International's urgent-action update; Radio Free Asia; CHRD — all agreeing to the precision of "one day in that window"; which day remains a matter of no public record). By the hearing the three men had already been held incommunicado for nearly eighteen months — Radio Free Asia's reckoning — or, on Amnesty International's reckoning, cut off from families and lawyers for more than fourteen months. The two reckonings measure the same isolation and are carried side by side.
How did the families learn that a trial had happened? Not by notification. Amnesty International's record is that the families found out about the trial on 10 September, almost a week after it had ended, and that all family members were thereafter barred from entering the Changsha Intermediate People's Court. CHRD's record is more particular: the families had received no advance notice from the authorities or from the appointed lawyers, and it was Wu Gejianxiong's father who, telephoning the government-appointed lawyer, was told the trial was already over. No announcement of the hearing ever appeared on the court's website. A trial that decided between two and five years of three men's freedom thus "existed" in procedural terms and, in the public record, almost did not exist at all: no published date, no public gallery, no detail of the proceedings, no verdict pronounced in any forum the families could reach. How long the hearing lasted, what concrete facts the prosecution alleged, what the appointed lawyers argued, what Cheng Yuan himself said — all of it is a matter of no public record. This section can therefore only be written one way: by setting out the full list of what is not known. In this case, that list is the body of the procedural record.
After the hearing came a longer silence still. From September 2020 to July 2021 — close to eleven months — no judgment emerged, while the families asked everywhere and learned nothing. Amnesty International later summarised the stretch exactly so: the three men received their verdict and sentence only in July 2021, eleven months later. What happened in between — when the collegial panel deliberated, and why the delay — is a matter of no public record. Lay the timeline straight: taken in July 2019, indicted in June 2020, heard at the start of September 2020, and the verdict surfacing in fragments between May and July 2021. Between a man's arrest and his learning how many years he had been given, two full years passed — and he learned it not by service of a judgment but by asking around.
The verdict surfaces: 25 May, 20 July and 5 August 2021 — three dates, three different jobs
This case's judgment dates stand in the public record in three layers, and this page pins each layer down by its own evidentiary character, refusing to press them into one.
The first layer is 25 May 2021: Cheng Yuan's own sentencing date, and the evidence for it is the prison-admission notice sent by Hunan's Jinshi Prison to Cheng Yuan's father, dated 17 September 2021. On that notice, as Dui Hua records it, Cheng was sentenced on 25 May by the Changsha Intermediate Court to five years for subversion. This is the only item of judgment information in the whole public record that derives from an official document — and note what kind of document it is: not a judgment, but a prison's admission notice; the family confirmed the principal defendant's term from a slip of paper a prison mailed to his father. Dui Hua records at the same time that it had been "widely reported" that the three had been secretly tried and sentenced in May, but that Cheng's wife maintained the families had received no procedural documents at all — no indictment, no hearing notice — and had still not received the judgments after learning of the sentences in August; and that all three defendants were represented by court-appointed lawyers.
The second layer is 20 July 2021: the date the sentences of Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong surfaced. Wu Gejianxiong's father, the human-rights lawyer Wu Youshui, stated publicly in late July 2021 that his son had received three years and Liu Dazhi two years, in a judgment handed down on 20 July — but that he had no information at all about the sentence handed down to Cheng (Radio Free Asia, relayed by CHRD). At the same event Shi Minglei said her husband's sentence remained a mystery, and left a sentence several outlets quoted: that all the family could do was keep a record of the truth and fight against lies (her words as relayed by reporting; this page records the attribution and keeps the quotation short). Wu Youshui said, at the same event, that even where a case involves state secrets and cannot be tried in public, judgments must by law be announced publicly, and that the authorities had acted illegally throughout the case — refusing lawyer visits, failing to inform the families. He has also written a book about the case, its title taken from the case itself: The Stolen Right to a Defense (the same reporting). A practising lawyer's last "case" for his own son was a book. Its title is the case.
The third layer is 5 August 2021: the date Cheng Yuan's five years were confirmed to the outside world. Amnesty International's statement of 6 August 2021 records that a relative had ascertained the three men's fates the day before — Cheng Yuan five years, Wu Gejianxiong three, Liu Yongze (Liu Dazhi) two — and that Liu had been released on 22 July after serving his term as credited (on Amnesty's dating; the International Service for Human Rights gives Liu's release as 21 July, a one-day difference treated in the co-defendants' section). ChinaAid likewise dates its sources' report of Cheng's five years to 5 August. Not until then — eleven months after the September 2020 hearing, two years and a month after the July 2019 detention — was the case's outcome complete. And the manner of its completion dictates its archival form: Cheng's term rests on a prison-admission notice, Liu's and Wu's on a father's relay, and the judgment of the whole case is a document the families have never seen — the appointed lawyers refused to give the families copies of the sentencing documents (CHRD; Wu Youshui). CHRD further records that Shi Minglei made the verdict's contents public for the first time only in June 2023: two years after the judgment was made, the first text relating to it reached the world — released by the family, not announced by the court.
Shi Minglei: from the woman in the black hood to the witness before a congressional commission
At this point the archive must give the lens, in full, to Shi Minglei, because a large share of this case's public record was carried by her alone. Return first to 22 July 2019: handcuffed, hooded in black cloth, interrogated for some seventeen to eighteen hours, threatened over her three-year-old daughter, released in the small hours of the next day, and afterwards placed for a time under residential surveillance on a subversion charge, her identity documents and bank cards seized (CHRD; State Department 2019 report). The memoir she published on the first anniversary of the detention, carried by Human Rights in China, is prefaced by an editor's note summarising that year: the case-handling authorities treated a woman with no connection to the case as a criminal, showed no credentials, intimidated the family and treated it as a hostage, and her three-year-old daughter had been traumatised in spirit (the memoir is a family member's own account, and this page grades it as such). Through July 2020 she was still living in China, under surveillance, with her small daughter.
The turn came on 7 April 2021: with ChinaAid's assistance — the association's own word is "rescued" — Shi Minglei arrived in the United States with her daughter (ChinaAid and Radio Free Asia agree). Once in America she did three things that remain in the archive. The first was sustained public advocacy: at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington in 2022 she read a joint statement with Luo Shengchun, the wife of the imprisoned lawyer Ding Jiaxi, on behalf of their husbands (ChinaAid's reporting); and she testified about forced labour at Chishan Prison before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, recounting what Lee Ming-che had told her after his own release — an item this page records at the grade of media reporting on the hearing, the precise date to be taken from the Commission's own record rather than asserted here. The second was turning her husband's letters into evidence: when the family received Cheng Yuan's three letters in July 2022, it was she who disclosed the high-security wing's details in full to Radio Free Asia, and who named the chain of her information plainly — her husband's letters, the relay of fellow Chishan prisoner Lee Ming-che after his release, and the corroboration of other released prisoners (Radio Free Asia, July 2022). The third was tracing a supply chain and filing complaints: following the line that Chishan Prison produced Milwaukee Tool gloves, she launched a petition, wrote to the company and to retailers, and reported the matter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Customs — the subject of its own section below.
