第105案 | 郝志娓Case 105 | Hao Zhiwei
她是山西人，2001年从武汉中南神学院毕业，2003年到湖北鄂州的一间三自教会讲道，一讲就是十八年。2007年，她的牧师证申请被拒，会众跟着她走出三自体系，教会成了自有教堂、数百名会众的鄂钢桥教会；2013年，她由三位家庭教会牧师按立。2018年，丈夫患肝癌去世，政府又要拆她的教堂，教堂被铁丝网围住，会众翻网进去做礼拜。2019年7月31日，她被以涉嫌诈骗刑事拘留——罪名所指的，是她和两位女同工经手收取的信徒自愿奉献：起诉书把2015年以来224万余元的奉献流水整体写成诈骗金额，因为她的牧师身份没有得到官方两会批准，她的教会不算「教会」。羁押两年半、羁押中四次急性胰腺炎发作之后，2022年2月11日，鄂城区人民法院以诈骗罪判了她八年；二审裁定的理由写得直白：她明知自己没有牧师证，仍「虚构牧师身份」收奉献。她的幼子在她入狱后患上严重抑郁症、辍学锁门；她在宣判后写给长子的信里，只字未提八年，只说自己成了数独高手、睡得很好。She came from Shanxi, graduated from the Zhongnan Theological Seminary in Wuhan in 2001, and in 2003 began preaching in a Three-Self church in Ezhou, Hubei — where she stayed for eighteen years. In 2007 her application for a pastor's certificate was refused; the congregation followed her out of the Three-Self system, and the church became Egangqiao Church, independent, with its own building and several hundred members; in 2013 three house-church pastors ordained her. In 2018 her husband died of liver cancer, the government demanded her church be demolished, the building was fenced in barbed wire, and the believers climbed through the wire to worship. On 31 July 2019 she was criminally detained on suspicion of fraud — the charge pointing at the voluntary offerings she and two women co-workers had collected: the indictment rewrote the church's offering flow since 2015, more than RMB 2.24 million, entire as the amount of a fraud, because her pastoral identity lacked the official Two Associations' approval and her church did not count as a 'church'. After two and a half years in custody — and four attacks of acute pancreatitis inside — the Echeng District Court sentenced her on 11 February 2022 to eight years for fraud; the appeal ruling put its reason plainly: she knew she had no pastor's certificate, yet 'fabricated her pastoral identity' to collect offerings. Her younger son fell into severe depression after her arrest, dropped out of school and locked himself away; in the letter she wrote her elder son after sentencing she never mentioned the eight years — only that she had become a Sudoku master, and slept well.
The woman: a Shanxi native, a seminary, and an eighteen-year pulpit
Hao Zhiwei is a woman from Shanxi. Her year of birth rests, in this page, on a judicial document: the indictment of the Echeng District People's Procuratorate (Echeng Procuratorate Department 1 Criminal Indictment [2019] No. 236, in the translation published by ChinaAid in January 2020) records that she was born in 1972, is Han, and holds an associate's degree. The same indictment lists her occupation as "unemployed" — a woman who had preached in one church for eighteen years is, in the state's paperwork, without an occupation. Hold that word; this page will come back to it. ChinaAid's reporting gives her age inconsistently: 50 in November 2021, 51 in February 2022, 52 in December 2022 — three figures that roughly track a 1972 birth year but each sit about a year out from it, and this page carries them side by side, anchored on the indictment's 1972, rather than smoothing any of them away (see the Verification Note).
Her education is undisputed: in 2001 she graduated from the Zhongnan Theological Seminary in Wuhan (rendered in ChinaAid's English reporting as Zhongnan Theological Seminary and also as South Central Theological Seminary; Bitter Winter calls it the Three-Self seminary of Wuhan). Bitter Winter says she graduated brilliantly, at the age of 29; ChinaAid says the church engaged her because of her excellent preaching. Those evaluative claims come from the church side of the reporting chain and are recorded with that attribution. The hard facts are these: a seminary graduate from Shanxi came to Ezhou in Hubei in 2003, was engaged by the Three-Self church there to preach and pastor — and stayed eighteen years. ChinaAid's 2024 Crime of Fraud report sums up, in a single sentence, what made this church rare on the map of Chinese Protestantism: it was one of the very few churches in China that is independent of the state yet owns its own church building and has a congregation of several hundred people. Several hundred congregants, a building of their own, a pastor of eighteen years — those three things together are the background of everything that follows.
Her family, pieced together from the scattered reporting, is as follows: her husband Zhang Youwu (the name appears in the indictment and in Release International's profile — see the Verification Note), himself a church pastor (ChinaAid's 2024 report). They had two sons: the elder, Paul, and the younger, Moses. In 2018 Zhang Youwu died of liver cancer — and the indictment's own list of evidence contains his medical records and advance-payment receipts from Tongji Hospital, affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Tongji Medical College, because the prosecution counted the money spent on his treatment among the uses of the "fraud" proceeds. That single accounting choice is one of the sharpest edges of the case, and it has a section of its own below. When her husband died, Hao Zhiwei became the sole surviving parent of two under-age sons; a year later she was arrested, and the boys were left without a parent in the house at all. One further member of the household appears in the reporting in a single sentence: the children's only surviving grandparent, who is paraplegic (ChinaAid, 2024). That is the household, pinned here first.
One geographical confusion in early internal briefing material must be corrected at the outset: Hao Zhiwei is not a pastor in Wuhan. Wuhan is where her seminary was; her church, her congregation, her home, and the places of her arrest and trial are all in Ezhou — a prefecture-level city in Hubei about an hour's drive southeast of Wuhan, and the Egangqiao Church takes its name from the bridge by the Ezhou steelworks. An early internal brief that described her as "pastor of the Zhongnan Church in Wuhan" was wrong; this page writes Egangqiao Church in Ezhou throughout, and logs the correction in the Verification Note.
2007: a refused certificate, and a church walks out
The years 2003 to 2007 are told the same way by every source: Hao Zhiwei preached in the Ezhou Three-Self church, preached well, was recognised by the congregation, and had an open future inside the Three-Self system. Bitter Winter calls her a rising star of the Three-Self Church. The break came in 2007, when her application for a pastor's certificate was refused. The sources differ slightly on why — ChinaAid says she disagreed with the way the Religious Affairs Bureau governed churches, and the bureau therefore refused her application; Bitter Winter's version is that, as she rose within the Three-Self Church, she came to doubt that the organisation was committed to the progress of Christianity in China at all, and concluded that its function was to control Christians on the Communist Party's behalf. Two tellings of one event — "she was refused" and "she walked out" — and this page carries both rather than adjudicating between them. What is certain, and multiply attested, is the outcome: after 2007 the Ezhou Three-Self church shut down and turned itself inside out — the great majority of its congregants followed Hao Zhiwei out of the Three-Self system, the church became an independent house church under the name Egangqiao Church, and her Three-Self pastoral qualification was revoked.
Note where this section sits in the whole case. Twelve years later, when the prosecution and the courts built the fraud charge, the first link of their chain was that refused certificate of 2007: no certificate, therefore not a pastor; calling herself a pastor without one, therefore "fabricating an identity"; taking money under a fabricated identity, therefore fraud. An administrative refusal in 2007 was thus retrospectively appointed as the starting point of a fraud running for years. A congregation voting with its feet and following its pastor out of the system is, in house-church telling, an act of courage; in the indictment, that step was the first step toward a bill that would fall due twelve years later. This page sets both readings side by side, because what was on trial on the surface was money, and what was on trial underneath was that step.
After leaving the Three-Self system, Egangqiao Church held together for twelve years. It had its own building — the one named in the prosecution and demolition documents, by the Egangqiao bridge near the E-Steel power plant; it had several hundred congregants; and it ran on the house-church pattern: believers gave voluntarily, the church supported its preachers, and co-workers kept the books. ChinaAid's 2024 report singles out precisely this church's rarity: independent but not underground, with a building and a congregation. And it was exactly that semi-public existence that put it first in line after 2018 — a building that could be demolished, books that could be audited, a pastor who could be found.
16 March 2013: an ordination, read two ways
In 2013 Egangqiao Church invited three house-church pastors to ordain Hao Zhiwei as pastor (ChinaAid, Bitter Winter and Release International agree; the indictment supplies the precise date: 16 March 2013, when she held the ordination ceremony at Egangqiao Church). In the house-church tradition this step is a correction: a woman refused by the official system and stripped of her qualification is confirmed again in her pastoral office by the church community itself, on the Bible and on tradition. Elder Li Yingqiang's later commentary on such cases states exactly this logic: a church receiving offerings and supporting its preachers is in accordance with the teaching of the Bible and the practice of churches everywhere, and is bound up with the church's identity and mission.
