第73案 | 崔泰Case 73 | Cui Tai
河北宣化教区地下主教崔泰，1950年生，1990年晋铎；因拒绝加入中国天主教爱国会、拒绝教会与圣座脱钩，1993年起被反复拘留、软禁并送劳教，2007年起被近乎不间断地关押在秘密地点与宾馆里，只有春节、中秋能回家探望姐姐几天，十三年里没有在教区过一个复活节。他从未受审、从未被判刑——当局连罪名都不再给。2013年他被圣座任命并祝圣为助理主教，2018年继任正权主教时人还在关押中；中梵临时协议签署后他又被带走四次，2021年4月最后一次被带走后彻底失踪，副主教张建林同月被秘密关押。2025年圣座撤销宣化教区、设立张家口教区，公告对这位仍失踪的正权主教只字未提。Augustine Cui Tai, underground bishop of Xuanhua in Hebei — born in 1950, ordained a priest in 1990 — refused to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and to sever his Church from the Holy See. From 1993 he was repeatedly detained, held under house arrest and sent to forced labour; from 2007 he was held almost without interruption in secret sites and hotels, allowed home for a few days at the New Year and Mid-Autumn festivals to see his sister, and in thirteen years he never spent an Easter in his diocese. He has never been tried and never sentenced — in the end the authorities did not even trouble to name a charge. Appointed and ordained coadjutor bishop by the Holy See in 2013, he succeeded as ordinary bishop in 2018 while still in custody. Taken four more times after the 2018 Vatican–China agreement, he was seized for the last time in April 2021 and has been disappeared ever since; his vicar Zhang Jianlin was placed in secret detention the same month. In 2025 the Holy See suppressed the Diocese of Xuanhua and erected the Diocese of Zhangjiakou — and its announcement did not mention the still-missing bishop at all.
A bishop with no charge sheet
Begin with the most striking feature of this case: Cui Tai has no judgment. No trial date, no indictment, no sentence, no appeal record. In the “charges and sentence” field of every other case in this archive there is at least a piece of paper, however fabricated its contents. In his case the field is empty, and the emptiness is the central fact. Since 2007 he has been held or kept under house arrest almost without interruption: locked in secret detention centres, confined in hotels, taken away under escort on forced “trips” and “study” tours, allowed home for a few days only at the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, to look in on his elderly sister. From 2007 to 2020 he did not spend a single Easter in his own diocese — and Easter, Holy Week, is the most solemn season of the Catholic year; the timing of his removals locked onto it year after year. In the words UCA News relayed from his faithful, his imprisonment “has become almost a routine,” and “our shepherd has become a sacrificial lamb.”
He is not an obscure figure. Born in 1950, Cui Tai was ordained a priest in October 1990. In early 2013, after consultation and verification, Pope Benedict XVI approved his appointment as coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Xuanhua, and he was ordained bishop on 7 April 2013 (the exact date comes from the Hudson Institute’s arrest-history table). The Diocese of Xuanhua, erected by the Holy See on 11 April 1946, is an old diocese in northwestern Hebei. Its ordinary, Bishop Zhao Kexun, was by then nearly ninety and had been in hiding for years; after the ordination he entrusted Cui with full authority to run the diocese. When Zhao died in hiding in 2018, canon law operated automatically: the coadjutor succeeded. From that moment Cui Tai was the ordinary bishop of Xuanhua. But the succeeding bishop was in custody at the time, and remained in custody: he never took public possession of his see, never celebrated a public Mass as its ordinary. In Rome’s registers he is a bishop. In the Chinese government’s registers he presumably does not rise even to the level of an “illegal religious person,” because the government has never recognized his episcopal status at all — to recognize the man, it would have to recognize the Rome that appointed him.
Sources: Nina Shea, “Ten Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China,” Hudson Institute, October 2024 (Cui Tai chapter and arrest-history table); ChinaAid, 24 February 2023; UCA News as relayed by AsiaNews, 23 June 2020; Bitter Winter, 30 May 2018.
His “crime”: refusing to cut his Church off from Rome
To understand the Cui Tai case, one sentence suffices: the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association requires its members to uphold a Church that is “independent and self-governing” — institutionally severed from the Holy See. The Hudson report states the collision plainly: the ten persecuted bishops it profiles are united by their conscientious refusal to join the Association, whose founding principles Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 letter to the Catholics of China had already declared incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Cui refused to join. Every Mass he celebrated, every act of evangelization, every gathering he led was thereby converted, in official language, into “illegal missionary activity” or an “illegal and unauthorized religious meeting.” In the early years the authorities still bothered with such labels: the Hudson report records that between 1993 and 2007 he was repeatedly detained and interned in forced-labour facilities under exactly this kind of charge. Later, even the labels were dropped. Police took him away and told his diocese they were taking him “travelling,” on “trips,” on “vacations.” The report’s judgment on the design is worth recording: this practice of informal arrest and detention exists to suppress a bishop’s religious activity while evading the international publicity that a public political trial of a Catholic bishop would bring.
His criticism of the official church was public. Catholic News Agency, relaying a 2019 AsiaNews report, records that Cui spoke out against the state-sponsored church, saying it was building a Church “independent” of the Holy See. That sentence is common knowledge inside the underground church; the price of saying it aloud was paid by him alone. Refusing to sign, refusing to join, refusing to be silent bought him an almost unbroken calendar of state handling from his thirties into his seventies. His other side must also be recorded, lest he be written up as a man who only said no. AsiaNews describes a man of simple and orderly life, firm in faith and full of virtue; he taught Catholics to be “good citizens,” and what he demanded came down to one thing: that the Church not be forced into the Patriotic Association and that communion with Rome not be cut. A man whose demands were that low — low enough to be summed up as “do not sever us from the Pope” — was handled by the state for thirty-three years. That fact is the most complete footnote available to the policy called the “Sinicization of religion.”
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (the Association’s “independence” principle and its incompatibility with doctrine; Benedict XVI’s 2007 letter; the early “illegal missionary activities” labels and the 1993–2007 detentions and forced labour); Catholic News Agency, 22 June 2020, relaying AsiaNews 2019 (his public criticism of an “independent” church); the Hudson report relaying AsiaNews on his character and teaching.
Two dioceses, one map: how “Zhangjiakou” was laid over Xuanhua
The geography of this case is a map war that lasted more than forty years. On the Holy See’s map stand the Diocese of Xuanhua and the Diocese of Xiwanzi (Chongli–Xiwanzi), both erected by Pope Pius XII on 11 April 1946, covering what is today the municipality of Zhangjiakou. On Beijing’s map stands a single “Diocese of Zhangjiakou,” created in 1980 when the official church, without the Holy See’s consent, merged Xuanhua and Xiwanzi — a diocese Rome then declined to recognize for forty-five years. Two maps over one territory, and only one flock of sheep on the ground. The underground church lived by the Holy See’s map: their bishop was in Xuanhua, their priests served along the 1946 boundaries. The official system operated by Beijing’s map: the Zhangjiakou structure had its Patriotic Association apparatus and lacked only a bishop and a retroactive nod from Rome. Cui Tai’s entire episcopate sat on the seam between the two maps. He kept the 1946 map; the side that commands the police intended to make the 1980 map the only one.