One general grading note on the Shi Minglei line belongs here. Her information about her husband's prison conditions has a clearly labelled source chain — Cheng's own letters, Lee Ming-che's relay, other former prisoners' accounts, her own petitioning research — but every link of that chain is a statement from one side: there has never been any response from the prison, and no independent investigative body has entered Chishan Prison to check. The archive's method is to lay the chain out as it is, with each link's attribution marked, rather than write the chain's far end as first-hand fact. The Chishan section and the Milwaukee section below are both written under that rule.
Jinshi admission, then Chishan's high-security wing: what the July 2022 letters home said
After the sentence, Cheng Yuan was first admitted to Hunan's Jinshi Prison — the path recorded by Dui Hua on the admission notice: the families learned only in October 2021 that he and Wu Gejianxiong had been taken into prison custody. The Jinshi admission notice is dated 17 September 2021 and was addressed to Cheng Yuan's father. Wu Gejianxiong's destination is recorded by Dui Hua as Hengzhou Prison, which notified his father by telephone; the International Service for Human Rights' 2022 update, however, records Wu leaving Chishan Prison at the end of his term. Between the two versions there may have been a transfer, or one record may be wrong; the public record cannot decide, and this page carries both (see the Verification Note). Cheng Yuan's own path is comparatively clear: on 18 January 2022 he was abruptly transferred to Hunan's Chishan Prison (ChinaAid, on his letters; Radio Free Asia in agreement). Chishan Prison, at Nanzui Town in Yuanjiang, Yiyang, is a Hunan prison known for holding heavy-sentence and political cases; the Taiwanese activist Lee Ming-che also served his 2017–2022 term there (his case is recorded elsewhere on this site).
His first three months at Chishan are the core of this case's prison record, and their source is three letters in his own hand. In early July 2022 — Radio Free Asia and ChinaAid give the family's receipt of the letters as 5 July; the joint statement of nine organisations in which ISHR took part gives 4 July, a one-day difference carried side by side — the family received three handwritten letters from Cheng Yuan, addressed to his elder sister, to his wife Shi Minglei, and to his father. The letters disclosed: on 18 January he had been transferred into Chishan and placed straight into the high-security wing, in solitary confinement, until 18 April; throughout, he was forbidden to write letters, forbidden to telephone his family, and forbidden to use the money on his card; he was subjected to forced labour; he had lost six kilograms and his hair had turned grey (ChinaAid's relay of the letters). Radio Free Asia's reporting adds the wing's concrete form: a tiny cell, bright lights, and chronic sleep deprivation (the same chain, through his wife's relay of the letters). He had broken no prison rule and offended no officer. ChinaAid relays his wife's conjecture that the treatment may have been connected to his refusal to plead guilty during the case — a conjecture by a family member, graded by this page as conjecture and not written as fact.
After those three months came the workshop. In his letter to his wife he wrote that he worked the sewing machine in the workshop by day, had barely any personal time, and was forced each evening to spend an hour in "study", learning the superiority of socialism and the happiness of the great national revival (the letters' content as relayed by ChinaAid; this page gives the substance rather than a word-for-word transcription). The length of the forced-labour day is recorded in two versions: his wife's account and ChinaAid give thirteen to fifteen hours a day; her petition elsewhere gives up to twelve hours a day at the sewing machine. Both figures come from the same source chain in different texts, and this page carries them side by side rather than taking the larger as fact. In his letter to his sister he also veiled the length of the work in two lines of a poem by Tao Yuanming (Wisconsin Watch's investigative reading of that letter, graded to the reporting). The in-prison reference point is Lee Ming-che: released at the end of his term in April 2022, Lee later told Shi Minglei that high-security prisoners suffered severe constipation from reduced rations, and that work at Chishan ran about thirteen hours a day with only a few days off around the Spring Festival (Radio Free Asia, July 2022; Wisconsin Watch's interview with Lee). Lee and Cheng were in the same prison in different cases; Lee's testimony can establish Chishan's general regime, not Cheng Yuan's every individual day. This page therefore files Lee's account at the level of "the prison's general conditions", keeps Cheng's personal record to his own letters, and does not mix the two levels.
Two later nodes must also be recorded. First: in the written testimony of Luo Shengchun — the wife of Ding Jiaxi — to a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on 1 February 2024, an enumeration of forced labour at Chishan Prison mentions that Cheng Yuan had been moved to a different unit within Chishan where he no longer had to perform forced labour, according to his wife Shi Minglei (the testimony text, retrieved and checked by this site, quotations kept short). The high-security wing and the sewing workshop were thus not the whole of his five years; when the transfer happened, and what conditions followed, is a matter of no public record beyond that single relay. Second: his contact with his family was severed for a long stretch. The joint statement of nine human-rights organisations in July 2022 recorded that Cheng Yuan's access to his family had been fully cut off since October 2021, and that the three letters of July 2022 were a rare exception in that blackout. In nearly three years, a family confirming that a man sentenced to five years was still alive held, as evidence, three letters.
Milwaukee Tool: a petition, an investigation, and a customs detention order
This section records the one line in the case that grew out of the prison walls and into a transnational supply chain — and the most consequential thing Shi Minglei did in America. Its starting point was Lee Ming-che: after his release he told her that prisoners at Chishan were forced to sew work gloves bearing the "Milwaukee" brand. She cross-checked with other released prisoners and obtained corroboration (Wisconsin Watch's investigation; ChinaAid's reporting). Her statement in the petition, as relayed by ChinaAid in November 2022, runs in substance: her husband was used as slave labour in the Chishan workshop producing Milwaukee products daily; the long hours without protection had left him with severe back, shoulder and lower-back pain, his hair wholly white, his weight under 110 pounds, and blood in his stool. That paragraph is her statement in a petition, and this page grades it as a family petitioner's assertion; its health details have no independent verification (see the Verification Note). The other face of the same record must be pinned with equal firmness: Shi Minglei herself told investigative reporters that she could not verify that Cheng Yuan was personally making Milwaukee Tool products; what she could establish were two distinct things — former prisoners' accounts that the prison undertook production for the Milwaukee brand, and her own husband's forced labour at a sewing machine in the same prison (Wisconsin Watch). The archive stops exactly there. Cheng Yuan's forced labour rests on his own letters. Chishan's production of gloves for the Milwaukee supply chain rests on former prisoners' testimony and customs data. The sentence "Cheng Yuan sewed Milwaukee gloves" fuses the two into a third claim, and this page does not take that step for anyone — she herself declined to take it.