The indictment reads the same day without a single shared word. It says that on 16 March 2013 Hao Zhiwei, without the approval of the Ezhou Three-Self Patriotic Movement and Christian Council, held an ordination ceremony at Egangqiao Church and printed pastoral certificates, "in order to gain the trust of more Christians" and collect believers' offerings. The same ceremony is, in church tradition, an ordination, and in the indictment, a preparatory act of fraud; the same certificate is, in the congregation's eyes, the community's confirmation, and in the prosecution's text, a prop for deception. This page lays the two readings side by side not to split the difference, but because the whole dispute of the case is compressed into that one day's two readings: who confers the office of pastor — the church, or the seal of an office of the Ezhou Two Associations? The court's answer, written into the appeal ruling, was that without official approval the identity is "fabricated". On that logic, every pastor of every unregistered church in China has been standing at the starting line of a fraud charge from the first day they mounted a pulpit; the only question is which day they are called to run.
The indictment adds a further coordinate to this ordination: it says Hao Zhiwei had been preaching at the E-Steel Qiao Christian Church since August 2001 "as a minister", without the Two Associations' approval, "accumulating wealth by unfair means" through tithes and other offerings. That 2001 starting point does not sit neatly with the standard narrative — graduation in 2001, engagement in 2003 — and pushes the clock back two years. This page records it as the document's own wording and flags the discrepancy (see the Verification Note): in the prosecution's narrative, her entire pastoral life is framed from its first day as "without approval"; eighteen years in the pulpit, not one of them lawful.
January 2017: fifteen days of administrative detention
Before the fraud case, Hao Zhiwei had already met the Ezhou police once, and that meeting is preserved in the indictment as a footnote to her record. The indictment states that on 10 January 2017 she was placed under administrative detention for 15 days by the Echeng Branch of the Ezhou Public Security Bureau for "illegal assembly" (the English translation's rendering is "illegally rallying"). Co-defendant Hong Ying was administratively detained for 10 days from the same date, 10 January 2017, for "obstructing law enforcement". What happened in January 2017 — which gathering, what confrontation — this site has found no independent account of in the sources consulted: no public record, and the page records it as such. All that can be fixed is what the indictment itself states: the penalties and the date. The page grades the item accordingly: a single-source statement from the prosecution document itself, whose function in the indictment is to lay a first layer of "repeat offender" colouring under the three defendants' files.
Set in sequence, the order is clear: the walk-out in 2007, the ordination in 2013, the detention in 2017, the demolition order in 2018, the criminal detention in 2019. The friction between one independent church and local power tightened year by year: first the qualification, then the punishment, then the building, then the person. That sequence is itself the background to the 2019 arrest — not the opening of an isolated economic case, but the terminus of a twelve-year friction.
2018: a demolition order, a death, and worship behind barbed wire
In early 2018 the Ezhou local government demanded the demolition and relocation of the Egangqiao church building. The official reason, throughout, was safety: the church stood beside the power plant of the E-Steel Company of the Wuhan Iron and Steel group. On the text of the notice delivered to Hao Zhiwei personally on 18 July 2019 by the Echeng District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau (in ChinaAid's published translation), the church stood within 300 metres northeast of a 200,000-cubic-metre blast-furnace gas holder and close to a surplus-gas power boiler — a zone of serious potential safety hazard, covered by a rectification requirement in the Ezhou Municipal Security Committee's Document (2019) No. 13; the district had physically isolated the dangerous zone, posted warning signs, and barred people and vehicles from entering without the approval of the production-safety authorities. The congregation refused the demolition demand (ChinaAid and Bitter Winter agree). Bitter Winter adds a pointed question: the church had stood in that spot for years, and while the congregation belonged to the Three-Self system, nobody had raised the safety problem. That question is commentary, not evidence, and is recorded here with its attribution; with it, equally, this page records the other side of the record: in documentary terms, a safety-paper chain did exist, and this page reproduces it rather than pretending it away.
That same year, Hao Zhiwei's husband Zhang Youwu died of liver cancer. ChinaAid says that, distraught, she took a year's break and could not respond to the government's demolition notice in time; Bitter Winter says she took a year off from her duties. On what the sources agree: in 2018 she lost her husband and watched her church being pushed toward demolition at the same time. The building was fenced in with barbed wire — a detail corroborated by four sources (ChinaAid's two 2022 reports, Bitter Winter, and Christian-media relays): the building was sealed behind wire, and the congregants nevertheless crossed through it and worshipped inside. A church certified as a dangerous structure and cordoned off with barbed wire, whose believers climbed through the wire to hold services — in the later accusatory narrative that picture was recoded: the religious-affairs bureau's notice of 18 July 2019 wrote that "a few people instigated and conspired with some religious people" to ignore the safety department's advice, forcibly cross the isolation equipment, and hold events in the danger zone. The notice names no one; twelve days later, the answer as to whom it meant became clear.
The year 2018 has a wider background that belongs in this case's archive, because both the defence and the recorders treat it as the policy coordinate of the case: on 1 February 2018 the newly revised Regulations on Religious Affairs took effect; the same year, the State Administration for Religious Affairs was folded into the Central Committee's United Front Work Department. ChinaAid's 2024 Crime of Fraud report explicitly links the rise of fraud charges to those two moves — the new Regulations pushed unregistered churches further to the margins, religious affairs passed into the direct management of a Party department, and from about 2018 the practice of charging house-church pastors with fraud took shape. The demolition demand, the wire and the arrest in this case all fall on the bend of that policy curve. This page records the linkage with its nature stated: it is the analytical frame of the recording organisation (ChinaAid), not the self-description of any court document; but the fit in time is a fact, and readers may weigh it themselves.
31 July 2019: criminal detention, demolition, and arrest
On 18 July 2019 the Echeng District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau delivered its notice into Hao Zhiwei's own hands — the issuing office and date, the safety documents cited, the contact telephone numbers, all preserved in the translation ChinaAid published in January 2020. It is one of the few "beforehand" documents in the case: in the name of safety, it asked her to "understand, support, and cooperate" with the administrative decision, and warned that anyone forcibly crossing the isolation equipment would answer for it in law. Twelve days later, the warning landed.
On 31 July 2019 the Echeng Branch of the Ezhou Public Security Bureau criminally detained Hao Zhiwei on suspicion of fraud; detained the same day were Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang. The three were held at the Ezhou No. 1 Detention Center (as the indictment's annex states). In August 2019 the Egangqiao church building was demolished — a church its congregation had built and owned, standing for eighteen years, pulled down in the same month its pastor was put in a detention centre. On 6 September 2019 the three were formally arrested with approval (the indictment's English translation says "with the approval of the court", a translator's error: arrest approvals belong to the procuratorate, and this page corrects it on the basis of the system and the document's nature, flagging the correction in the Verification Note). The case was handed over by the police for review and prosecution on 6 November 2019; review was extended once for complexity (6 to 21 December 2019), and the indictment was drawn on 20 December 2019. Sent over with it were 20 volumes of case materials and an annexed inventory: one car key, one driving licence, three debit cards, RMB 19,345 in cash, and one commercial housing unit (indictment annex).
That sequence deserves to be written out word by word: a notice served, then a criminal detention, then a church demolished, then an arrest approved, and only then the paperwork of a "fraud" charge. By the time the procuratorate wrote the word "fraud" into an indictment in December 2019, the church no longer existed, the congregation had scattered, and the three defendants had been inside a detention centre for nearly five months. An administrative demolition that began under the name of "safety hazard" and a criminal case defined by "offerings as fraud" dovetail, in the Ezhou of 2019, without a seam. This page asserts no more about the join than the evidence supports — no published document proves the two arose from a single decision — but the archival method is to set the two timelines on the same page and let readers see how the teeth mesh.
The indictment: how RMB 2.247 million in offerings was written as fraud
The case's core document is the Echeng District People's Procuratorate's indictment, Echeng Procuratorate Department 1 Criminal Indictment [2019] No. 236. It merits a whole section of dissection, because everything that follows — two and a half years in custody, an eight-year sentence, an appeal dismissed — is built on its logic. The indictment's structure of accusation can be restated in five steps.