The map war came into the open on 11 May 2021. On that day Bishop Joseph Guo Jincai of the official Diocese of Chengde travelled onto Xuanhua’s territory and ordained three priests and a deacon for the “Diocese of Zhangjiakou” — ordinations performed on land that, in canon law, was not his, without the consent of its bishop. Cui himself had already been taken away and disappeared (April 2021). The man who answered was the diocesan vicar, Father Zhang Jianlin, in a strongly worded statement: the so-called Diocese of Zhangjiakou had no legitimacy; the ordinations had never been discussed with Bishop Cui; on the basis of the Code of Canon Law, the diocese did not recognize them. According to local sources relayed by AsiaNews through ChinaAid, the hasty ceremony had been organized by Father Wang Zhengui, with the Beijing Winter Olympics in Zhangjiakou in view, and with Wang himself reportedly hoping it would make him bishop of “Zhangjiakou.” Remember that name; four years later it appears in a Vatican announcement. The price Zhang Jianlin paid for his statement was secret detention from April 2021, with no news for more than two years (see below). Before one map can swallow another, the men who guard the first map must be silenced: first the bishop, then his vicar.
Sources: ChinaAid, 26 April 2022 and May 2023, relaying AsiaNews (the 11 May 2021 ordinations by Guo Jincai on Xuanhua territory for “Zhangjiakou”; Zhang Jianlin’s statement; Wang Zhengui’s organization of the ceremony and the Olympics consideration); International Christian Concern, 18 May 2021 (the substance of Zhang’s statement: “the present diocese does not recognize this ordination”); all sources agree that Xuanhua was erected by the Holy See in 1946 and Zhangjiakou created by the official church in 1980 without Holy See recognition.
1993–2007: the labour-camp years, recorded only in years
This archive owes its readers candour: for the first fourteen years of Cui Tai’s persecution, the public record preserves years, not dates. The Hudson Institute’s arrest-history table compresses the period into a single line — “1993–2007: detention and forced labor.” Bitter Winter, in May 2018, relaying UCA News, reported that since 1993 the authorities had repeatedly detained and punished him for illegal preaching and illegal religious assemblies, placing him under house arrest or sending him to labour camps. Which years he was taken, how many times, for how long, and where — none of it is in the public record. This archive does not invent an itemized list. It therefore sorts this page by the year 1993 and states in its Verification Note that 1993 is the earliest year supported by reliable sources, that no exact date within that year is publicly documented, and that the month and day in the sort date are placeholders, not a documented detention day.
Even with only years to go on, the shape of the period is legible. He was ordained in October 1990; the handling began in 1993. He had been a priest less than three years when the state’s file on him opened. The toolbox of that era still included re-education through labour: no court, no judgment, an administrative decision sufficing to send a man into a labour facility for years. The Hudson report summarizes 1993–2007 as “detention and forced labor”; Bitter Winter’s phrase is “labor camps.” A priest in his thirties and forties, moving in and out of labour facilities in Hebei for the offence of preaching, left no photograph and no contemporary report behind. What survives is one line in a table in a Washington think-tank report written thirty years later. This archive reproduces that line as it stands and marks its thinness: the thinness is not evidence that the events are untrue, but that in those years no one was able to keep records for him. That is one of the reasons this archive exists.
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024, Cui Tai arrest-history table (1993–2007: detention and forced labor); Bitter Winter, 30 May 2018, relaying UCA News (repeated detention, house arrest and labour camps since 1993 for illegal preaching and religious assemblies). Itemized dates, places and terms: no public record.
2007–2016: a decade of near-continuous custody
The year 2007 was the hinge. Two things happened together. Zhao Kexun became ordinary bishop of Xuanhua on 13 July 2007 (he had been secretly consecrated an auxiliary bishop on 17 February 2004); the authorities raided, Zhao went into hiding, and he was never seen in public again in the remaining eleven years of his life, dying in hiding in 2018. In the same year, Cui Tai’s handling changed in kind, from “repeated” to “almost nonstop.” AsiaNews, ChinaAid and UCA News speak with one voice: from 2007 he was illegally detained or placed under house arrest almost continuously, the forms of custody rotating among secret detention centres, hotels and forced “trips,” always under government guard, cut off from his family and his church community. Only at the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival was he occasionally allowed home for a few days, to visit his elderly sister; on one occasion he was permitted only a brief home visit to her before being taken away again. From 2007 until at least 2020 he did not spend one Easter in his diocese.
Read this decade back into church politics and the logic is plain. In 2007 Zhao formally became ordinary, Benedict XVI published his letter to the Church in China, and the underground church’s organizational shape became, if anything, clearer. The Hebei authorities’ answer was to neutralize the diocese’s two pillars: drive the elderly ordinary into hiding, and lock his strong successor into unbroken custody. With Zhao hidden, the diocese could still function because Cui was out and moving; with Cui locked away, only the priests remained, each on his own. The Hudson report records that the Diocese of Xuanhua had fifty-seven priests, of whom only twelve were reportedly members of the Patriotic Association. That figure explains the authorities’ obsession with maps and personnel: the diocese’s clergy stood, in the main, with the underground church, and you cannot arrest an entire presbyterate — you arrest the man at its head. When Cui was ordained a bishop in 2013, he was still inside the rotation of custody; ordination bought him no freedom, and the ordination itself must have been accomplished outside the authorities’ sight. His episcopate was, from its first day, the episcopate of a prisoner.
Sources: AsiaNews, 23 June 2020, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre (near-continuous illegal detention or house arrest since 2007; secret detention centres and hotels; forced “trips”; home only briefly at the New Year and Mid-Autumn festivals; the short visit to his sister); Hudson Institute, October 2024 (detained 2007 to late 2016/early 2017; no Easter in the diocese from 2007 to 2020; 57 priests, about 12 of them Association members); on Zhao Kexun: Wikipedia, citing Catholic-Hierarchy and the UCAN diocesan directory (ordained priest 1951; secretly consecrated 17 February 2004; ordinary bishop from 13 July 2007; in hiding after the 2007 raid; died 2018).