The chain of procedure and outcome, by contrast, rests on public documents, itemised here. In November 2022 Shi Minglei launched a petition on Change.org calling on Milwaukee Tool to stop sourcing from the prison, and wrote to the company's president; the same month she reported the alleged forced labour to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (ChinaAid, 4 November 2022; Wisconsin Watch). The workshop figures in her petition were: between 4,800 and 14,400 Milwaukee gloves produced daily; thirteen to fifteen hours of labour a day; four days off a year; and monthly pay of 13.80 U.S. dollars, about two per cent of an ordinary Chinese factory worker's wage (the petition text as relayed by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre; this page grades the figures as the petitioner's own). Milwaukee Tool's reply was that the company does not tolerate forced labour, had conducted a thorough investigation of the claims, and had "found no evidence to support the claims being made" (its statement to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre). In June 2023 Wisconsin Watch published its investigation (reporter Zhen Wang, supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism): two former prisoners separately confirmed that the prison produced Milwaukee-branded gloves — Lee Ming-che identified four types he had been forced to make — regulatory filings in China showed a Shanghai supplier had been contracted to manufacture "Performance" gloves for a subsidiary of Milwaukee Tool's parent company, and an analysis of customs shipping data showed thirteen shipments of work gloves from Shanghai arriving at U.S. ports since the summer of 2019 with Milwaukee Electric Tool Co. listed as consignee (the investigation's conclusions, carried here with their attribution). Walmart subsequently removed Milwaukee-branded gloves from its third-party platform (Wisconsin Watch's follow-up reporting).
The chain lands on 10 April 2024, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a Withhold Release Order against Shanghai Select Safety Products Company and two affiliated companies, on information that "reasonably indicates the use of convict labor" in their production, contrary to the U.S. law barring imports made with forced labour (the CBP order as reported by Wisconsin Watch in May 2024). The order came seventeen months after Shi Minglei's petition. Its legal meaning must be stated precisely: a withhold release order proceeds on a standard of "reasonably indicates", not on any court's final finding of forced-labour fact; it targets the supplier, not Milwaukee Tool itself; and Milwaukee Tool continues to deny that its supply chain involves forced labour. But the other face must be stated with equal precision: an exiled prisoner's wife, armed with her husband's letters, a fellow prisoner's testimony and her own complaint, moved the United States' customs authority, in seventeen months, to close a door on a Chinese supplier. In the whole record of this case, that is the single point at which the family's action changed something in the real world. This site's commentary returns to it below.
The international response: a UN finding of arbitrary detention, and four years of State Department reports
This case's international record is denser than most NGO cases of its kind, and it began early. It is set out item by item.
At the United Nations there were two steps. First, on 11 December 2019, six UN human rights experts (Special Procedures mandate-holders) wrote jointly to the Chinese government expressing serious concern at the three men's short-term disappearance, the grave charges against them, and their being precluded from contact with their families and legal representation in order to mount a defence (ISHR's explainer on the UN experts' actions; the correspondence as archived by CHRD; the Chinese government replied on 23 December 2019, a reply this page does not reproduce verbatim). The second step is the case's central international instrument: Opinion No. 11/2020 of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, adopted at its 87th session (27 April to 1 May 2020) and published around 5 June 2020, finding the detention of Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong arbitrary and urging their immediate release (Front Line Defenders' compilation of UN-level actions; ISHR's explainer). The opinion's reasoning, as relayed by the joint statement of nine organisations in 2022, resolves into three points: the detention lacked a plausible legal basis, "subversion of state power" being a broadly-worded provision; it violated the men's rights to a fair trial and due process; and it constituted discrimination on the grounds of political opinion and of their status as human rights defenders, contrary to Articles 2 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This page did not study the opinion's text paragraph by paragraph, and grades those three points to the joint statement's and ISHR's relays; the opinion's number and adoption dates rest on Front Line Defenders' compilation and on the original-text links archived by CHRD. China did not implement the opinion. The three men went on to serve, after its adoption, more than four further years, three years and two years respectively, without a single day's reduction. This page prints the opinion in full archival form all the same, because its existence measures the exact distance between international law and domestic execution in this case.
Amnesty International's record has three parts: a 2019 urgent action (UA 113.19) calling for the men's release; a September 2020 update recording the secret trial and the families' learning of it only on 10 September, and designating the three prisoners of conscience; and, on 6 August 2021, a statement by the head of its China team on the confirmation of the sentences, demanding the immediate and unconditional release of Cheng Yuan and Wu Gejianxiong, who remained in prison, and noting that the government-appointed lawyers had refused even to inform the trio's relatives of their fates (Amnesty International). Front Line Defenders followed the case continuously, recording the hearing window and the lawyers' exclusion, and maintains the compilation page of UN actions on human-rights defenders in China. CHRD built the three men's case page and made repeated submissions to the UN (including on 19 September 2019). ISHR published a bilingual explainer for the third anniversary of the detention, setting out all of the UN experts' actions, and on 20 July 2022 joined eight other organisations in demanding that China guarantee Cheng Yuan's communication with his family, end the ill-treatment, and let Wu Gejianxiong leave prison at the end of his term without restriction. After the verdicts surfaced in July 2021, further joint appeals were issued by human-rights organisations and specialist networks such as hepCoalition (the joint letters as archived by CHRD).
The continuity of the United States' official record deserves separate treatment, because it forms a documentary chain independent of the media. The State Department's China human-rights reports carried this case in four successive years. The 2019 report records the three men's detention on 22 July, the repeated questioning of Shi Minglei and the seizure of her property, and that neither of the two lawyers retained by Cheng Yuan's family had been able to meet him by year's end (that report styles the three "public interest lawyers" — see the Verification Note). The 2020 report records their September trial without notice to families or lawyers, Cheng Yuan's litigation work against torture and on the one-child policy and household registration, and that the trial's outcome remained unknown at year's end. The 2021 report records the secret trial's sentences of two to five years in July, that despite a legal requirement the sentences were not made public, and that the families learned of them through informal channels. The 2022 report records Radio Free Asia's publication of the contents of a letter from Cheng Yuan in Chishan Prison concerning his treatment there. (Each year's entry was checked by this site against the reports' text as retrieved.) The Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2023 annual report likewise mentions that Cheng Yuan and Lee Ming-che were forced to work in detention and convicted under broad, vaguely defined state-security charges for exercising rights recognised under international law (the report's executive summary). Finally, Amnesty International's annual report on 2024 lists Cheng Yuan among the human-rights defenders released that year, stating expressly that all three of the defenders it names continued to face restrictions on their freedom of movement after release and were deprived of political rights (the report as archived via ecoi.net). That is, at present, the only institutional-level public record of the execution of Cheng's additional penalty of deprivation of political rights. Its number of years remains a matter of no public record.