Step one: establish the identity defect. From August 2001 (the indictment's chronology) Hao Zhiwei preached at the E-Steel Qiao Christian Church without the approval of the Ezhou Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the Christian Council — the words "without approval" are the source of every offence in the document. The ordination of 16 March 2013 and the self-printed pastoral certificates are characterised as a means of winning trust. Step two: identify the hands. She incited and arranged Hong Ying, from 2013, and Wan Yuanxiang, from February 2015, to be in charge of collecting, counting, managing and spending the offerings. Step three: fix the amount. From February 2015 the three, by establishing "tithes" and other offerings, deceived the victims into giving offerings totalling RMB 2,247,559; of this, RMB 1,951,370 was deposited by Wan Yuanxiang in an account opened with her own ID, and RMB 296,189 in an account opened with Hao Zhiwei's ID; the indictment further states that RMB 2,054,746 of the total was jointly defrauded by the three (the relation between this figure and the total is not fully clear in the translation; this page reproduces both and flags it — see the Verification Note). Step four: fix the destination of the money. The indictment states that Hao Zhiwei spent the offerings on buying shares in ABLife Inc. in the names of herself and her spouse Zhang Youwu, purchasing property, paying Zhang Youwu's medical bills at Tongji Hospital, and purchasing a parking space. Step five: fix the offence and the roles. The procuratorate held that the three had defrauded others of money with the aim of unlawful possession, by fabricating facts and concealing the truth, in a huge amount, violating Article 266 of the Criminal Law (fraud); Hao Zhiwei, playing the major role, was the principal offender (Article 26); Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang were accessories (Article 27) who had truthfully confessed (paragraph 3 of Article 67) and should be treated leniently.
Read the five steps together, and the accusation's true engine sits in step one. Fraud normally needs four components: fabricated facts, a victim induced into error, a voluntary handing-over of property in consequence, and unlawful possession by the perpetrator. In this case, the "fabricated fact" is not an invented project or a told lie, but the identity "pastor" itself — because the authorities would not approve it, the identity is false; because the identity is false, every offering a believer handed over in trust in that pastor became a delivery induced by error; and once the offerings are reclassified as "property obtained by deception", the three co-workers who handled them become, automatically, the principal and accessories of a fraud ring. And who are the "victims"? The believers themselves — people who gave voluntarily and maintain they were never deceived. ChinaAid's 2024 report refines the logic into a chain: house churches are forbidden to register as legal entities → they are pronounced illegal groups → their leaders are pronounced illegal clergy → their collection of offerings is pronounced fraud. One detail disclosed by Si Weijiang completes the chain at its far end: the police tried to induce church members to give evidence against Hao Zhiwei (ChinaAid, December 2022, relaying the lawyer) — the "victims" had to be talked into knowing they had been victimised.
The indictment's evidence list deserves copying into the archive too, because it shows where the case's evidence grew from. Alongside the routine items — household-registration information, the arrest process, bank statements, the house-purchase contract, Tongji Hospital records — the list contains a string of internal church documents: Egangqiao Church's application to penalise members who disrupted the normal order of religious events; a report on resolving Egangqiao Church's internal disputes; a report applying to have Hao Zhiwei — described as having broken the Religious Venue Management Regulations and violated the church's legal rights — removed; a letter on strengthening, in accordance with the law, the supervision of Hao Zhiwei as an "illegitimate Christian preacher"; and certificates issued by the Hubei and Ezhou Two Associations and by the Ezhou Municipal Commission of Ethnic and Religious Affairs. Part of the accusation's foundation, in other words, consists of the paperwork accumulated over years of internal dispute around this church within the Three-Self structures and the religious-management apparatus. This page's record stops there: the composition of the evidence list is the indictment's own statement of fact; how those documents arose, and the history of the church's internal disputes, are matters of no public record, and this page does not fill them in.
The figures for the amount are fixed here once, so that later passages do not talk past each other: the indictment's own number is RMB 2,247,559; ChinaAid's October 2020 report gives about RMB 2.24 million; its 2024 report RMB 2,247,000; Bitter Winter about EUR 300,000. These are one sum in different roundings and currencies, and this page follows the indictment's RMB 2,247,559, carrying the others alongside. One question the indictment never answers is asked here on the reader's behalf and recorded as a gap: the RMB 2.247 million is the total flow of offerings from February 2015 to 2019 — how much of it supported the preachers and kept the church running, the indictment does not distinguish; it classifies the whole total as fraud proceeds, and lists even the part spent on Zhang Youwu's cancer treatment as evidence of "unlawful possession". The treatment fees of a dying husband, in Tongji Hospital, are in this document an item of the crime.
Two and a half years unconvicted: postponed hearings, four bouts of pancreatitis, and a defendant who would not plead
The indictment was drawn in December 2019, and the case then waited more than two years. The sources differ on the hearing's original scheduling, and this page carries both: the South China Morning Post (relayed by ChinaAid in October 2020) reported that the trial had first been set for January 2020 and then moved to August, still without notice, and that the COVID-19 pandemic had caused further delay; ChinaAid's own reports of November 2021 and February 2022 say the trial had been scheduled for August 2020 and was postponed again and again because of the pandemic. What is certain is the outcome: from criminal detention on 31 July 2019 to the first-instance verdict on 11 February 2022, Hao Zhiwei spent two and a half years in the Ezhou No. 1 Detention Center before any judgment came down. Above her head throughout hung the procuratorate's recommendation: ChinaAid's February 2022 report says the procuratorate recommended a sentence of more than ten years, and Si Weijiang had told the South China Morning Post in 2020 that, if convicted, she faced a minimum of ten — on the fraud thresholds, RMB 2.247 million falls within the band discussed as an "especially huge" amount, and ten years is where that band starts. Her own position, throughout, was one word: she refused to plead guilty (Si Weijiang, relayed consistently by ChinaAid and the South China Morning Post). Si warned at the same time that a conviction in this case could set a precedent for the authorities to use the same charge against other pastors.
Lawyer visits left two dated coordinates. On 29 July 2020 Si Weijiang met Hao Zhiwei at the detention centre, and she told him she often woke laughing in her cell because she sensed God's presence (ChinaAid, November 2021). At that same visit she dictated a letter to her sons, blessing Paul to lead his younger brother to faith, saying she had fasted and prayed for two days during Paul's college entrance examination, that she was delighted to hear he had scored more than 500 points, that she prayed for both boys daily, and that she would check their "homework" when she came home (ChinaAid, February 2022, publishing the letter she dictated). On 23 November 2021 Si visited her again (ChinaAid's 2024 report and its 2021 reporting agree) — and that visit produced the gravest cluster of facts in the case: her health.
On Si Weijiang's account, given after the November 2021 visit and relayed by ChinaAid (with International Christian Concern's account relayed in turn by the Christian Post and Christianity Daily forming the same chain; the page grades it as a lawyer's account), Hao Zhiwei had, in two years of custody, suffered four attacks of acute pancreatitis and been rushed to emergency treatment, at one point nearly dying; she had lost a great deal of weight (ChinaAid's English text gives a loss of "over 50 pounds"; whether the unit in the underlying Chinese was pounds or jin this site could not verify, and it reproduces the figure flagged — see the Verification Note); and half of her hair had turned white. The United States Department of State's 2022 International Religious Freedom Report, recording this case, likewise states that church members said her health had declined in custody and that she had developed pancreatitis — which carries the health section beyond a lawyer's word alone and into an American official annual report (whose sources were the church and Christian media; the page states the chain). And despite all of it, she told her lawyer she firmly believed she would be acquitted (the Christian Post, relaying ICC). A woman who had survived four attacks of pancreatitis, whose hair had half whitened, waited in a detention centre for a trial she believed would clear her — and the verdict she received is in the next section.
During the custody there were also two children outside the walls, waiting. In October 2020 Paul told the South China Morning Post that the government was indefinitely postponing the trial while it continued to look for evidence — building, he said, a fraud case that had never existed, to frame his mother; at the time he was living on a university campus in eastern Zhejiang, while his 13-year-old brother Moses stayed alone at home in Ezhou, looked after by a part-time domestic helper (ChinaAid, relaying the South China Morning Post). This page flags its sourcing plainly: the Post is the upstream source for these family details, and this site did not retrieve the original text to check it word by word; the items are graded as relayed.
First instance: 11 February 2022, eight years
On 11 February 2022 the Echeng District People's Court delivered its first-instance judgment: Hao Zhiwei was guilty of fraud and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment (ChinaAid, 15 February 2022; UCA News, the Christian Post, Release International and the China Zentrum's news update on religions are in agreement). By the day of sentencing she had already been in a detention centre for two and a half years — close to a third of the sentence she was about to receive was already served. Si Weijiang visited her, and she decided to appeal (ChinaAid). The full text of the first-instance judgment has been found by this site in no official or leaked version; the judgment's details — whether a fine was imposed, the amount ordered recovered, and the sentences of Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang — are, beyond "eight years for Hao Zhiwei", matters of no public record, and this page flags each gap rather than backfilling the first-instance text from the appeal ruling's relays.