7 April 2013: a prisoner is ordained a bishop
In early 2013, after consultation and verification by the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI approved and appointed Cui Tai coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Xuanhua. A translation muddle must be cleared up here. ChinaAid and some English-language reports render his appointment as “auxiliary bishop”; the Hudson Institute, UCA News and Catholic News Agency consistently say “coadjutor bishop.” In canon law the two are entirely different: a coadjutor carries the right of succession, an auxiliary does not. The facts arbitrate: after Zhao Kexun’s death in 2018, every source records that Cui “automatically succeeded” as ordinary bishop, and automatic succession is the defining feature of a coadjutor. This archive accordingly uses “coadjutor bishop” and logs the conflict in its Verification Note. On 7 April 2013 Cui was ordained a bishop (the exact date is the Hudson arrest table’s; other sources give only “April 2013”). After the ordination, Bishop Zhao entrusted him with full authority to administer the diocese — a man of about ninety handing his diocese to a man in rotating custody. That is what succession looks like in the underground church: the transfer of power takes place not in a cathedral but between a hiding place and a detention room.
What did ordination change? In Rome’s ledger, Xuanhua’s succession problem was solved. In the local authorities’ ledger, an “illegal religious person” had been promoted to “illegal bishop,” and the case for handling him had only strengthened. His public identity itself was treated as the offence: AsiaNews’s 2019 reporting, analysing why he was seized that March, relayed the diocesan priests’ view that the reason was precisely that he had publicly manifested his episcopal identity — an identity recognized by the Holy See and not by the government, whose public exercise is therefore “illegal.” Read that twice. On this soil, a bishop celebrating Mass is not the crime; a bishop being a bishop is. Identity as offence is the standing rule for underground bishops, and Cui Tai is simply the case in which it has been enforced most completely.
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (appointed by Benedict XVI in early 2013; ordained coadjutor bishop on 7 April 2013; full authority entrusted by Bishop Zhao; automatic succession on Zhao’s death in 2018); ChinaAid, February 2023 (the appointment and ordination, though its English says “auxiliary” — inconsistent with the succession, see the Verification Note); AsiaNews, March 2019, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre (priests attributing the arrest to his public manifestation of his episcopal identity).
February 2017: taken from his sister’s home
The Hudson arrest table gives 2017 its own line: in February 2017, about two weeks after the Lunar New Year, security officials arrested Bishop Cui at his sister’s home; he was released at some point in the following months. Inside that short entry sits the family dimension of the whole case. His sister’s home was the one place that, across more than a decade of custody, the authorities treated as a “home” to which he could be released: the New Year releases went there, the Mid-Autumn releases went there. And the authorities used even that place — taking him at the moment and in the location of his year’s closest approach to family life. The line between “release” and “re-arrest” was always blurred in his calendar: a release usually meant only a change of venue, from secret detention to house arrest, from a hotel to his sister’s sofa, with the guards repositioned. After the February 2017 seizure came the detention of mid-April 2018 — the one that reached Hong Kong.
Source: Hudson Institute, October 2024, Cui Tai arrest-history table and text (arrested at his sister’s home in February 2017, two weeks after the New Year; released sometime in the following months; detained again in April 2018; in custody from 2007 to late 2016/early 2017).
2018: the year of the agreement, and three rounds of detention
The year 2018 was supposed to be the turning point for the Catholic Church in China. On 22 September 2018 the Holy See and Beijing signed the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops — its text secret, its stated purpose to let both sides recognize episcopal appointments and end the split between the underground and official churches. For Cui Tai, the 2018 calendar reads differently. In mid-April he was taken away into a custody called “study”: the authorities arranged for him to tour “red” tourism sites, visit open church communities and “exchange views” with official bishops and priests — arrangements that sources quoted by Bitter Winter described as, in substance, “house arrest and psychological pressure programs under the name of studying.” On 29 May the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong diocese issued a statement calling on the Chinese government to free Cui Tai, allow him medical care, and release other detained clergy in Hebei; Cardinal Joseph Zen, the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, posted an appeal to end the “inhumane and illegal detention.” In December he was taken again and held for at least fifteen days. Within three months of the agreement’s signing, the police had not released a round of detention; they had added one.
One more event of 2018 must be read alongside the detentions. That year Bishop Zhao Kexun died in his hiding place, aged ninety-four (born 1924; one English report of 2020 gave his age as ninety-six, a figure that does not square with the birth year — this archive uses 94 and logs the conflict in the Verification Note). Zhao had been in hiding for eleven years, since the 2007 raid, and never returned to his cathedral. His burial place later became, on one account, a subject of interrogation under torture: ChinaAid reported in April 2022 that, according to earlier reports, police had tortured Cui Tai and several priests to extract information about Bishop Zhao, including where he was buried. That claim rests on a single source chain and is marked unverified in this archive (see the Verification Note). But even on the verified record alone the picture is complete enough: one bishop hidden until death, one bishop in custody without end, and between them not two stories but two workstations of the same machine. On Zhao’s death Cui succeeded him by law as ordinary bishop — a man who could not say where his predecessor was buried, and who would be tortured, on the unverified account, precisely for not saying it, inherited the diocese.
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (detained mid-April 2018; detained December 2018 to January 2019, the December round lasting at least fifteen days); Bitter Winter, 30 May 2018, relaying UCA News (the Hong Kong Justice and Peace Commission statement of 29 May; Cardinal Zen’s appeal; the substance of the “study” arrangements); ChinaAid, 26 April 2022 (the torture-to-extract-Zhao’s-burial-place account, single source, unverified); on Zhao’s age at death: Gaudium Press, 14 February 2023 (94).
The Zhang Li affair: the priest who reported his bishop
The internal split inside the Diocese of Xuanhua is an unavoidable page in understanding the 2018–2019 round of detentions. Father Francesco Zhang Li had been a Xuanhua priest who became an active figure on the official side: he promoted a “Pentecostal”-style group in ambiguous collaboration with a Protestant pastor, and was accused of exaggerating and fabricating “miracles”; he publicly advocated eliminating the underground church, urged the faithful to cross over to the official church, and rejected his bishop’s authority. According to the Hudson report, Cui Tai suspended Zhang Li on 23 December 2018 for fabricating miracles, calling for the elimination of the underground church and rejecting episcopal authority. According to AsiaNews and LiCAS, the suspension became public in March 2019, on grounds that Zhang Li had defected to the official side and steered underground faithful across, and amid accusations that Zhang had engineered the authorities’ arrest of the bishop — the headline of AsiaNews’s report says it in one breath: a priest suspended after switching to the official church and getting the authorities to arrest his (underground) bishop. The two sets of reports disagree on the exact timing of the suspension (23 December 2018 versus March 2019); the discrepancy may reflect a decision taken in December and announced in March, or two sources each recording part of the episode. This archive records both and does not force a merger (see the Verification Note). What is certain is the direction of the causal chain: denunciation and pressure from Zhang Li came first; the bishop’s detentions of December 2018 and March 2019 came after; and Zhang Li, backed by the official system, went on campaigning after his suspension.