On the Chinese official side, the record stands in direct contrast: within the sources consulted, this site found no bulletin, press answer or statement of any kind on this case from mainland official media, any court, or the foreign ministry. The government's one formal response on the case that this site retrieved was its reply to the six UN experts' letter of December 2019 (see above). The judgment appears on no China Judgments Online; the hearing was never announced; the term was confirmed only by a prison-admission notice. The total of this case's official text is, in effect, zero. That structure — the official zero-text — is the same as in the case of Ruan Xiaohuan (Case No. 105 on this site). It is not this page's rhetoric; it is a factual feature the two cases share.
The two co-defendants: Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong
Liu Dazhi is also known as Liu Yongze — the variants belong in the record side by side: Amnesty International, the State Department reports and ChinaAid mostly use "Liu Yongze"; CHRD and Dui Hua use "Liu Dazhi". They are the same man, and CHRD's case page states the alias expressly. Born on 16 May 1977 in Hunan, he joined Changsha Funeng in 2017; before that he founded the Changsha Chunyu Mutual Aid Team, working on labour rights, aid for victims of occupational disease and schooling for children in families hit by workplace illness, and he had run information-disclosure applications on tap-water quality and biomedical-waste disposal (CHRD). He received two years, the lightest of the three sentences. His release date carries a one-day discrepancy: Amnesty International gives release on completion of his term on 22 July 2021; ISHR's explainer gives 21 July; Dui Hua gives release after the conviction. This page records release at the end of July 2021, the two dates side by side. Of his public trace after release there is no public record: his name appears afterwards only as one third of the "Changsha Three", and he himself appears in no later reporting of any kind.
Wu Gejianxiong was born on 1 January 1995 in Hangzhou (CHRD), was twenty-four when detained, had only recently entered the NGO field, and worked mainly alongside lawyers on rights cases. His father Wu Youshui is a Zhejiang human-rights lawyer — which made the Wu family the most methodical voice among the three households: the criminal-detention notice was received only by the Wu family; the fact that the trial was already over emerged from Wu Youshui's telephone call; the sentences of Liu and Wu were announced to the world by Wu Youshui; and he wrote a book recording the whole case, The Stolen Right to a Defense. Wu Gejianxiong received three years. His prison is recorded inconsistently: Dui Hua gives Hengzhou Prison, which notified his father of the admission by telephone; ISHR's update of August 2022 records that he left Chishan Prison on completion of his sentence on 21 July 2022 and was reunited with his father in Hangzhou. Between the two versions there may have been an inter-prison transfer; the public record cannot decide, and this page carries both. His release date: ISHR's post-release update gives 21 July, against an earlier general expectation of 22 July; this page follows the update's 21 July and carries the expectation alongside. Of his public trace after release there is no public record.
Set the three men's sentences and fates side by side and this case's sentencing logic speaks for itself: five years for the founder who had done a decade of anti-discrimination litigation, two years for the labour mutual-aid backbone, three years for the young man who had barely started. The terms do not run in proportion to "seniority"; they run in proportion to the role the case-handlers assigned each man — a role whose basis has never been published in any form. Their release dates fell in July 2021, July 2022 and July 2024 respectively, spaced as neatly as an arithmetic exercise. This page records the neatness and looks for no reason behind it.
21 July 2024: the sentence completed, and a wife's "twenty years older"
On Sunday 21 July 2024 Cheng Yuan was released from Chishan Prison at the completion of his sentence (Radio Free Asia, 23 July 2024; the date and the weekday have been checked against each other by this site). Five years earlier, in the same week, he had been taken away in Shenzhen; five years on, in the same week, he walked out of prison. His wife Shi Minglei had by then been living in the United States for more than three years, and the couple met by video call. Her account to Radio Free Asia is graded by this page as a family member's own testimony, with quotations kept short: she was shocked when she saw him — he looked twenty years older than when he was taken away; he was very thin, with a very dark tan and bald, with broken teeth. She recorded that his humour had survived: he joked that she should not tell anyone he was bald, so that people would still remember him as good-looking. Of his five years inside he had, at first, said little, saying he needed more time to process it; the thing he returned to, and that had saddened him most, was having been arrested in front of his daughter and how scared she had been; and he apologised to his family, feeling he had failed in his responsibilities as a husband and father (the same report). These details stand in this archive because they are, to date, the only first-hand record of Cheng Yuan's state on release — a wife's single video call across the Pacific.
Release was not freedom, and the reporting says so concretely: Cheng Yuan remained under restrictions after leaving prison, likely with a security detail following him wherever he went; he told his wife he wanted to visit her family, and she advised him not to, fearing the followers would frighten her family again; there was no guarantee he would be allowed to join his wife and daughter in the United States; and Shi feared that if he resumed his old work in China he could be arrested again at once (the same report). Amnesty International's annual report on 2024 states the position in matching terms: released defenders continued to face restrictions on their freedom of movement and were deprived of political rights (see the international-response section). The length of Cheng Yuan's deprivation of political rights, and its start and end dates, are a matter of no public record — this site searched that item repeatedly through the sources consulted, and the finding is that nothing was found: no organisation and no report anywhere states the figure. That a man should still be deprived of political rights for an unknown number of years after completing his sentence, and that the number can be entered in the archive only as "not found", is itself part of this case's record.
For the period after his release, this page conducted the dedicated 2025–2026 search its standard requires, and the conclusion must be written honestly: there is no public record. Searching Chinese- and English-language sources for January 2025 to November 2026 under the names Cheng Yuan, Changsha Funeng and Shi Minglei, this site found, apart from the institutional databases' historical case pages, relays of the July 2024 release reporting and the older reporting on which this page rests, no new report of Cheng Yuan's post-release whereabouts, health, work, or any renewed summons or harassment; and no new public advocacy by Shi Minglei has been found since the April 2024 customs order. Set against the density of her public voice between 2021 and 2024, this silence admits two readings — a life settling into quiet, or channels and will to speak both fading — and this page chooses neither. It records the silence itself: as of 1 November 2026, more than two years after the principal defendant in the Changsha Funeng case walked out of prison, the public world holds no fresh news of him.
Timeline
18 October 1973: Cheng Yuan is born (CHRD gives Nanjing as his birthplace; ChinaAid describes him as a Changsha native — the two versions stand side by side; see the Verification Note).
Late 2000s: Cheng Yuan begins public-interest legal aid, first with Justice for All, then working for years on hepatitis B and HIV anti-discrimination cases (CHRD).
2013: He works on China's first compensated HIV employment-discrimination case (Jinxian County, Jiangxi; Amnesty International, ChinaAid and CHRD, in wordings of differing strength).
February 2016: Cheng Yuan and Yang Zhanqing co-found Changsha Funeng; the same year, the Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas NGOs is passed.
2017: Liu Dazhi joins Changsha Funeng (CHRD).
21 July 2019: Cheng Yuan is taken away in Shenzhen by the Changsha Municipal Bureau of State Security and placed in residential surveillance at a designated location (ChinaAid's account).