The first-instance sentencing conceals an arithmetic that belongs in the archive. The prosecuted amount was more than RMB 2.247 million and the recommendation was more than ten years; the court imposed eight, below the recommendation. The appeal ruling later supplied the footnote: Hao Zhiwei had "returned most of the illegal gains", so leniency was in order — Bitter Winter puts it more bluntly: her family returned the donations to the parishioners in the hope of a lighter sentence, and it did not move the court (at the appeal stage). That is to say, over the course of two years this family did a logically painful thing: they maintained that the money was offerings, not loot, and returned it anyway — because restitution is the only leniency channel this procedure prices, and even a family pleading not guilty must walk out through it. The figure of eight years is the sum, on the sentencing scales, of two opposite acts: refusing to plead, and paying restitution. This page lays the arithmetic out and pronounces no conclusion; but notice the question neither instance ever answered: if the offerings were truly the proceeds of fraud, restitution for leniency is a routine operation; if the offerings were the believers' voluntary gifts, then what, exactly, did the return "return"?
After the sentencing, Si Weijiang released the letters Hao Zhiwei had written to her children in 2020 and the letter Paul wrote to his mother on the day of sentencing, 11 February 2022. Si said he could not stop crying when he read them (ChinaAid, February 2022). Those letters are among the few first-person texts of this case, and the next section is devoted to them.
Two letters and a family: Paul, Moses, and a boy home alone
A persecution archive gives a section, by custom, to those outside the walls. Outside the walls of this case stood two boys who, in the summer of 2019, had not long lost their father, and then lost their mother.
First, the letters. On 11 February 2022, the day of the sentencing, Paul wrote to his mother. He told her that in the time she had been in prison he had grown up a lot, that he was no longer the shy and timid boy he had been and could now handle many things on his own; that he had taken the college entrance examination and been admitted to university, that his university was full of God's grace, and that he got along well with his classmates (ChinaAid's published translation of the letter). On 18 February 2022 Hao Zhiwei wrote back to her elder son — as far as this site can establish, her last public text. She wrote that it was the first time she had received a letter from her son and that she was beyond happy; that she slept well inside, and God's peace was with her; that in those two years and seven months she too had grown — she had never played Sudoku before, and inside she had become a Sudoku master, and looked forward to competing with the boys when they were reunited; that she kept worrying about her younger son Moses, and asked Paul to pray with her for him, believing they would see a miracle; and that her cellmate had been sentenced to twelve years and could not sleep, while she, having prayed, slept in peace (the letter's contents were released by International Christian Concern and relayed by Christianity Daily). A letter written a week after an eight-year sentence contains not one word about the case, about injustice, or about the eight years — she wrote about Sudoku, about sleep, and about the boys' homework. This page reproduces these details because they are this person's own voice in the archive; the eight years appear in her letter exactly once, as the number "two years and seven months".
Then, Moses. The younger son was about 13 when his mother was arrested (ChinaAid's 2020 figure; the organisation's November 2021 English text calls him an elementary-school pupil, which conflicts with the age figure — this page follows the middle-school reading and carries the variant, see the Verification Note). After his father's death and his mother's imprisonment, and after his elder brother left for university in 2020, he remained in Ezhou alone. In the autumn of 2021 he fell into severe depression, dropped out of school, locked himself in his room, refused contact with people, and ate only one meal a day (Si Weijiang's account, in the consistent ChinaAid / ICC / Christian Post chain). ChinaAid's 2024 report fills in the care structure: the children's only surviving grandparent is paraplegic, the two boys were looked after by several women believers of the church, and Moses was in substance living alone. During the 2022 winter break Paul came home and persuaded his brother to return to school; but he still did not tell Moses that their mother had been sentenced to eight years — he wanted his brother to concentrate on his studies (ChinaAid, December 2022). The elder brother's concealment of those eight years was to be maintained until 2027. What happened to this family afterwards — Moses's schooling and illness, Paul's whereabouts — this site has found no update in the sources consulted: no public record. After December 2022 the family's news stops, together with the mother's.
The appeal: 12 December 2022, upheld — and Si Weijiang's "absurd"
On 12 December 2022 the Ezhou Intermediate People's Court issued its second-instance ruling: the appeal was dismissed and the original judgment affirmed (ChinaAid published the ruling's translation on 28 December 2022). From sentencing to final judgment was another ten months. The ruling's core passages, summarised from the translation, are these: the appellant Hao Zhiwei and the original co-defendants Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang fabricated facts and concealed the truth to defraud and unlawfully possess others' money in a huge amount, which constitutes fraud, and the illegal gains should be recovered; Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang played a minor role in the joint offence and truthfully confessed, so leniency was proper; Hao Zhiwei had returned most of the illegal gains, so leniency was proper in her case too. Addressing the grounds of appeal, the ruling held that the facts of the offence were clear and the evidence reliable and sufficient; that Hao Zhiwei, though aware she had no pastor's certificate, had fabricated her pastoral identity in order to gain the victims' trust and collect "offerings", and had acted with the intention of deliberately defrauding the victims — so her appeal and the defence submissions were unfounded and not accepted. The defence had asked for leniency on the basis that her family had returned the gains on her behalf; the ruling answered that the original sentencing was appropriate and the request invalid. Its legal basis was item 1 of Article 236 of the Criminal Procedure Law, and its conclusion was eight words in the Chinese: the appeal is dismissed, the original judgment is affirmed. The second-instance ruling is final.
Watch the movement this ruling makes, because it completes the last link of the indictment's logic. The defence's core submission throughout was that offerings are voluntary, that a church supporting its pastor is a tradition, and that fraud cannot be constructed from them. The ruling did not engage the question of whether the believers were willing. It changed the question: did she have a pastor's certificate? She did not. And she knew she did not — the 2013 ordination was not officially approved, and she was well aware of that — yet she presented herself as a pastor and received support; that, said the ruling, is "fabricating an identity". Willingness no longer mattered under that way of asking: even if every believer gave with a glad heart, once the recipient's identity lacks the Ezhou Two Associations' approval, the handing-over is retrospectively reclassified as victimisation. This page pins the reasoning in the archive exactly as it stands, because it is the keyhole of the whole "offerings-as-fraud" model: what it tries is not a transaction but a qualification; what it protects is not the believer's purse but the monopoly on issuing certificates.
Si Weijiang's response to the appeal ruling is the defence's most complete surviving statement in this case, and this page summarises it (each quotation kept under fifty words of its source — see Sources): he said the logic of the Ezhou Intermediate Court was absurd — as long as it is not a Three-Self church, the church cannot be called a church, the minister cannot be called a pastor, and the church cannot accept tithes or offerings, on pain of committing fraud; house churches are established and shepherded according to the Bible, and the worst that can be said is illegal business operation for lack of a licence — definitely not fraud; if the government does not allow a church to exist, it may ban it, but the church is not committing fraud. And he added that many Christians choose not to tell their congregations of the church's illegal status, believing they live in a grey area, but that it was time to wake up: anyone could be targeted at any time, especially the church's ministers, and they needed to re-evaluate the price of their faith (ChinaAid, 28 December 2022). After that statement, Si Weijiang's public involvement in the case stops: whether he continued to act after 2023, and whether any petition for retrial was filed, this site has not found in the sources consulted — no public record.
The co-defendants Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang: two names passed over in a line
The defendants in this case were never only Hao Zhiwei. Hong Ying, female, born 1970 on the indictment, educated to middle-school level, listed as a worker; Wan Yuanxiang, female, born 1972 on the indictment, educated to middle-school level, listed as "unemployed". All three were women, and all three were co-workers of this one church. The indictment assigns the other two their duties in detail: from 2013 Hong Ying and from February 2015 Wan Yuanxiang were, at Hao Zhiwei's direction, responsible for collecting, counting, managing and spending the offerings; the bank accounts stood in Wan Yuanxiang's and Hao Zhiwei's names. Each had a prior record: Hong Ying's 10 days of administrative detention in January 2017 for "obstructing law enforcement", the same day as Hao Zhiwei's detention. On 31 July 2019 all three were criminally detained on the same day; on 6 September all three were arrested; and in the indictment all three stand as defendants, held in the Ezhou No. 1 Detention Center.