A second thread must be kept separate here, so that readers do not confuse the two priests surnamed Zhang. Zhang Li is the informer. Zhang Jianlin is the vicar — the bishop’s closest assistant. Zhang Jianlin’s own calendar of handling is long: intercepted in May 2008 on his way to the Sheshan pilgrimage in Shanghai and taken back to Xuanhua into detention; taken by police in July 2009 and held under house arrest in a courtyard attached to a government office building, subjected to physical and psychological pressure to support the official bishops’ conference and join the Patriotic Association; taken away by religious affairs bureau staff on 22 June 2011, whereabouts unknown; placed under house arrest for two weeks in January 2019. In one diocese, one priest climbed by reporting his bishop, and another spent the same years in rotating custody for standing by him. In Xuanhua, “united front work” was never an abstract noun.
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (the suspension of Zhang Li on 23 December 2018 and its three stated grounds; the December detention occurring at Zhang’s urging); AsiaNews, 2019, as carried by LiCAS, 13 December 2019, and the Holy Spirit Study Centre (the suspension’s public timing; the defection and the accusation of engineering the bishop’s arrest; the “Pentecostal” group and miracle questions); on Zhang Jianlin: Cardinal Kung Foundation press release, 13 July 2008; Catholic News Agency, 14 July 2008 and October 2009 as carried by the Archdiocese of Baltimore; ChinaAid, May 2023 (taken in 2009; two weeks of house arrest in January 2019).
29 March 2019: a warning text message, and an arrest announced in advance
In January 2019, after nearly ten months in custody, Cui Tai was released (the Hudson table gives December 2018 to January 2019). He at once issued a letter asking his flock to accept the leadership of Vicar General Zhang Jianlin and the diocesan board — a bishop just out of detention whose first act was to arrange the church for his own absence, as if he already knew the next removal was scheduled. At the end of March the premonition was fulfilled. On 28 March Zhang Jianlin was taken first, by officials of the provincial religious department: his identity papers had long been confiscated — he could not so much as buy a bus ticket to a neighbouring city — and the ground given was breach of those travel restrictions. At 8 a.m. on 29 March, Cui Tai received a text message on his mobile phone informing him of his impending arrest, and was then taken away by government officials. His whereabouts were unknown. To receive the text first and be collected second exposes the texture of this procedure: the arrest is not a judicial act but an administrative notification, and the notified man has no option of flight, because his entire life is already inside the surveillance perimeter.
A priest of the diocese told UCA News what it meant: “The government’s aim is to paralyze the diocese. If the diocese fails to manage the community, then the government will use this as an opportunity to take it over.” Another member of the underground congregation said complaints had been made to the Vatican, but that Rome had fallen silent on the plight of the underground communities. In November 2018 two of the diocese’s priests, Father Su Guipeng and Father Zhao He, had already been taken away to be “indoctrinated” in government religious policy, for refusing to join the Patriotic Association; two priests of the neighbouring Chongli–Xiwanzi diocese were taken at the same time. Lay the sequence from November 2018 to March 2019 end to end: first the priests are pulled out, then the vicar general is seized, then the bishop is collected — a decapitation of a diocese performed in three steps. And all of it happened in the half-year after the provisional agreement was signed. What the agreement’s text contains, the outside world still does not know. What happened outside the text, the Diocese of Xuanhua annotated with the freedom of three of its clergy.
Sources: UCA News, 29 March 2019, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre and Catholic News Agency (Zhang Jianlin taken on 28 March and his travel restrictions; Cui taken at 8 a.m. on 29 March after the warning text; his January letter to the faithful; the priest’s “paralyze the diocese” remark; Su Guipeng and Zhao He taken in November 2018); Hudson Institute, October 2024, arrest table (detained 29 March 2019 to January 2020).
29 November 2019: a letter from Rome
During this detention, Rome was not wholly silent — only quiet. On 29 November 2019 Cardinal Fernando Filoni, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, wrote to Bishop Cui to reaffirm the Holy See’s recognition of the Diocese of Xuanhua and of Cui’s authority there. The Hudson report underlines the letter’s context: it was written in response to the Chinese authorities’ establishment, without Vatican authorization, of a new diocese intended to replace Xuanhua. Whether the bishop in custody ever received the letter is not in the public record. But the letter’s existence marks where Rome’s line stood that year: diocesan boundaries and episcopal authority were not to be changed unilaterally. Read six years later, the letter’s fate is a sombre one. In 2025, the document that suppressed Xuanhua and erected Zhangjiakou issued from the Holy See itself (see below). Every principle Filoni’s letter reaffirmed — the survival of the Diocese of Xuanhua, the authority of Cui Tai — met not a concession from Beijing but a redrawing of the map by Rome. This archive records the fact and defends neither side; but an archive’s duty is to place the letter of 2019 and the announcement of 2025 on the same page, and let readers see for themselves what those six years contained.
Source: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (Cardinal Filoni’s letter of 29 November 2019 to Bishop Cui, reaffirming the Holy See’s recognition of the Diocese of Xuanhua and of Cui’s authority, against the background of the authorities’ unauthorized new diocese). Whether Cui himself received the letter: no public record.
2020: six months of “freedom,” and the seizure of 19 June
In January 2020, after some ten months of uncharged secret detention, Cui Tai was allowed home for the Lunar New Year, returning to his family on 24 January. Then the pandemic broke out, and because of it he remained at home until June — nearly six months from January to June, the longest stretch of “freedom” he had known since 2007. The quality of that freedom must be stated plainly: it resulted not from any release order but from the accidental overlap of a festival release with epidemic lockdown. The guards withdrew; the door never truly opened; he remained a man who could be taken at any moment. On 19 June 2020 the authorities took him again, to an unknown place. When AsiaNews reported it on 23 June, the words of his faithful were preserved: it was “a shame that such a sweet person” should be treated this way, “even against Chinese law.” They added that his imprisonment had become almost routine, yet it did not allow the bishop to celebrate and care for his sheep — “our shepherd has become a sacrificial lamb.” The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) entered the item into the official record in its 2021 annual report: the authorities were holding underground Bishop Cui Tai of the Xuanhua diocese, detained since 19 June 2020, at an unknown location; since 2007 he had been detained several times for long intervals.
The timing deserves a note of its own. The seizure of 19 June fell in the run-up to the first renewal of the provisional agreement, due in September–October 2020 (it was renewed in October 2020). A bishop whom the agreement was ostensibly meant to protect was taken away beneath the negotiating table; on the table’s other side, the Holy See chose renewal. Cui was seventy that year. In his calendar, seventy was not an age of retirement; it was an age of being taken. Catholic News Agency’s headline of June 2020 was flat — “Underground bishop detained in China” — illustrated with the flags of China and the Vatican. The disappearance of a seventy-year-old bishop earns one wire story in the international news flow, and the wire story’s single clause “under house arrest since 2007” compresses thirteen years.