22 July 2019: Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong are criminally detained (most case summaries). The same day, state-security officers enter Shi Minglei's Shenzhen home and seize her documents and cards; she is handcuffed, hooded and interrogated for some seventeen to eighteen hours, released in the small hours of the next day, and later placed under residential surveillance herself. Her daughter is three.
24–25 July 2019: Families and lawyers seek the men at the Wangcheng District Public Security Bureau in Changsha without result, and only afterwards learn the men were taken by state security; only the Wu family receives a detention notice.
3 August 2019: Shi Minglei files a complaint with the Hunan provincial and Changsha municipal procuratorates and the provincial state-security department.
26 August 2019: The three men are formally arrested; Cheng Yuan's family later receives an arrest notice giving "Hunan State Security Hall" as the place of detention.
19 September 2019: CHRD and others make a submission on the case to the United Nations.
11 December 2019: Six UN human-rights experts write jointly to the Chinese government expressing serious concern; China replies on 23 December.
16 March 2020: The six family-retained lawyers are notified that they have been "dismissed" by the three men, replaced by government appointees; the lawyers have never been allowed a single meeting. On 23 March the case is transferred to the procuratorate for review for indictment.
27 April–1 May 2020: The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, at its 87th session, adopts Opinion No. 11/2020 finding the three men's detention arbitrary and urging their immediate release; the opinion is published around 5 June 2020.
24 June 2020: The three men are indicted (Shi Minglei learns of it only by telephoning the Changsha Procuratorate on 10 July).
21 July 2020: Shi Minglei's first-anniversary memoir is published (carried by Human Rights in China).
One day between 31 August and 4 September 2020: The Changsha Intermediate People's Court tries the three men behind closed doors; the families receive no notice and learn around 10 September that the hearing is over.
7 April 2021: Shi Minglei arrives in the United States with her daughter, with ChinaAid's help.
25 May 2021: Cheng Yuan is sentenced by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court to five years for subversion of state power (on the Jinshi Prison admission notice, recorded by Dui Hua).
20 July 2021: The sentences of Liu Dazhi (two years) and Wu Gejianxiong (three years) surface through Wu Youshui; Cheng Yuan's term is still unknown.
Late July 2021 (21 or 22 July, the two datings side by side): Liu Dazhi is released at the end of his term.
5 August 2021: Cheng Yuan's five-year term is confirmed through the family; on 6 August Amnesty International issues its statement demanding the release of Cheng Yuan and Wu Gejianxiong.
17 September 2021: Jinshi Prison issues its admission notice to Cheng Yuan's father; the family learns of his admission into prison only in October.
18 January 2022: Cheng Yuan is transferred to Chishan Prison and placed straight into the high-security wing in solitary confinement, with letters and calls banned, until 18 April; he is subjected to forced labour during this period.
April 2022: Lee Ming-che is released at the end of his term and later relays Chishan's regime, and the production of Milwaukee-branded gloves, to Shi Minglei.
4 or 5 July 2022 (the two datings side by side): The family receives Cheng Yuan's three letters home, disclosing the high-security wing, bright lights, sleep deprivation and sewing-machine labour. On 20 July ISHR and eight other organisations issue their joint statement demanding his rights be ensured.
November 2022: Shi Minglei launches her petition against Milwaukee Tool and reports the alleged forced labour to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
June 2023: Wisconsin Watch publishes its investigation into Chishan Prison and the Milwaukee supply chain; the same month, Shi Minglei makes the verdict's contents public for the first time (on CHRD's record).
1 February 2024: Luo Shengchun's written testimony to a CECC hearing records that Cheng Yuan has been moved, on his wife's account, to a unit at Chishan where he no longer performs forced labour.
10 April 2024: U.S. Customs and Border Protection issues a Withhold Release Order against Shanghai Select Safety Products Company and two affiliates, on information reasonably indicating the use of convict labour.
21 July 2024 (Sunday): Cheng Yuan completes his sentence and is released from Chishan Prison; he video-calls his wife and daughter in the United States, and his wife describes him as "twenty years older". After release he remains under surveillance and deprived of political rights (whose length is a matter of no public record).
2025 to 1 November 2026: This site has found no public record of any post-release development concerning Cheng Yuan.
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case stays with this case's own facts.
First, let us settle what this organisation actually "subverted". The whole of Changsha Funeng's public work record is: employment-discrimination lawsuits for people living with HIV, for hepatitis B patients and for persons with disabilities; applications for the disclosure of government information; training sessions; and policy advocacy. It won cases — the 2013 first compensated HIV employment-discrimination case for a person living with HIV is proof. Every instrument it used was one the system itself lays out on the table: the courts, the litigation law, the information-disclosure regulations. And the offence the court finally applied was not paragraph 2 of Article 105, "incitement", but paragraph 1, "subversion" — organising, plotting or carrying out the subversion of state power. Nothing in the public record shows these three men organising, plotting or carrying out anything that answers to the literal meaning of that word; what the record shows is complaints and application forms. This site's judgement is written here: when "subversion" can be used to convict an organisation that sues on behalf of the sick, the offence no longer punishes conduct; it punishes existence — the existence of a civil organisation that does not obey, that has foreign funding, and that keeps winning.
Second, this case's procedural record is a complete specimen of isolation, and it deserves to be inventoried ring by ring. At the arrest, a wife hooded and interrogated, threatened over her small daughter. Six lawyers retained, never permitted a meeting, then "dismissed" by a single notification. The appointed lawyers' names kept secret from the families; the judgment refused to them. A hearing held without notice, which the families learned of by telephoning. A verdict never served, the principal defendant's term confirmed only when a prison's admission notice reached his father's hands. Ring by ring, every ring wore a formality's shell, and every ring had the same effect: to disappear the defendants and their families out of the case. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found the detention arbitrary in the detention's ninth month and urged immediate release — and the three men were then held for four more years, three years and two years respectively, without a single day less. This page records that opinion not to prove that international law works, but to measure exactly how far it did not: from the finding of arbitrary detention to Cheng Yuan's completion of his sentence, four full years and two months.
Third, the absence of the judgment. To this day, the outside world's chain of proof for Cheng Yuan's five years is: a prison-admission notice, a co-defendant's father's relay, and the convergent reporting of several organisations. The judgment has not been published; the families never received it; it cannot be found on China Judgments Online. A judgment that put a public-interest worker away for five years does not, as a text, exist in any public space. That means the indictment's concrete facts, its evidence and the court's reasoning are all unexaminable; what can be examined is only the outcome — five years, three years, two years — and the procedure: secret, isolated, delayed. A regime confident in its own judgment has a cheap way to prove it: publish the judgment. It chose not to. This page is therefore written in unusual detail for a reason: where the state keeps no archive, a civil archive must keep every scrap of paper.