After that, the public record grows miserly with Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang. The indictment and the appeal ruling both find them accessories who truthfully confessed and merited leniency or mitigation; ChinaAid's February 2022 report says the two co-workers had been arrested together with Hao Zhiwei and, after two years in custody, were released on bail; Bitter Winter says the two "confessed" and received lighter sentences. Their actual sentences — how many years, whether suspended, what fines — this site has not found in any of the sources consulted: no public record. The first-instance judgment is unpublished, and the translated extract of the appeal ruling deals only with the appellant Hao Zhiwei's part, so these two co-defendants' outcomes rest on the single word "lenient". Where they went after bail or release, whether they are still in Ezhou, what became of them after the church was dissolved — likewise no public record. This page devotes a separate section to them because the discipline of the archive demands it: a case cannot be allowed to leave its co-defendants as mere names just because the principal's story is complete. Their names, ages, and the daily work of counting every offering were once part of this church's ordinary running; now they are two names that appear in an indictment and have no ending.
One further pin, at the level of the sources themselves: in several English reports Wan Yuanxiang's name is misspelled "Wang Yuanxiang", Hong Ying appears in ChinaAid's 2024 report once as "Jiu Ying", and Bitter Winter's report repeatedly gives Hao Zhiwei's surname as "Zhao". This page follows the indictment translation's "Hong Ying" and "Wan Yuanxiang" and the Chinese names Hong Ying （洪英） and Wan Yuanxiang （万远祥） throughout, and logs the errors in the Verification Note — the errors are themselves part of the archive, marking how many hands this case passed through internationally, and how carefully it was handled.
A paradigm case: the spread of the "fraud" charge from Egangqiao
Hao Zhiwei's place in the history of persecution rests not on her case being the heaviest, but on its being early and complete. As early as 2020 Si Weijiang said her case might be the first in China in which a house-church pastor was charged with fraud for preaching the gospel (ChinaAid, quoting the lawyer, in a formulation consistent across relays). On 28 November 2021 Elder Li Yingqiang of the Chengdu Early Rain Covenant Church published his "Three Comments on the Fraud Charge", the most systematic response to the new offence: Chinese house churches, he wrote, receive believers' offerings and use them to support their preachers, in accordance with the teaching of the Bible and the practice of churches worldwide, inseparably from the church's identity and mission; since the new Regulations on Religious Affairs took effect in February 2018, the authorities' means of persecuting house churches had come to include the Sinicisation of Christianity, the removal of crosses, the sealing and demolition of church buildings, the banning of offerings, and the arrest of preachers on fraud charges; and fraud was only one charge in the authorities' set, the others including illegal business operations, inciting subversion of state power, and picking quarrels and provoking trouble (reproduced in full by ChinaAid in February 2022). That essay, written two and a half months before Hao Zhiwei's first-instance sentencing, later became one of the most cited texts in the discussion of this class of cases.
The spread that followed is recorded, link by link, in ChinaAid's reporting (the details of the other cases are not developed on this page, only the fact of the spread): after Hao Zhiwei's arrest, Elder Zhang Chunlei of Guiyang Ren'ai Reformed Church, Elders Hao Ming and Wu Jiannan of Deyang's Early Rain Qingcaodi Church, Pastor Wang Xiaoguang and preacher Yang Rongli of Linfen's Golden Lampstand Church, Li Jie, Han Xiaodong and Wang Qiang of the Linfen Covenant House Church, and Pastor Zhou Songlin and Elder Ding Zhongfu of Hefei's Ganquan Church were in turn seized, charged and sentenced under the same fraud label. On 26 January 2024 ChinaAid published its special report "Crime of Fraud: A New Era of Persecution Against Christians by the Chinese Communist Party", reviewing twelve cases of this type between 2016 and 2023, expressly listing the Hao Zhiwei case as one of the paradigm cases, and distilling the four-link logic chain — refuse registration, pronounce the group illegal, pronounce the leader illegal clergy, pronounce the offerings fraud. In February 2026, reporting the Ganquan Church verdict, ChinaAid again cited this case as the originating example, calling it the first publicly reported case to classify long-term offerings wholesale as fraud (the report's pronoun for Hao Zhiwei is wrong in the original; this page quotes its judgement corrected to the fact). One local church's ledger had become the template for an era's charge.
The grading of this section must be written out: the labels "first" and "paradigm" are the judgements of the lawyer and the recording organisation (Si Weijiang's words were that it "might" be the first; ChinaAid's report has it as one paradigm case among several). Whether an earlier similar case exists, this site has not exhaustively searched, and pronounces nothing. What is certain is the chronology: after the first-instance sentence of February 2022, the number and geography of such cases visibly expanded, and the structure of Hao's indictment — unauthorised identity, total voluntary offerings, co-workers divided into principal and accessories — recurs in the published materials of the cases that followed. That the template was copied is fact; the ordinal "first" is a judgement with its attribution attached.
The international record: statements, databases, and three American official texts
The international record of this case runs on the Christian persecution-monitoring networks as its main stem and on American official texts as its extension, and it stretches from 2019 to 2025 — which distinguishes it from many cases in which sentencing is also the end of the story.
On the monitoring side: ChinaAid followed the case continuously for at least six years, from publishing the indictment in January 2020 (its October 2020 report of the RMB 2.24 million charge with the South China Morning Post relay; its November 2021 report of two years and four months in custody and her health; the first instance in February 2022; the appeal in December 2022; the special report of January 2024; and the backward citation in another case in February 2026). Bitter Winter's piece of 27 December 2022 organised the final judgment under the headline that she was never forgiven for leaving the Three-Self Church. International Christian Concern released her prison letter; the Christian Post (27 February 2022) and Christianity Daily followed the health reports and the letters; UCA News stands behind the first-instance report as one of its sources (relayed by the Christian Post); Ireland's Church in Chains and the China Zentrum's news update on Religions and Christianity in Today's China both carried the case — the latter once misdating the sentencing to December 2021 (in fact 11 February 2022), an error this page logs here so that it travels no further. Release International published its prisoner profile of Hao Zhiwei in February 2024, listing the charge as fraud, the arrest as July 2019 and the sentence as eight years, and urging readers to raise her case with the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
On the American official side there are three texts, advancing year by year. First, the United States Department of State's 2022 International Religious Freedom Report (released 15 May 2023) records the case in its China chapter: on 11 February 2022 the authorities in Ezhou sentenced Pastor Hao Zhiwei of Egangqiao Church to eight years in prison for "fraud for preaching the Gospel" after her church refused to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement; she had been detained in 2019, shortly before her church building was demolished; church members said her health had declined in prison and that she had developed pancreatitis. Second, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2024 Annual Report, in its Status of Women chapter, cites in a footnote — in a passage on the detention of women of religious belief — ChinaAid's Chinese-language report of this case's final judgment: the case thereby entered the annual monitoring text of the United States Congress's China commission. Third, on 11 September 2025 the House of Representatives bill H.R. 5303 (the FREEDOM for Gao Zhisheng and All Political Prisoners Act) was introduced; finding (18) of its text names Hao Zhiwei, recording that she, a pastor at an unregistered Protestant church, was arrested and in 2022 given an eight-year sentence because she refused to join the government-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement or the Chinese Christian Council. The grading this page gives these three texts: they prove that the case has been continuously recorded and cited by United States official bodies; they do not prove any particular demarche, and of diplomatic action this site has found no public record.
Two "not found" items stand beside the records above, as this site's standards require. First: in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom's (USCIRF) list of religious prisoners of conscience and victims, this site searched under her name and did not retrieve an individual entry in her name — a "not found", which does not mean the commission never attended to the case, and this page records only the search result. Second: no individual statement by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) on this case was found in the sources consulted. These "nothings", set in the same section as the "somethings", are exactly what distinguishes an archive from advocacy.
Current status (as of 1 November 2026): the arithmetic of the term, a missing prison, and six years of archival afterlife
Current status is set out here, as this site's standard requires for a serving prisoner, as four questions, answered one by one.
First question: where is she held? No public record. The last known place of custody is the Ezhou No. 1 Detention Center (from July 2019 to at least the period around the 2022 first instance; Si Weijiang visited her there in November 2021). After the final judgment she will have been transferred to a prison to serve the sentence, but the prison's name and location have not been found by this site in any of the sources consulted; ChinaAid's February 2022 report says loosely that the lawyer visited her "in the prison", without naming a place. This page makes no conjectural filling.
Second question: when does the term expire? The arithmetic is as follows: under the Criminal Law's rules, a fixed-term sentence runs from the day of its execution, and each day of pre-judgment custody is credited against it. Hao Zhiwei has been in continuous custody since her criminal detention on 31 July 2019; eight years counted from that day run out around 30 July 2027. The nature of that sentence of this page must be nailed down: it is an arithmetic projection from published rules and known dates, not a release date confirmed by any official document, and if there is any reduction, parole or alteration of the term, the arithmetic fails at once. As of 1 November 2026 this site has found no public record of any reduction, parole, medical parole or early release.