Sources: AsiaNews, 23 June 2020, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre and LiCAS (released for the New Year on 24 January; remained with family until June because of the pandemic; the longest freedom since 2007; taken again on 19 June; the faithful’s “sacrificial lamb” remark); Hudson Institute, October 2024 (released in January 2020 from ten months of secret detention; six months of relative freedom; detained again without charge in June 2020); CECC, 2021 Annual Report, Freedom of Religion chapter (held at an unknown location from 19 June 2020; detained repeatedly for long intervals since 2007).
April 2021: taken a fourth time — and then silence
In April 2021 the police took Cui Tai away again. The Hudson Institute’s 2024 count is precise about the pattern: this was the fourth time since the signing of the 2018 Vatican–China agreement that police had taken him into custody (December 2018, March 2019, June 2020, April 2021). Unlike the previous three, this removal was not followed by any news of release. ChinaAid reported in February 2023 that since he was taken away in the spring of 2021 he had not returned home and had not appeared in public; the faithful had no way of knowing his whereabouts or welfare. He was seventy-three at the time, and suffered from stomach problems, according to a diocesan source relayed by AsiaNews. By the Hudson report’s publication in October 2024 the formula was “he has not been seen since.” His diocese repeatedly called on the government to end the illegal detention and release him unconditionally, without reply. In September 2025, English-language coverage of the erection of the Diocese of Zhangjiakou gave his age as seventy-five and noted that the announcement did not mention him. Searching through October 2026, this archive found no public report of his release, trial, sentencing, hospitalization or death. The latest verifiable status is one sentence long: taken in April 2021, whereabouts unknown since, with no public record of his survival.
Zhang Jianlin disappeared in the same month. According to AsiaNews of 8 May 2023, the vicar of Xuanhua had been held in secret detention since April 2021 — by May 2023, more than two years. His family hoped the authorities would release him on humanitarian grounds so that he could care for his ninety-year-old mother. (ChinaAid’s relay of that report mislabels Zhang Jianlin a “bishop” in its headline; he is a priest and the diocesan vicar — see the Verification Note.) Bishop and vicar vanished in the same month, and the diocese lost its entire leadership in a single stroke: the “paralyzed diocese” of which the unnamed priest had warned UCA News in 2019 was, by April 2021, an accomplished fact. After that, the diocese’s public voice shrank to prayer texts and appeals. The year 2023 was the tenth anniversary of Cui’s episcopal ordination; his faithful said they could hear no news of their bishop at all, and could only pray for him daily, hoping he would return to them safely and soon. That is how a diocese marked the tenth anniversary of its bishop’s ordination.
Sources: Hudson Institute, October 2024 (taken for the fourth time in April 2021; not seen since; the diocese’s calls to end the illegal detention and release him unconditionally); ChinaAid, 24 February 2023, relaying AsiaNews (taken in spring 2021 and not home since; aged 73; stomach problems; the faithful’s prayers at the tenth anniversary of his ordination); AsiaNews, 8 May 2023, as relayed by ChinaAid in May 2023 (Zhang Jianlin in secret detention since April 2021, over two years; his family’s hope of a humanitarian release to care for his 90-year-old mother); Catholic News Agency, 10 September 2025 (Cui aged 75; the announcement did not mention him).
The family: one sister, and a door that opened only at festivals
Cui Tai’s family record is thin to the point of pain. In all the public sources, his family consists of a single figure: his sister. Elderly sister — the reports never give her name or exact age, and this archive does not supply them. For more than a decade her home was the one approved “family visit” point: the New Year releases went to her home, the Mid-Autumn releases went to her home, and on one occasion he was allowed only a brief visit to her before being taken away again. In February 2017 security officials simply collected him from her home. The six months of January to June 2020 he spent with “family” — the sources oscillate between “his sister” and “his family,” and others may have shared the household, but of any other family member’s name, relation or circumstances there is no public record whatsoever, and this archive does not speculate or fill the gap.
The festival-release system deserves dissection, because it is a design, not an oversight. The release windows were set at the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival — the two great reunions of the Chinese calendar. Their length was counted in days. Every release was followed by re-arrest, and he was invariably taken before Easter (his never spending Easter in the diocese and the festival releases are two faces of one mechanism). For the detained man, the twice-yearly door reminded him that home still existed — and that the door was not in his hand. For the family, it turned every reunion into the overture to the next separation. For the outside world, it furnished the custodians with a ready defence: “Who says we are holding him? Didn’t he go home for New Year?” The late years of a seventy-year-old bishop and his sister were thus cut into fragments measured out in festivals. After April 2021 even the fragments stopped. Whether his sister is still alive, whether anyone has ever told her where her brother is, which office she may have asked — of all of it there is no public record. This archive leaves that blank space in the file exactly as it is, because the blankness is itself testimony about this family’s situation.
Sources: AsiaNews, 23 June 2020 (released home only at the New Year and Mid-Autumn festivals; once permitted only a brief visit to his older sister); ChinaAid, February 2023 (brief festival visits home to his sister; six months with family from January to June 2020); Hudson Institute, October 2024 (arrested at his sister’s home in February 2017). His sister’s name and age, other family members, and any family search efforts after April 2021: no public record.
The machine that runs the handling
The institutions that handle Cui Tai can be named, in the public reporting, in three layers. At the top is the Communist Party’s United Front system: in 2018 the State Administration for Religious Affairs was folded into the Central United Front Work Department, and religious management became fully a Party function. The Patriotic Association is the United Front’s hand inside the Catholic Church — joining it, and pledging an “independent” church, is the paper every underground cleric is pressed to sign again and again. The middle layer is Hebei’s and Zhangjiakou’s religious affairs departments and the public security and security personnel: it was “provincial religious department officials” who took Zhang Jianlin, and the reports’ usual words for Cui’s removals are “government officials” and “police.” The bottom layer is the nameless daily machinery: confiscated identity papers (Zhang Jianlin could not buy a bus ticket to the next city), arrests announced by text message, custody rotating among hotels and secret sites, ideological remoulding packaged as “study classes” and “red tourism,” and festival releases to a single designated address. No layer leaves a document a lawyer could sue over: no copy of an arrest warrant has ever surfaced, no detention notice, no indictment. The Hudson report notes that the authorities cynically told the diocese they were taking the bishop into custody for “travel,” “trips” and “vacations.” The disguise is perfunctory because the procedure will never have to account for itself to any court.
One more gear inside the machine deserves recording: the official diocesan structure. The “Diocese of Zhangjiakou,” created in 1980, existed for more than forty years without a bishop recognized by both sides, yet persisted as an administrative frame waiting to be filled. In December 2019 diocesan sources told LiCAS that the government was promoting a Zhangjiakou diocesan congress precisely in order to fold the underground dioceses of Xuanhua and Xiwanzi wholly into Zhangjiakou and then select a bishop it recognized. A underground-church source identifying himself as Father Paul said this would not bring the unity the Pope advocates, but would force the Church to bow to Beijing “through a kind of administrative violence.” The out-of-territory ordinations of May 2021, the synchronized disappearance of bishop and vicar in April 2021, and Rome’s map-changing announcement of 2025 are three nodes on one line. What this machine does best is not persuasion. It is waiting and replacing: wait until the men who guard the old map grow old or are held until they vanish, then lay the new map down.