Fourth, the Chishan chapter leaves this site with two judgements that must not be merged. The first concerns the three months in the high-security wing disclosed by Cheng Yuan's letters — solitary confinement, bright lights, sleep deprivation, all communication cut, forced labour — imposed while the record shows no breach of any prison rule by him. His family conjectures a link to his refusal to plead guilty; this page keeps that as conjecture, but notes the harder fact beneath it: for imposing three months of total isolation on a sentenced prisoner, the public record contains no disciplinary instrument of any kind. The second concerns the workshop labour and the Milwaukee supply chain — the one thread in this case that produced a real-world consequence — and every step of it must be written at its own evidence level. Cheng Yuan at a sewing machine: his letters. Chishan producing Milwaukee-branded gloves: two former prisoners' testimony and customs data. Shanghai Select detained by U.S. Customs: an official U.S. instrument. All three levels are true; together they still do not add up to "Cheng Yuan personally sewed Milwaukee gloves" — a step Shi Minglei herself refused to take, and which an archive must therefore refuse as well. Whoever presses those three levels into a single slogan is not defending this case; they are consuming it.
Fifth, the person outside the walls. Shi Minglei's starting point was seventeen or eighteen hours in a black hood, threatened over her daughter. Her end point, so far as the public record runs, was a witness chair before a congressional commission and a U.S. Customs detention order. There is no miracle in between — only a repeatable path: keep every one of her husband's letters; verify every witness's words; file every complaint with the authority that actually has jurisdiction. What she did was exactly what Cheng Yuan had done inside China — use the instruments a system provides on behalf of the people that system would rather not see — simply in a different system. The two systems' answers to the same set of actions were, on one side, five years for subverting state power, and, on the other, a customs detention order. This page sets that contrast down as it stands, without adjectives.
Last, back to the man. The person who walked out of Chishan Prison on 21 July 2024 was thin, dark, bald and broken-toothed, twenty years older, still under surveillance, separated by an ocean from his wife and daughter, deprived of political rights for a term that even the organisations who care about him cannot discover. The last "major" thing he had done before prison was a business trip to Hong Kong to handle his organisation's affairs; the most famous case he ever won won compensation for a man with AIDS who had been refused a job. Case No. 106's archive ends here: after 2025, the public world holds no fresh news of him. May this silence be peace, and not another form of isolation. What an archive can do is record in full the man as he was before he went in, the manner of his going in, and the state in which he came out — so that silence does not become disappearance.
Verification Note
This site's characterisation: a case of persecution in which a state-security offence was used to strike an anti-discrimination public-interest organisation — Changsha Funeng's co-founder Cheng Yuan sentenced to five years for subversion of state power under paragraph 1 of Article 105 of the Criminal Law, in proceedings held wholly in secret, with family and retained lawyers excluded throughout, and the detention held arbitrary by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. It meets this site's criteria for the persecution archive. The source structure of the case must be stated first. The mainland authorities have never issued any bulletin, press answer or release on it, and neither the indictment nor the judgment has ever been published; the outside world's proof of the judgment rests on the Jinshi Prison admission notice (as recorded by the Dui Hua Foundation), on the co-defendant's father Wu Youshui's relay, and on convergent institutional reporting. This page accordingly uses the judgment's elements (court, sentencing date, offence, term) while flagging that no judgment text exists by which to verify them, their reliability resting on one fragment of official paper — an admission notice — and on the agreement of several independent organisations. Information from the family's side derives chiefly from Shi Minglei's accounts to Radio Free Asia and ChinaAid, her statements in the petition and in testimony, and her 2020 anniversary memoir, consistent in outline across tellings, with individual figures diverging as noted below.
Facts verified across sources: the founding of Changsha Funeng in February 2016 by Cheng Yuan and Yang Zhanqing and its remit of HIV, hepatitis B and disability anti-discrimination work (CHRD; Amnesty International; the State Department reports); Cheng Yuan's part in the 2013 first compensated HIV employment-discrimination case (Amnesty International; ChinaAid; CHRD, in wordings of differing strength); the criminal detention of the three men on 22 July 2019, their formal arrest on 26 August 2019 and their indictment on 24 June 2020 (CHRD's procedural record; the State Department's 2019 report); Shi Minglei's hooded interrogation the same day, the threats over her daughter and the seizure of her property (CHRD; the State Department's 2019 report); the six family lawyers never being granted a single meeting and being told on 16 March 2020 that they had been "dismissed" (CHRD; Front Line Defenders as relayed by RFA); the closed hearing on a day between 31 August and 4 September 2020 without notice to the families (Front Line Defenders; Amnesty International; CHRD; RFA); the sentences of Liu Dazhi (two years) and Wu Gejianxiong (three years) surfacing through Wu Youshui on 20 July 2021 (RFA; Amnesty International; Dui Hua); Cheng Yuan's five years, confirmed through the family on 5 August 2021 (Amnesty International; ChinaAid); Cheng's sentencing on 25 May 2021 for subversion by the Changsha Intermediate Court (Dui Hua, on the Jinshi Prison admission notice — the case's sole documentary anchor); Shi Minglei's arrival in the United States with her daughter on 7 April 2021 (ChinaAid; RFA); the transfer to Chishan Prison on 18 January 2022, solitary confinement in the high-security wing until 18 April, bright lights and sleep deprivation, and sewing-machine labour (his letters as relayed by ChinaAid and RFA, the two in agreement); his release at the end of his term on 21 July 2024, the post-release surveillance and the separation from his wife and daughter (RFA, 23 July 2024); and his deprivation of political rights after release (Amnesty International's annual report on 2024).
The charge wording, graded (the case's central point). At the detention stage, most summaries give "suspected subversion of state power" (CHRD; the State Department's 2019 and 2020 reports; the editor's note to Shi Minglei's memoir carried by Human Rights in China), while one ChinaAid report of July 2022 gives "suspected inciting subversion of state power". At the conviction stage, the wording is uniform: subversion (the admission notice as recorded by Dui Hua; RFA; Amnesty International; the State Department's 2021 report). Following the commissioning check, this page presents the arc — "inciting subversion" (some early-stage reporting) giving way to "subversion" (the documentary and conviction record) — in layers, unmerged, and it does not purport to settle the original wording of the detention notice: that notice's text has never been published, and the Wu family, the only family confirmed to have received one, has never transcribed its charge line publicly. It is likewise recorded that the State Department's 2019 report itself used "subversion" at the detention stage in English, so "inciting subversion" was a partial early usage, not the general rule; the text states the layering as it stands.