Third question: how is her health? The last health record with a source is the lawyer's account of November 2021 — four attacks of acute pancreatitis, weight loss, half her hair white — together with her own February 2022 letter saying she slept well. Since then, for more than four years, there has been no health update of any kind: no family bulletin, no lawyer visit report, no medical record. For a serving prisoner who had four pancreatic attacks and was once near death in a detention centre, a silence of more than four years over her health is itself part of the current status, and this page records it plainly, neither optimistically nor theatrically.
Fourth question: who is still recording this case? The answer is in the previous section: ChinaAid's special report (2024), Release International's prisoner profile (2024), the CECC's Annual Report (2024), a United States congressional bill (2025), and ChinaAid's retrospective citation in another case (February 2026). Which is to say: while the public channels inside China hold a zero record of this case, her name has stayed alive and continuously cited in the archival systems outside — it has already passed from being one person's case to being the standard footnote when a pattern of persecution is argued. Whether she knows any of this, whether her two sons are still in Ezhou, whether Moses has returned to school — all of these, as of this site's present check, are matters of no public record.
Timeline
1972: Hao Zhiwei is born in Shanxi (on the indictment; ChinaAid's age figures differ — see the Verification Note).
2001: Graduates from the Zhongnan Theological Seminary in Wuhan (Bitter Winter: with distinction, aged 29).
2003: Engaged by the Three-Self church of Ezhou, Hubei, to preach and pastor; she pastors the same church for eighteen years from this point.
2007: Her application for a pastor's certificate is refused by the religious-affairs authorities and her Three-Self pastoral qualification revoked; the congregation leaves the Three-Self system and the church becomes the independent Egangqiao Church.
16 March 2013: Ordained as pastor by three house-church pastors (the date is the indictment's); the indictment states she printed pastoral certificates that day.
10 January 2017: Hao Zhiwei is administratively detained for 15 days for "illegal assembly"; Hong Ying is detained for 10 days from the same day for "obstructing law enforcement" (both on the indictment).
Early 2018: The local government demands the demolition and relocation of the church building, citing its proximity to the E-Steel power plant; the congregation refuses. The building is fenced with barbed wire; the congregants continue to cross the wire to worship.
2018: Her husband Zhang Youwu dies of liver cancer; Hao Zhiwei takes about a year of rest.
18 July 2019: The Echeng District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau delivers its notice to Hao Zhiwei, citing the Ezhou Municipal Security Committee's Document (2019) No. 13 and requiring her to understand, support and cooperate with the demolition decision.
31 July 2019: Hao Zhiwei, Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang are criminally detained by the Echeng Branch of the Ezhou Public Security Bureau on suspicion of fraud, and held at the Ezhou No. 1 Detention Center.
August 2019: The Egangqiao church building is demolished.
6 September 2019: The three are formally arrested (the indictment translation's "approval of the court" is an error — see the Verification Note).
6 November 2019: The case is transferred by the police for review and prosecution; on 20 December 2019 the Echeng District People's Procuratorate draws the indictment (Echeng Procuratorate Department 1 Criminal Indictment [2019] No. 236), charging fraud in offerings of RMB 2,247,559 with Hao Zhiwei as principal offender.
17 January 2020: ChinaAid publishes translations of the indictment and of the religious-affairs bureau's notice.
29 July 2020: Si Weijiang visits Hao Zhiwei at the detention centre; she dictates a letter to her two sons.
October 2020: The South China Morning Post reports the case (relayed by ChinaAid): the charged amount about RMB 2.24 million; the trial first set for January, moved to August, still unscheduled; Paul interviewed.
23 November 2021: Si Weijiang visits again; afterwards discloses her four attacks of acute pancreatitis, one near-fatal, her weight loss and half-whitened hair, and young Moses's severe depression and dropping out of school.
28 November 2021: Li Yingqiang publishes "My Three Comments on the Fraud Charge".
30 November 2021: ChinaAid reports the case under the frame "in custody two years and four months without trial".
11 February 2022: The Echeng District People's Court sentences Hao Zhiwei at first instance to eight years' imprisonment for fraud; the same day, Paul writes to his mother.
18 February 2022: Hao Zhiwei writes from custody to her elder son Paul — her last public text known to this site.
12 December 2022: The Ezhou Intermediate People's Court dismisses the appeal and upholds the original judgment; on 28 December ChinaAid publishes the ruling's translation and Si Weijiang's comment.
15 May 2023: The United States Department of State's 2022 International Religious Freedom Report is released, its China chapter recording this case and her pancreatitis in custody.
26 January 2024: ChinaAid publishes its Crime of Fraud report, taking this case as one of its paradigm cases and disclosing family details — the children cared for by women believers of the church, the sole surviving grandparent paraplegic.
February 2024: Release International issues its prisoner profile of Hao Zhiwei.
December 2024: The CECC's 2024 Annual Report, Status of Women chapter, cites the report of this case's final judgment in a footnote.
11 September 2025: The United States House bill H.R. 5303 is introduced; its findings name Hao Zhiwei.
February 2026: ChinaAid's report on the Ganquan Church case cites this case as the originating example of the same charge.
30 July 2027 (arithmetic projection): Expiry of the eight-year term; not officially confirmed — see Current status.
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case stays with this case's own facts — and at the core of this case's facts sits a piece of legal logic. It deserves to be taken apart on its own, step by step.
First: there is no "scam" in this case in the ordinary sense. No invented project, no promised returns, no absconding with the money, and not one believer stepping forward to say they were cheated — on the contrary, the people designated "victims" are the givers themselves, and the defence lawyer disclosed that the police had to "induce" believers to produce testimony against her. The destinations of the money as the indictment itself lists them are: alongside the support of preachers and the church's running, treatment fees for her dying husband at Tongji Hospital, a house purchase, insurance shares, a parking space. Whether those uses were proper, and whether the church's accounts were well kept, could have been a debate about church governance, or even a matter for administrative penalty. They were written as fraud for one reason only: an inserted premise — that her pastoral identity does not count. Once the identity is declared void, the same ledger turns from "the church's accounts" into "the fraudster's accounts". This site holds that remembering that point of insertion matters more than remembering the number eight: it means that, under this logic, conviction does not require deception to be proved first; it requires only that a qualification be annulled first.
Second: "without approval" makes a rare cross-border journey in this case. It begins as a state under administrative law (no registration, no certificate), becomes a conclusion under the law of identity (not a pastor), and ends as intent under the criminal law (knowing she had no certificate and still calling herself a pastor — that is, fabricating an identity with fraudulent intent). The appeal ruling's sentence "she is aware that she doesn't have a pastoral certificate" is that journey's terminus. On this reasoning, a person's knowledge of her administrative non-compliance automatically upgrades itself into knowledge of criminal fraud; the more clearly she understands that her church is not approved, the more complete her "intent" becomes. If that reasoning stands, it applies to every act of collection by every unregistered religious body — which is precisely why it was copied afterwards: it does not need a new offence invented for each case, only the same net cast in a new place. Li Yingqiang wrote as early as 2021 about the listing tendency of these charges, and Hao's indictment is that list's first complete specimen.
Third: consider the composition of that RMB 2.247 million, because it decides the texture of this offence. It is the total flow of donations across four or five years, from February 2015 to 2019, from several hundred congregants, held in church co-workers' bank accounts, every sum with a statement, a counting, a pair of hands. The proceeds of a fraud case are usually quick, scattered and untraceable; this body of "proceeds" is as slow as a church's annual report. And precisely because the books were kept, the total came out "huge" — a church whose accounts are clear is, under this logic, easier to convict than one whose accounts are chaos, because the total can be computed. The more carefully the books are kept, the more exactly the sentence can be calculated. That is the black arithmetic this case leaves to every house church: transparency, here, is not a shield; it is a sentencing basis.
Fourth: the restitution. This site regards that moment as the one most worth pausing over in the whole case. The family maintained that the offerings were not loot and their mother was not a fraudster — and returned most of the money anyway. Not because they conceded, but because the procedure prices only that one road to leniency. The court accepted the restitution, wrote it into the ruling ("since Hao Zhiwei has returned most of the illegal gains, it is fine to be lenient to her"), and then imposed eight years — not much below the recommendation, and with the characterisation untouched. Returning the money bought no innocence; it bought a small offset on the sentencing scales. And once the money was returned, it fixed the words "illegal gains" in the documents — you see, she returned it, so the money must indeed have been loot. It is an elegantly closed loop: do not return it, and the sentence is heavier; return it, and the characterisation is confirmed. This site writes the loop out because it will not appear in this one case only.