Sources: UCA News, 29 March 2019 (provincial religious department officials take Zhang Jianlin; confiscated papers and travel restrictions); Hudson Institute, October 2024 (custody without process under the names of “travel,” “trips” and “vacations”; the Patriotic Association brought under direct United Front control in 2018); LiCAS, 13 December 2019 (the government-promoted Zhangjiakou congress to merge the two underground dioceses; Father Paul’s “administrative violence”).
The international and Vatican record: appeals, lists, and a long sigh
Cui Tai’s name stands noticeably higher in the international file than that of a street preacher — he is, after all, a bishop. Item by item, as this archive verified them: Hong Kong — on 29 May 2018 the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong diocese issued a statement demanding Cui’s release and access to medical care, and Cardinal Joseph Zen appealed publicly against the illegal detention (Bitter Winter, relaying UCA News). Rome — on 29 November 2019 Cardinal Filoni wrote to the imprisoned Cui reaffirming the Holy See’s recognition of his authority (Hudson report), the clearest public gesture by a Holy See official in his individual case; thereafter, no further public statement on his personal fate by official Holy See channels can be found in the record, and this archive records that silence as fact without decorating it. Washington — the CECC’s 2021 annual report recorded his detention at an unknown location from 19 June 2020, and a later CECC annual report (2024, Freedom of Religion chapter recommendations) listed “Catholic bishop Augustine Cui Tai” among the religious leaders whose release the U.S. administration should seek. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s FoRB Victims List for China includes the name “Cui Tai” (checked by this archive in October 2026 against the published China victims file). Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025, commenting on the October 2024 third renewal of the Vatican–China agreement, wrote expressly that the authorities continue to persecute Catholic house churches and leaders, “notably Bishop Cui Tai.” And in scholarship and policy: the Hudson Institute’s October 2024 monograph counts him among its ten persecuted bishops and supplies the fullest arrest-history table yet published.
The list is not short. Its ineffectiveness must be recorded in the same breath. From Hong Kong’s statement of 2018 to Washington’s reports of 2024, not one of these documents altered Cui Tai’s situation by a single day. Most of those appeals already existed when he was taken in April 2021; he disappeared anyway. The international file on this bishop grows thicker as the man himself grows thinner — until, in September 2025, even the Holy See’s announcement disposing of his diocese’s future did not spare him a single line. Documentation and forgetting are accelerating together. That is why this page is written at this length: the purpose of an archive is not that it change anything at once, but that one day, when anyone claims “nobody knew at the time,” this page can stand up and say otherwise.
Sources: Bitter Winter, 30 May 2018 (the Hong Kong Justice and Peace Commission statement; Cardinal Zen’s appeal); Hudson Institute, October 2024 (the Filoni letter; the ten-bishops monograph); CECC 2021 Annual Report and 2024 report, Freedom of Religion chapter (the 19 June 2020 detention record; the call-for-release list); USCIRF FoRB Victims List, China file (checked by this archive in October 2026: “Cui Tai” is included); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025, China chapter (the October 2024 renewal; “notably Bishop Cui Tai”).
10 September 2025: a diocese suppressed, a bishop unmentioned
On 8 July 2025 Pope Leo XIV decided to suppress the Dioceses of Xuanhua and Xiwanzi — both erected by Pius XII in 1946 — and to erect in their place the Diocese of Zhangjiakou, appointing Father Joseph Wang Zhengui as its first bishop, the announcement noting that his candidacy had been approved “within the framework of the provisional agreement.” Wang, born in 1962 (reported age 62), was ordained a priest on 24 May 1990 for the Diocese of Xianxian and later ministered in the Xuanhua area. He is also the man who organized the out-of-territory ordinations of May 2021 (see above); since the agreement’s 2020 renewal, AsiaNews had reported as early as May 2021 that the official side already treated Wang as Zhangjiakou’s pastoral coordinator. On 10 September 2025 Wang was ordained bishop at the Church of the Holy Family in Zhangjiakou, before some 300 faithful, 50 priests and senior Patriotic Association leaders; the same day the Holy See Press Office published the redrawing, the new diocese’s territory matching the municipal boundaries of Zhangjiakou, with a population of just over four million, about 85,000 Catholics and 89 priests.
News agency after news agency, reporting the announcement, wrote the same observation: it did not mention Cui Tai. Catholic News Agency’s phrase was that the longtime underground bishop of the suppressed diocese was “notably absent” from the Vatican’s announcement. A seventy-five-year-old bishop, still held and disappeared on the official record with no news of release, had his diocese suppressed that day and his flock assigned to a new bishop — the new bishop being the very organizer of the ordinations that had bypassed him four years earlier. This archive does not propose to adjudicate the Holy See’s diplomacy. The agreement’s defenders will say that preserving a mutually recognized diocesan structure and bishop is worth more than defending a map that cannot be held. The faithful of the underground church will ask what the man who was held for thirty-three years for guarding that map is supposed to count for. This archive only lays the file out in order: the erecting decree of 1946, Filoni’s letter of 2019 “reaffirming recognition,” and the suppression announcement of 2025 all issued from the same Holy See. In the first document Cui Tai is the successor; in the second he is the addressee; in the third he does not exist.
Sources: Catholic News Agency, 10 September 2025 (Pope Leo XIV’s decision of 8 July 2025 suppressing Xuanhua and Xiwanzi and erecting Zhangjiakou; Wang Zhengui’s appointment; the ordination of 10 September and its attendance; the new diocese’s population, Catholic and priest numbers; no mention of Cui Tai, described as “notably absent”; Cui’s age given as 75); Catholic News Service, 10 September 2025, as carried by the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh and others (Wang ordained priest 24 May 1990; later service in Xuanhua); AsiaNews, May 2021 (the official side already treating Wang as Zhangjiakou’s pastoral coordinator).
Full Timeline
11 April 1946: Pope Pius XII erects the Catholic Diocese of Xuanhua (and the Diocese of Xiwanzi).
1950: Cui Tai is born (Hudson Institute and ChinaAid agree; month, day and birthplace not in the public record).
1980: The Chinese official church, without the Holy See’s consent, merges Xuanhua and Xiwanzi into a “Diocese of Zhangjiakou,” which the Holy See does not recognize; two diocesan structures coexist on the same territory for more than four decades.
October 1990: Cui Tai is ordained a priest (ChinaAid gives October 1990; the Hudson Institute gives 1990).