Source conflicts and this site's treatment. First, the taking and detention dates: ChinaAid gives the taking in Shenzhen on 21 July; most summaries give criminal detention on 22 July — recorded here in layers ("taken 21 July / criminally detained 22 July"), with the case sorted to 22 July. Second, Cheng Yuan's birth particulars: CHRD gives 18 October 1973, born in Nanjing; ChinaAid describes him as a Changsha native — carried side by side, unmerged, with age calculations avoided in the text. Third, the length of Shi Minglei's interrogation: ChinaAid gives about seventeen hours; CHRD gives eighteen hours in custody — carried side by side as "some seventeen to eighteen hours". Fourth, the sentencing dates in three layers: the admission notice gives Cheng's sentencing as 25 May 2021; Wu Youshui gives the handing-down of Liu's and Wu's judgments as 20 July; CHRD's case page header gives the sentencing date as unknown but in August 2021 (close to the 5 August external-confirmation date, and probably a confusion of confirmation date with sentencing date) — this page takes 25 May as Cheng's sentencing date, 20 July as the surfacing of Liu's and Wu's judgments, and 5 August as the date of external confirmation, the three layers kept separate. Fifth, ChinaAid's September 2021 report gives a "secret trial on 20 July 2021" and a term ending 2 July 2024 — both wrong (the hearing fell between 31 August and 4 September 2020; the term expired on 21 July 2024); this page does not rely on them and logs them here. Sixth, RFA's release report of 23 July 2024 contains one passage swapping the co-defendants' terms, as three years and two years, against the convergent record through Wu Youshui, Amnesty International and Dui Hua (Liu two, Wu three): this page follows the convergent record and flags the passage. Seventh, Wu Gejianxiong's prison: Dui Hua gives Hengzhou Prison; ISHR's update gives his release from Chishan Prison — carried side by side; a transfer may intervene, and the record cannot decide. Eighth, Liu Dazhi's release date: Amnesty International gives 22 July, ISHR gives 21 July — a one-day difference, carried side by side. Ninth, the letters' receipt date: RFA and ChinaAid give 5 July, the nine organisations' joint statement gives 4 July — carried side by side. Tenth, the forced-labour day's length: the letters' relays and his wife's account give thirteen to fifteen hours a day, while her petition elsewhere gives up to twelve — carried side by side, the larger not adopted. Eleventh, the four formulations of the custody site (provincial state-security department; its detention centre; a national-security custody facility; the Kaifu District Detention Center) — carried side by side, not forced into alignment. Twelfth, mistaken identities: ChinaAid styles Cheng Yuan a "human-rights lawyer" who "ran a law firm", and the State Department's 2019 report styles the three men "public interest lawyers" — both wrong; Cheng Yuan was an NGO director, corrected in the text. ChinaAid's case page also once misprints the 2013 client's name as "Chen Yuan" (a corruption of Cheng Yuan's romanised name); that too is logged here.
Matters resting on a single source or on relay, graded in the text: Yang Zhanqing's attribution of the arrests to overseas funding (a co-founder's judgement, with no indictment to test it against); the conjecture linking the high-security wing to Cheng's refusal to plead guilty (his wife's conjecture); the workshop output and wage figures and Cheng's health details (blood in the stool, weight below 110 pounds, and the like) in Shi Minglei's petition (the petitioner's own assertions, independently unverified — and she herself concedes she cannot verify that Cheng personally produced Milwaukee products); Lee Ming-che's relay about Chishan (which proves the prison's general regime, not Cheng Yuan's individual daily treatment); the item in Luo Shengchun's February 2024 testimony that Cheng had been moved to a non-labour unit (a two-step relay through Shi Minglei); Cheng's appearance and words on the day of his release (his wife's account to RFA, the sole first-hand source); and the three points of reasoning attributed to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's opinion (relayed by the nine organisations' joint statement and ISHR's explainer; this site did not study the opinion's text paragraph by paragraph, while its number, 11/2020, and its adoption dates rest on Front Line Defenders' compilation and the original-text links archived by CHRD).
Matters of no public record, flagged wherever they arise in the text: the full texts of the indictment and the judgment; the original charge wording on the detention and arrest notices; the hearing's exact date, length, alleged facts and defence arguments; the appointed lawyers' names; the number of years of Cheng Yuan's deprivation of political rights, and its start and end dates (this site searched the item specifically — nothing found); Cheng Yuan's treatment during his Jinshi Prison months (September 2021 to January 2022); any transfer record between the Hengzhou and Chishan versions of Wu Gejianxiong's custody; and any public trace of the three men after their releases (Liu and Wu from their release dates; Cheng Yuan from 21 July 2024 onwards — a dedicated bilingual search for 2025–2026 returned nothing new).
The three-requirements check: time and place are confirmed (the founding, the taking, the criminal detention, the arrest, the indictment, the hearing window, the layered sentencing dates, the prison admission, the transfer, the letters and the release are all supported by the anchor sources above, in Changsha, Shenzhen, Jinshi and Chishan, with single-chain details graded item by item); cross-verification has been completed (the admission-notice documentary chain, the family's accounts, the international organisations' statements, the United States' official reports and the investigative-media chain kept in five separate layers throughout, with conflicts inside each layer listed one by one); documentary and visual evidence — the admission notice as catalogued by Dui Hua, the existence of the arrest and detention notices as catalogued by CHRD, the letters home as relayed by ChinaAid and RFA, and the U.S. Customs withhold release order as a public official instrument — is recorded here as to existence and provenance only, with no unverified visual detail relayed.
Sources
- The Dui Hua Foundation, Prisoner Updates 2021 #8: the Hunan Jinshi Prison admission notice of 17 September 2021 confirming that Cheng Yuan was sentenced on 25 May 2021 by the Changsha Intermediate Court to five years for subversion, the term to expire in July 2024; the families learning of the prison admissions only in October; Wu Gejianxiong notified by Hengzhou Prison by telephone, sentenced to three years; Liu Dazhi sentenced to two years and released after the conviction; the wife's statement that the families received no indictment or hearing notice and still had not received the judgments after learning of the sentences in August; the background note on the foreign NGO law. This case's documentary anchor for the judgment.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), case page on Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong (opened 20 August 2019, updated to June 2023): the procedural line — criminal detention 22 July 2019, formal arrest 26 August 2019, indictment 24 June 2020; the Wangcheng search for the men and the Wu family's sole detention notice; the six lawyers' notification on 16 March 2020 that they had been "dismissed"; the pre-trial meeting, and the families' learning of the completed trial through Wu Youshui's telephone call; the appointed lawyers' refusal to provide the sentencing documents and Shi Minglei's first publication of the verdict's contents in June 2023; Changsha Funeng's founding in February 2016 and its information-disclosure method; Cheng Yuan born 18 October 1973 in Nanjing, his early work at Justice for All, the 2013 first compensated HIV case, and his hukou and family-planning litigation; Liu Dazhi born 16 May 1977, the Chunyu mutual-aid team and his environmental disclosure applications; Wu Gejianxiong born 1 January 1995 in Hangzhou; Shi Minglei handcuffed, hooded, held eighteen hours and placed under residential surveillance; and the archived links to WGAD Opinion No. 11/2020 and the six experts' letter of 11 December 2019.