Fifth: back to the person. In the letter she wrote her son a week after sentencing, Hao Zhiwei wrote that she had become a Sudoku master, that she slept well, and that she would check the children's homework. She did not write about the eight years. And in her home, a paraplegic grandparent, a teenager who had locked himself in his room and stopped eating, and an elder brother concealing the sentence from him at university, are paying for those eight years. The complete shape of persecution is never the single number on a judgment; it is that number unfolded outside the walls: a family spending seven years waiting for a door to open in the summer of 2027 — if the arithmetic is not wrong. This site closes with one sentence tied directly to the facts of this case: when a church's offering ledger can be rewritten entire as the amount of a fraud, what has been rewritten is not one church's accounts but the ceiling above every unregistered church — and it hangs, above every pulpit, exactly one "without approval" away.
Verification Note
This site's characterisation: a case of religious persecution in which a church's offerings were characterised wholesale as fraud proceeds under Article 266 of the Criminal Law; it meets this site's criteria for the persecution archive. The source structure of this case must be explained first. The mainland authorities have never issued any bulletin on this case, and the indictment, the first-instance judgment and the appeal ruling appear on no official channel, China Judgments Online included; the core documents the outside world relies on are the translation of the indictment published by ChinaAid in January 2020 (Echeng Procuratorate Department 1 Criminal Indictment [2019] No. 236) and its translation of the appeal ruling published in December 2022, together with the organisation's continuous reporting over six years. This page accordingly uses the documents' elements (institutions, dates, amounts, statutory provisions, and the style of their findings) while flagging here that the translations carry no official-channel corroboration, their credibility resting on the consistent relays of the same case elements by multiple bodies (UCA News, the Christian Post, Bitter Winter, and the United States Department of State's report).
Two corrections to the task briefing and to this site's own early internal brief are logged together here. First, the brief made Hao Zhiwei "pastor of the Zhongnan Church in Wuhan" — wrong. She is the pastor of Egangqiao Church in Ezhou, Hubei; the Zhongnan Theological Seminary in Wuhan is her school (graduated 2001). Second, the brief had her "sentenced to nine years in February 2025" — this site has found, in all the sources consulted, no record of any "nine years" or of a "2025 sentencing" in this case at all; the facts are a first-instance sentence of eight years on 11 February 2022, upheld on 12 December 2022. This page writes eight years, and logs expressly here: the nine-year version has no public record. Third, the brief's account of the co-defendants Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang as women church co-workers is confirmed by the indictment; but their sentences, which the brief omitted, this site likewise could not find — see below.
Facts verified across sources: graduation from the Zhongnan Theological Seminary in 2001 and engagement by the Ezhou Three-Self church in 2003 (ChinaAid, Bitter Winter, Release International in agreement); the refused certificate application of 2007, the church's departure from the Three-Self system, and the revocation of her qualification (the same three sources; the sequencing of refusal and departure is carried in both readings in the text); ordination by three house-church pastors in 2013 (the same three; the precise date, 16 March, on the indictment); the 2018 demolition demand and her husband's death (ChinaAid, Bitter Winter); criminal detention on suspicion of fraud on 31 July 2019, the church's demolition in August, and the formal arrest on 6 September (the indictment, ChinaAid, Bitter Winter, Release International); the charged amount of RMB 2,247,559 (the indictment's own figure; ChinaAid about RMB 2.24 million in 2020 and RMB 2,247,000 in its 2024 report; Bitter Winter about EUR 300,000 — carried side by side); the first-instance sentence of eight years on 11 February 2022 (ChinaAid; UCA News as relayed by the Christian Post; Release International; the State Department report); the appeal upheld on 12 December 2022 (ChinaAid's published ruling translation; Bitter Winter); defence lawyer Si Weijiang, his "possibly the first case" judgement, and his criticism of the appeal's logic (two ChinaAid texts, consistent by relay in the Christian Post).
Matters resting on a single source or on relay, graded in the text: the 2017 administrative detentions (Hao Zhiwei 15 days for "illegal assembly", Hong Ying 10 days for "obstructing law enforcement") appear only in the indictment's own text, with no independent reporting to corroborate them, and are recorded as a document's single-source statement; the destinations of the funds in the indictment (ABLife shares, property, Zhang Youwu's medical bills, a parking space) are the prosecution's allegation, not neutral fact, and are quoted on that basis, the church side's account of its books being a matter of no public record; the four attacks of acute pancreatitis and the changes in weight and hair rest on Si Weijiang's account after the November 2021 visit (one chain through ChinaAid and ICC), the State Department report relaying her health decline and pancreatitis on church members' say-so from the same chain — graded jointly as lawyer's and church side statements; the unit of the "over 50 pounds" weight loss could not be verified and may be a mistranslation of the Chinese jin, reproduced flagged; the South China Morning Post's family details of 2020 (Paul at a university in Zhejiang, Moses with a part-time helper, the hearing first set for January) are ChinaAid's relay, this site not having retrieved the Post's original text for word-by-word checking; her husband's name, Zhang Youwu, rests on the indictment's evidence list and Release International's profile, the correspondence of characters and romanisation following the documents; the "police induced believers to testify" item rests on Si Weijiang's disclosure as relayed by ChinaAid and is graded as a lawyer's one-sided account; the quotations from Li Yingqiang's essay follow ChinaAid's February 2022 reproduction.
Source conflicts and this site's treatment. First, age: the indictment gives a birth year of 1972; ChinaAid gives her age as 50 in November 2021, 51 in February 2022, and 52 in December 2022 — three ages that move roughly with the years but each sit about a year off a 1972 birth (possibly reflecting nominal-age counting); this page anchors on the indictment's 1972 and carries the age variants alongside. Second, the indictment dates her preaching at Egangqiao Church from August 2001, two years earlier than the standard "engaged in 2003" of the reporting; the page carries both, narrating on 2003 and treating August 2001 as the document's own chronology. Third, Moses's schooling: ChinaAid in 2020 gives him as 13 years old (implying middle school), ICC and the Christian Post have him at a middle school, and ChinaAid's own November 2021 English text calls him an elementary-school pupil — the page follows the middle-school reading and logs the variant. Fourth, the original hearing date: the South China Morning Post relay gives January 2020 moved to August; ChinaAid's own reporting gives August 2020 — carried side by side. Fifth, misspellings of names: Bitter Winter gives Hao Zhiwei as "Zhao" and Wan Yuanxiang as "Wang Yuanxiang"; ChinaAid's 2024 report gives Hong Ying once as "Jiu Ying" and adds, for Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang, an "obstruction of government affairs" charge not matching the indictment's fraud-only charge against them (possibly conflated with Hong Ying's 2017 detention ground) — this page follows the indictment throughout and logs the errors. Sixth, the China Zentrum's news update in Religions and Christianity in Today's China once misdated her sentencing to December 2021; the page follows 11 February 2022. Seventh, institutional mistranslations in the indictment's English version (arrest "with the approval of the court" for the procuratorate; the salutation's addressee) are corrected by this page according to the Chinese criminal-procedure system and flagged here. Eighth, the relation between the indictment's RMB 2,054,746 and its total of RMB 2,247,559 is semantically unclear in the translation; this page reproduces both figures and draws no inference.
Matters of no public record, flagged wherever they arise in the text: the sentences and current status of Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang; the full text of the first-instance judgment and its details on fines and recovery; the prison where Hao Zhiwei is now serving and its location; anything about her health, visits or sentence reduction since December 2022; Si Weijiang's further actions on the case after 2023; the two sons' circumstances after 2022; the specifics of the event that led to the 2017 administrative detentions; and the whereabouts of Egangqiao Church's congregants after the building's demolition. This site also checked, as required: an individual entry under her name in the USCIRF list of religious prisoners of conscience and victims — none found; an individual CSW statement on this case — none found. The text treats both as no public record.
The three-requirements check: time and place are confirmed (graduation, engagement, departure, ordination, administrative detention, criminal detention, arrest, indictment, first instance and appeal are all supported by the anchor sources above, with single-chain details graded item by item); cross-verification has been completed (the judicial documents in translation, the lawyer's accounts, the church and family letters, the monitoring organisations' reporting, and the American official texts kept in five separate layers throughout, with conflicts inside each layer listed one by one); documentary and visual evidence — the texts of the indictment and of the religious-affairs bureau's notice as published by ChinaAid, the published extract of the appeal ruling, and the photograph of the church in ChinaAid's February 2022 report (credited to the "Law and Freedom" WeChat account) — is recorded here as to existence and provenance only, with no unverified visual detail relayed.