From 1993: The authorities begin repeatedly detaining and placing under house arrest, and sending to forced labour, the priest Cui Tai, under labels of illegal preaching and illegal religious assemblies; the Hudson arrest table summarizes 1993–2007 as “detention and forced labor.” No itemized dates are in the public record. This page’s sort year — the earliest year supported by reliable sources.
17 February 2004: Zhao Kexun is secretly consecrated auxiliary bishop of Xuanhua.
2007: Zhao Kexun becomes ordinary bishop of Xuanhua on 13 July; after a raid by the authorities he goes into hiding and is not seen in public for the remaining eleven years of his life. From the same year, Cui Tai is held illegally or under house arrest almost without interruption — in secret detention centres and hotels, or taken on forced “trips” — allowed home only briefly, at the Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival, to visit his sister; from this year until 2020 he spends no Easter in his diocese.
Early 2013: Pope Benedict XVI approves the appointment of Cui Tai as coadjutor bishop of Xuanhua (some English sources erroneously say “auxiliary” — see the Verification Note). 7 April 2013: Cui is ordained a bishop; Bishop Zhao at once entrusts him with full authority to administer the diocese.
February 2017: About two weeks after the Lunar New Year, Cui Tai is arrested by security officials at his sister’s home; he is released at some point in the following months (into house arrest or surveillance — the sources do not subdivide).
Mid-April 2018: Cui is taken again, into a custody called “study” (including arranged tours of red tourism sites and visits to open church communities). 29 May 2018: the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong diocese issues a statement demanding Cui’s release and access to medical care, and the release of other detained Hebei clergy; Cardinal Joseph Zen publicly appeals for an end to the inhumane and illegal detention.
22 September 2018: The Holy See and Beijing sign the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops.
2018: Bishop Zhao Kexun dies in hiding, aged 94; Cui Tai succeeds him automatically under canon law as ordinary bishop of Xuanhua — succeeding while still inside the rotation of custody, and never taking public possession of the see.
November 2018: Two of Cui’s priests, Father Su Guipeng and Father Zhao He, are taken away for “indoctrination” in religious policy after refusing to join the Patriotic Association; two priests of the neighbouring Chongli–Xiwanzi diocese are taken at the same time.
December 2018: Cui is taken again and held for at least fifteen days, until his release in January 2019. The suspension of, and denunciation by, Father Zhang Li runs through this period: the Hudson report dates Cui’s suspension of Zhang to 23 December 2018, on grounds of fabricating miracles, advocating the elimination of the underground church and rejecting the bishop’s authority; AsiaNews and others place the suspension’s publicity in March 2019, with Zhang engineering the authorities’ arrest of the bishop (a timing conflict — see the Verification Note).
January 2019: On release, Cui writes to his flock asking them to accept the leadership of Vicar General Zhang Jianlin and the diocesan board. 28 March 2019: Zhang Jianlin is taken by Hebei provincial religious department officials (his identity papers had already been confiscated and his travel restricted). 8 a.m., 29 March 2019: after receiving a text message warning of his arrest, Cui Tai is taken away by government officials; his whereabouts are unknown.
29 November 2019: Cardinal Fernando Filoni, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, writes to the detained Cui, reaffirming the Holy See’s recognition of the Diocese of Xuanhua and of Cui’s authority, in response to the authorities’ unauthorized creation of a new diocese.
24 January 2020: Cui is allowed home for the Lunar New Year; because of the pandemic he remains with his family until June — at nearly six months, his longest period of relative freedom since 2007. 19 June 2020: he is taken again and held at an unknown location (recorded in the CECC’s 2021 annual report).
October 2020: The provisional agreement is renewed (and renewed again in October 2022 and October 2024, the 2024 renewal running for four years).
April 2021: Cui Tai is taken by police for the fourth time since the agreement was signed, and disappears; no public news of him follows. The same month, Vicar Zhang Jianlin is also placed in secret detention, with no news for over two years. 11 May 2021: official Bishop Guo Jincai ordains three priests and a deacon on Xuanhua’s territory for the Holy See-unrecognized “Diocese of Zhangjiakou”; Zhang Jianlin’s statement refusing recognition of the ordinations belongs to this episode (the sources differ slightly on the ordering of the statement and his detention; this archive follows AsiaNews as relayed by ChinaAid, under which the statement was issued against these ordinations).
April 2022: A ChinaAid report states that more than ten Xuanhua clergy were taken before that year’s Lunar New Year, naming Cui Tai and Zhang Jianlin among them — a formulation that overlaps and conflicts with the record that both men had already been in custody since April 2021; this archive flags it as a conflicting record (see the Verification Note). The same report states that police had tortured Cui and others to extract the location of Bishop Zhao’s burial (single source, unverified).
February 2023: ChinaAid and Gaudium Press report Cui missing for nearly two years and the faithful’s call for an end to the illegal detention; at the tenth anniversary of his ordination, the diocese’s faithful pray for him daily. May 2023: AsiaNews reports Zhang Jianlin held in secret detention for over two years.
October 2024: the Hudson Institute publishes “Ten Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China,” with Cui Tai among them: aged 74, detained four times under the agreement, not seen since April 2021. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025 likewise names him — “notably Bishop Cui Tai.”
8 July 2025: Pope Leo XIV decides to suppress the Dioceses of Xuanhua and Xiwanzi, erect the Diocese of Zhangjiakou, and appoint Wang Zhengui its first bishop. 10 September 2025: Wang is ordained and the Holy See publishes the redrawing the same day; the announcement does not mention Cui Tai.
September 2025 to October 2026: No public report of Cui Tai’s release, appearance, trial or death. Latest verifiable status: disappeared since April 2021, whereabouts unknown, with no charge, no trial and no official notification of any kind.
Verification Note
The spine of this page is the Cui Tai chapter of Nina Shea’s “Ten Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China” (Hudson Institute, October 2024). That report compiles the channels that have tracked the Church in China over the long term — AsiaNews, UCA News, the Cardinal Kung Foundation and others — and gives the fullest arrest-history table for Cui Tai yet published. This archive cross-checked it item by item against AsiaNews in the original (as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre), UCA News of 29 March 2019, Catholic News Agency, LiCAS, ChinaAid, Bitter Winter, the CECC annual reports, Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025, and the September 2025 agency coverage of the erection of the Diocese of Zhangjiakou. The key nodes — handling from 1993; near-continuous custody from 2007; ordination on 7 April 2013; the arrest at his sister’s home in February 2017; the detention rounds of April and December 2018; the seizure of 29 March 2019; the homecoming of 24 January 2020 and the re-detention of 19 June 2020; the final seizure of April 2021 and disappearance since — are each supported by at least two source chains. Readers are owed a statement of the sources’ nature: nearly every detail in this case comes from church and religious-freedom advocacy channels (AsiaNews is the agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions; UCA News is an Asian church news service; ChinaAid and the Hudson Institute have declared positions). The Chinese authorities have never issued any notification, charge or legal document in Cui Tai’s case with which these accounts could be read against one another. That absence of anything to check against is itself part of this case’s evidence structure, and the text presents it as such.