- Radio Free Asia (RFA), report series: the late-July 2021 verdicts report (relayed by CHRD — Wu Youshui announcing Liu's two years and Wu's three, the 20 July judgment date, Cheng Yuan's term unknown, Shi Minglei's "record of the truth" statement, and The Stolen Right to a Defense); the July 2022 Chishan letters report (the high-security wing's tiny cell, bright lights and sleep deprivation, the three letters received 5 July, Lee Ming-che's relay); and the release report of 23 July 2024, "Tortured Chinese activist Cheng Yuan released from prison" (Chen Zifei — release from Chishan on Sunday 21 July; the video call's "twenty years older", thin, dark-tanned, bald and broken-toothed; his humour, and the pain of having been arrested in front of his daughter; post-release following and surveillance, and no guarantee of family reunion. One passage's swap of Liu's and Wu's terms is treated in the Verification Note).
- ChinaAid, report series and case page: the Cheng Yuan case page (taken in Shenzhen on 21 July 2019 by the Changsha state-security bureau, designated-location residential surveillance, interrogation focused on his Funeng role, funding and Hong Kong trip, the 2013 Jinxian County HIV case, Shi Minglei's April 2021 arrival in the United States with the association's help, the Milwaukee supply-chain tracing in outline — the page's "secret trial on 20 July 2021" and "term ending 2 July 2024" treated as errors in the Verification Note); the sentencing report of 15 September 2021 (the 5 August sources, the Liu Yongze alias, the appointed lawyer's refusal to hand over the verdict); the forced-labour report of 12 July 2022 (the three letters to his sister, his wife and his father; the 18 January transfer to Chishan, the high-security wing until 18 April, the bans on letters and calls, the six-kilogram weight loss, the sewing machine and the evening "study" in the letters; Lee Ming-che in the same prison; the joint statement at the International Religious Freedom Summit — the report's detention-stage wording of "inciting subversion" graded in the text); and the Milwaukee petition report of 4 November 2022 (Shi Minglei's black-hood interrogation, the petition and her open letter to the company president, and her petition-stage assertions about the workshop and her husband's health).
- Amnesty International: Urgent Action UA 113.19 and its September 2020 update (the secret trial, the families' learning of it only on 10 September, the prisoner-of-conscience designation); the statement of 6 August 2021 (the China team head's comment; the family's ascertainment on 5 August of Cheng's five years, Wu's three and Liu Yongze's two, and Liu's release on 22 July; Cheng's roughly dozen discrimination cases over a decade and the 2013 landmark; the appointed lawyers' refusal even to inform the relatives; the demand for the immediate and unconditional release of Cheng Yuan and Wu Gejianxiong); and the annual human-rights report on 2024 (Cheng Yuan among the defenders released that year, all continuing to face movement restrictions and deprivation of political rights after release; archived via ecoi.net).
- International Service for Human Rights (ISHR): the bilingual explainer, "UN experts' action on the 'Changsha Three'" (updated 3 August 2022 — the six experts' letter of 11 December 2019; the Working Group's April 2020 opinion finding the detention arbitrary and calling for immediate release; Liu Dazhi's release on 21 July 2021; Wu Gejianxiong's departure from Chishan Prison on 21 July 2022 and reunion with his father in Hangzhou); and the joint statement with eight other organisations of 20 July 2022 (detention beyond 1,000 days; Cheng Yuan's family contact fully cut since October 2021; the three letters received 4 July; the demands for guaranteed communication and an end to ill-treatment).
- Front Line Defenders: its case follow-up (the trial falling between 31 August and 4 September 2020, the families not notified, the lawyers told in March 2020 that they had been "dismissed") and its compilation "UN-Level Actions on Human Rights Defenders in China" (the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's opinion of 5 June 2020 finding the detention of Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi and Wu Gejianxiong arbitrary and urging their release).
- U.S. Department of State, China human-rights reports for 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, the case's entries: 2019 (the 22 July detention; Shi Minglei's repeated questioning and seized property; neither retained lawyer able to meet Cheng Yuan by year's end; the "public interest lawyers" styling treated in the Verification Note); 2020 (the September trial without notice to families or lawyers; Cheng's anti-torture, family-planning and hukou litigation; the outcome unknown at year's end); 2021 (the July secret trial's sentences of two to five years; the sentences not made public despite a legal requirement; the families informed through informal channels); 2022 (RFA's publication of the contents of Cheng Yuan's letter from Chishan Prison). Each entry checked by this site against the retrieved report text.
- Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) records: the 2023 annual report's executive summary (Cheng Yuan and Lee Ming-che forced to work in detention, both convicted under broad state-security charges for exercising internationally recognised rights); Luo Shengchun's written testimony to the hearing of 1 February 2024 (Cheng Yuan, in its forced-labour enumeration for Chishan, recorded as moved on his wife's account to a unit without forced labour); and Shi Minglei's testimony on Chishan forced labour before the Commission (as relayed by U.S. media reporting on the hearing).
- Wisconsin Watch, investigative reporting (reporter Zhen Wang, June 2023, supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism) and follow-ups: Lee Ming-che and another former prisoner confirming that Chishan produced Milwaukee-branded gloves (four types identified by Lee); the Chinese regulatory filings showing a Shanghai supplier contracted to make "Performance" gloves for a subsidiary of Milwaukee Tool's parent company; the customs-data analysis of thirteen glove shipments; Shi Minglei's acknowledgment that she could not verify her husband personally made Milwaukee products; Milwaukee Tool's "no evidence" response; Walmart's removal of the gloves from its third-party platform; and the May 2024 follow-up — U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Withhold Release Order of 10 April 2024 against Shanghai Select Safety Products Company and two affiliates (information reasonably indicating the use of convict labour).
- Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, archived documents: the workshop figures in Shi Minglei's petition (4,800 to 14,400 gloves a day; thirteen to fifteen hours a day; four days off a year; monthly pay of 13.80 U.S. dollars); Milwaukee Tool's statement of denial; and Shi Minglei's letter to Walmart and her report to Customs.
- National Public Radio (NPR), 2019 reporting (as relayed): Cheng Hao's journey to Changsha and his "kept completely clueless" statement; Changsha Funeng's 2016 founding, its survival through the purge and its landmark court wins; Yang Zhanqing's explanation that the organisation employed no lawyers of its own but connected groups with lawyers and coordinated training and advocacy; the Hong Kong branch and the foreign funding; and Yang's attribution of the arrests to overseas funding being treated as collusion with hostile forces (RFA's reporting is to the same effect).
- Human Rights in China, carrying Shi Minglei, "On Fear, On Healing — a first-anniversary memoir by Cheng Yuan's wife" (21 July 2020), with its editor's note (criminal detention on 22 July 2019 on suspicion of subversion; the wife and daughter treated as criminals; the daughter's trauma — the family-account chain).