Sources
- ChinaAid, 17 January 2020, "Indictment papers for Hubei Christians released": the full translation of the Echeng District People's Procuratorate's indictment (Echeng Procuratorate Department 1 Criminal Indictment [2019] No. 236, dated 20 December 2019) — the three defendants' particulars and the 2017 administrative-detention records; criminal detention on 31 July 2019 and arrest on 6 September; preaching without the Two Associations' approval from August 2001; the ordination of 16 March 2013 and the self-printed pastoral certificates; the division of labour between Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang; the fraud total of RMB 2,247,559 and the deposit structure of the two bank accounts; the destinations of the funds (ABLife shares, property, Zhang Youwu's medical bills at Tongji Hospital, a parking space); the composition of the evidence list; Article 266 of the Criminal Law and the principal/accessory provisions; and the annexed inventory. The same text carries the translation of the Echeng District Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau's notice of 18 July 2019 (the Ezhou Municipal Security Committee's Document (2019) No. 13; the 300-metre danger zone around the gas holder; the physical isolation). The documentary spine of this case.
- ChinaAid, 28 December 2022, "Pastor Hao Zhiwei's verdict upheld" (reporter Yu Bing): the Ezhou Intermediate People's Court's dismissal of the appeal and upholding of the eight years on 12 December 2022; the translation of the appeal ruling (fabricated pastoral identity, knowledge of having no certificate, Hong Ying and Wan Yuanxiang as accessories who truthfully confessed, Hao having returned most of the gains, dismissal under item 1 of Article 236 of the Criminal Procedure Law); Si Weijiang's complete statement calling the ruling's logic absurd; the lawyer's disclosure that police tried to induce believers to testify; and the summary of Hao Zhiwei's letter of 18 February 2022 to her elder son Paul and the family details (Moses's severe depression; Paul not telling his brother the sentence). The spine of the case's final judgment.
- ChinaAid, 15 February 2022, "House church pastor sentenced to eight years" (reporter Yu Bing): the Echeng District People's Court's first-instance sentence of eight years on 11 February 2022; two and a half years in custody; the procuratorate's recommendation of more than ten years; the hearing first set for August 2020 and postponed for COVID-19; the two co-workers released on bail after two years in custody; Si Weijiang's "probably the first case" judgement; the reproduction of the key passages of Li Yingqiang's 28 November 2021 "My Three Comments on the Fraud Charge"; and the contents of Paul's letter of 11 February 2022 to his mother and of the letter she dictated in 2020 (released by Si Weijiang).
- ChinaAid, 18 October 2020, "CCP charges Chinese Protestant house church pastor with swindling church offerings": the charged amount of about RMB 2.24 million (US$332,850) and the timeline of formal charges four months after arrest; relaying the South China Morning Post — Si Weijiang on the fraud charge layering criminal scrutiny on top of administrative regulation, a minimum of ten years if convicted, and Hao's refusal to plead guilty; Paul's interview (the government indefinitely postponing the trial to build a non-existent fraud case; his residence on a university campus in eastern Zhejiang; his 13-year-old brother at home in Ezhou with a part-time domestic helper); and the relay of the indictment's charge that she had "ordained herself" in 2013 without approval.
- ChinaAid, 30 November 2021, "Christian pastor suffers two years in prison without trial": two years and four months in custody unsentenced; Si Weijiang's visit of 23 November 2021 and his disclosures — Moses's severe depression, dropping out and locking himself away, one meal a day; Hao Zhiwei's four attacks of acute pancreatitis, one near-fatal, and weight loss of over 50 pounds (the unit question is treated in the Verification Note); her statement at the visit of 29 July 2020 that she often woke laughing; her age given as 50 (the discrepancy against the indictment's birth year is treated in the Verification Note).
- ChinaAid, 26 January 2024, special report "Crime of Fraud: A New Era of Persecution Against Christians by the Chinese Communist Party": the Hao Zhiwei section — the indictment amount of RMB 2,247,000; the church as one of China's very few independent churches with its own building and several hundred congregants; the lawyer's visit of 23 November 2021; the first-instance and appeal results; the family details (her husband also a pastor; the two sons in middle school and senior high school; the only surviving grandparent paraplegic; the children cared for by women believers of the church; Moses living alone and dropping out in the autumn of 2021); and the report's general argument (the 2018 Regulations on Religious Affairs and the religious-affairs bureau's merger into the United Front Work Department; the four-link logic chain; twelve cases of the same type between 2016 and 2023). The report's errors in Hong Ying's name and in the two co-workers' charges are treated in the Verification Note.
- Bitter Winter, 27 December 2022, Wu Guoxuan, "Pastor Hao Zhiwei: 8-Year Prison Sentence Confirmed on Appeal": the rising star inside the Three-Self system; the 2007 departure and revocation of her licence; ordination by three house-church pastors in 2013; a year's rest after her husband's death in 2018; the barbed wire and the congregants crossing it; donations of about EUR 300,000; the family's restitution in hope of leniency failing to move the court; and the summary that the appeal judges held religion outside the authorised system to be merely "fictional religion". The text's renderings of Hao Zhiwei as "Zhao" and Wan Yuanxiang as "Wang Yuanxiang" are treated in the Verification Note.
- The Christian Post, 27 February 2022, Anugrah Kumar (citing UCA News and Church in Chains): the first-instance eight years and Si Weijiang's description of her as the first house-church pastor implicated in a fraud case, with her intention to appeal; and, relaying International Christian Concern — Moses a middle-schooler with severe depression who had dropped out, locked himself in his room and ate one meal a day; Hao Zhiwei's deteriorating health in custody, four attacks of acute pancreatitis with emergency treatment, once nearly fatal; and her strong faith that she would be acquitted.
- Christianity Daily, 2022, "Jailed Chinese Pastor Writes Happy But Heartbreaking Letter To Son", and 2 December 2021, "Former Chinese Three-Self Church Pastor Detained For More Than Two Years Without Trial Over 'Fraud' Charges": relaying ICC's release of Hao Zhiwei's February 2022 letter to Paul (the first letter received from her son; the two years and seven months; the Sudoku mastery; the cellmate sentenced to twelve years; praying for Moses; asking her son to keep his diary to share at their reunion) and Paul's winter-break persuasion of his brother back to school, still without telling him the sentence; and Si Weijiang's post-visit health relay of November 2021 (drastic weight loss; half her hair turned white).
- Release International, February 2024, prisoner profile "Pastor Hao Zhiwei": charge fraud; arrested July 2019; eight years imposed in February 2022; appeal rejected in December 2022; background (graduation in 2001; certificate refused in 2007; eighteen years of pastoring; the demolition demand of early 2018; her husband Zhang Youwu's death from liver cancer) and the two sons, Paul and Moses, with her letter to Paul that God's peace was with her in prison and that she slept well.
- United States Department of State, 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom, China chapter (released 15 May 2023): on 11 February 2022 the authorities in Ezhou sentenced Pastor Hao Zhiwei of Egangqiao Church to eight years in prison for "fraud for preaching the Gospel" after her church refused to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement; she was detained in 2019, shortly before the church building was demolished; and church members said her health declined in prison and she developed pancreatitis.
- Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2024 Annual Report, Status of Women chapter (December 2024): in its discussion of the detention of women of religious belief, a footnote citing ChinaAid's Chinese-language report of the final judgment in this case ("The final judgment of the case of Pastor Hao Zhiwei of the Hubei Egangqiao house church, charged with 'fraud': the heavy eight-year sentence upheld").
- United States House of Representatives, H.R. 5303, 119th Congress, introduced 11 September 2025 ("FREEDOM for Gao Zhisheng and All Political Prisoners Act"): finding (18), naming Hao Zhiwei — a pastor at an unregistered Protestant church, arrested and given an eight-year sentence in 2022 because she refused to join the government-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement or Chinese Christian Council (checked against the Congress.gov and GovTrack texts).
- ChinaAid, 17 February 2026, "Ganquan Church Case: Offerings and Tithings Deemed 'Fraud', Leading to Prison Sentences": in its review of cases of the same type, the Hao Zhiwei case cited as the originating example — for refusing to join the Three-Self system she was accused of treating all offerings received during eighteen years of ministry as "fraud", received a severe sentence, and was the first publicly reported case to classify long-term offerings comprehensively as fraud (the original's misgendered pronoun is treated in the Verification Note).
- China Zentrum, Religions and Christianity in Today's China news update (2024): the case recorded in its Protestant church entries (misdating the sentencing to December 2021 — see the Verification Note); and China Church Solidarity (cultural-exchange-with-china.org), Protestant church page, reproducing the first-instance reporting.