Seven conflicts and corrections must be stated. First, the title of his appointment: ChinaAid and some English-language sources say “auxiliary bishop,” while the Hudson Institute, UCA News and Catholic News Agency say “coadjutor bishop.” The fact that Cui succeeded automatically as ordinary bishop on Zhao Kexun’s death in 2018 matches the definition of a coadjutor (who holds the right of succession), and this archive uses “coadjutor.” Second, the sort year: 1993 is the earliest year supported jointly by the Hudson arrest table (“1993–2007: detention and forced labor”) and by Bitter Winter relaying UCA News (“since 1993”), but no exact date within that year exists; this page’s sort date therefore takes the year 1993 with month and day as system placeholders, which in no way represent a documented detention day. The itemized dates, places and terms of the 1993–2007 detentions are all matters of no public record. Third, Zhao Kexun’s age at death: born in 1924 and dying in 2018, he was 94 (Gaudium Press and others); Catholic News Agency’s 2020 report calls him 96 years old at that time, which does not square with the birth year and is not adopted. Fourth, the timing of Zhang Li’s suspension: the Hudson report dates it to 23 December 2018 (and says the December detention occurred at Zhang’s urging and lasted at least fifteen days), while AsiaNews and LiCAS place the suspension and the narrative of Zhang engineering the bishop’s arrest in March 2019; this archive records both versions side by side and does not force a merger. Fifth, ChinaAid’s April 2022 report states that more than ten Xuanhua clergy were taken before that year’s Lunar New Year “including Cui Tai and Zhang Jianlin,” although both men had already been in custody and disappeared since April 2021; the formulation appears to summarize their continuing detention or to relay it imprecisely, and this archive flags it as a conflicting record rather than erecting a separate 2022 detention event on it. Sixth, the headline of a May 2023 ChinaAid report mislabels Vicar Zhang Jianlin a “bishop”; Zhang Jianlin is a priest and the diocesan vicar (baptismal name Simone), and this archive records him as such while noting the error. Seventh, the Hudson report’s arrest table misprints Xuanhua as being in “Jiangsu Province”; Xuanhua is in Zhangjiakou, Hebei, a typographical error in that report, and this archive records Hebei. Relatedly, some sources render Zhao Kexun’s name as Zhao Duomo, Zhao Kexun or “Thomas (Cathedral) Zhao”; all are the one man, Zhao Kexun (Thomas), standardized here as Zhao Kexun. In addition: Cui Tai’s birth is documented only to the year (1950), with month, day and birthplace not in the public record; his sister’s name and age, any other family members, the family’s search efforts after April 2021, and whether Cardinal Filoni’s letter ever reached him are all matters of no public record, flagged as such in the text. Only two items in this page rest on a single source chain and are marked unverified: the report that police tortured Cui and others to extract Bishop Zhao’s burial place (ChinaAid, April 2022, itself relaying “earlier reports”), and the detail of his stomach illness, which comes from a diocesan source relayed by AsiaNews and cited by ChinaAid in 2023, recorded here with that provenance. Beyond these, this page adopts no single-source claim.
All quotations on this page are paraphrase and summary; direct quotation from any single source is kept under fifty words. Matters for which no public record exists are flagged as such in the text and in the timeline, and are not filled in by conjecture.
Our Take
The Cui Tai case is the quietest page in this archive’s religious-persecution files: no judgment, no trial, no charge — not even the shadow of an arrest warrant. It is precisely that quietness that develops one form of persecution most clearly. When a regime will not spend even the effort of fabricating a charge on a bishop, what it wants was never a “conviction.” It is a disappearance: lift the man out of his diocese’s daily life, lift his name out of the public record, and finally lift the diocese itself off the map. From the labour camps of 1993, through the unbroken custody after 2007 conducted under the names of “trips” and “study,” through the door that opened twice a year at the festivals, through the final loss of contact in April 2021, to the absence in the announcement that suppressed his diocese in September 2025 — every step on that line is namelessly “unlawful,” and together they sum to thirty-three years of one man’s life and eighty years of one diocese’s existence.
Notice, too, how small the thing he refused actually was. He organized no protest, published no political essay, maintained no foreign operation. On the public record he did only this: he did not join the Patriotic Association, he did not pledge a Church “independent” of the Holy See, and he went on living as a bishop in his own diocese. This archive ends where it began, with the words of one of his faithful, preserved by the Hudson report: his imprisonment “does not allow the bishop to celebrate and take care of his sheep.” A bishop’s entire “crime” was the wish to be a bishop; and the means used to stop him being one was thirty-three years of unbroken, administratively unnamed detention. When the map-changing announcement was published in 2025, some will have said that the Xuanhua question had been “settled.” This page is left here to record the settlement’s full cost: not a negotiation and not a piece of paper, but Zhao Kexun hidden until death, Cui Tai held until he vanished, Zhang Jianlin in secret detention for over two years, and a diocese whose two successive bishops, between them, never publicly celebrated a single Mass in their own cathedral. Maps can be redrawn. Archives are not.
Sources
Hudson Institute: Nina Shea, “Ten Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China,” October 2024 — the Cui Tai chapter, its arrest-history table and the executive summary. AsiaNews: March 2019 (the suspended Xuanhua priest and the bishop’s arrest, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre and LiCAS); Wang Zhicheng, 23 June 2020 (Bishop Cui seized again by police, as carried by the Holy Spirit Study Centre); 8 May 2023 (the vicar of Xuanhua in prison for two years, as relayed by ChinaAid); 30 May 2018 (the Hong Kong Justice and Peace Commission’s call for Cui Tai’s release). UCA News: 29 March 2019 (bishop and vicar general detained); June 2020 (the 19 June detention, as relayed by Catholic News Agency); the 2009–2011 Hebei priests series (as carried by the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Cardinal Kung Foundation). Catholic News Agency: 29 March 2019; 22 June 2020; October 2024 (the ten bishops report); 10 September 2025 (the erection of the Diocese of Zhangjiakou). Catholic News Service: 10 September 2025 (Wang Zhengui’s ordination as priest and service in Xuanhua). ChinaAid: 26 April 2022; 24 February 2023; May 2023. Bitter Winter: 30 May 2018. LiCAS News: 13 December 2019; 24 June 2020. International Christian Concern: 1 April 2019; 18 May 2021. Congressional-Executive Commission on China: 2021 Annual Report, Freedom of Religion chapter; 2024 report, Freedom of Religion chapter (the call for Cui Tai’s release). U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, FoRB Victims List, China file: this archive’s checking record of October 2026 (Cui Tai is included). Human Rights Watch: World Report 2025, China chapter. Gaudium Press: 14 February 2023. On Zhao Kexun’s life: Wikipedia, citing Catholic-Hierarchy and the UCAN diocesan directory.