第68案 | 李和平Case 68 | Li Heping
北京人权律师李和平自2002年前后代理杨子立、陈光诚、法轮功学员与地下教会成员等敏感案件，2007年曾被绑架殴打、2009年执照被停，后主持欧盟资助的反酷刑项目；2015年7月10日下午，他在709大抓捕中被天津警方从北京家中带走并抄家，在指定居所监视居住中强迫失踪六个月，2016年1月8日以颠覆国家政权罪被正式逮捕，在天津市第一看守所羁押期间——据他本人经妻子王峭岭与友人傅希秋转述——被强迫服用所谓降压药长达近两年、被手脚连环铐具锁铐整整一个月，并遭受电击、殴打、饥饿与剥夺睡眠；2017年4月25日天津市第二中级人民法院以涉及国家秘密为由秘密开庭，家属与家属律师均未获通知，连官派律师温志胜都未出席4月28日宣判，法院经微博宣布其犯颠覆国家政权罪、判处有期徒刑三年缓刑四年并剥夺政治权利，法院称其认罪不上诉，其妻则公开表示他从未承认颠覆、只是以秘密审判换取缓刑；2017年5月9日他回到北京家中时瘦得脱形、头发变白，2018年北京市司法局以该定罪为由吊销其执业证书（通知日期6月6日）；此后王峭岭成为709太太团的核心人物，儿子李泽远被拒发护照而耽误学业，女儿李佳美六岁时被拒入学、十三岁时于2023年6月9日在成都天府国际机场与父母一同被以危害国家安全为由阻止出境，2023年一家还遭遇砸窗、拆门式逼迁；联合国特别程序多次就本案致函（CHN 6/2015、CHN 9/2016、CHN 3/2017、CHN 5/2017），联合国秘书长报复问题报告连续多年收录本案并记至2026年一家仍受监控骚扰——须纠正的是，任意拘留问题工作组第62/2018号意见的对象是王全璋、江天勇、李玉函，并非李和平；2025年7月他仍以实名在China Change发表与通州交警争执五小时的长文，截至2026年10月无再次被拘留的公开记录，其最新健康、住址与收入均无公开记录。Beijing human rights lawyer Li Heping took sensitive cases from around 2002 — Yang Zili, Chen Guangcheng, Falun Gong practitioners and underground-church members — was abducted and beaten in 2007, had his licence suspended in 2009, and went on to run an EU-funded anti-torture project. On the afternoon of 10 July 2015, in the 709 crackdown, Tianjin police took him from his Beijing home and searched it. He was forcibly disappeared for six months under residential surveillance at a designated location, formally arrested for subversion of state power on 8 January 2016, and — on his own account, relayed by his wife Wang Qiaoling and his friend Bob Fu — forcibly medicated with supposed blood-pressure pills for the better part of two years in Tianjin No. 1 Detention Centre, shackled hand-to-foot in a combined chain for a full month, and subjected to electric shocks, beatings, starvation and sleep deprivation. On 25 April 2017 the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court tried him in secret on state-secrets grounds without notifying his family or their lawyers; even his state-appointed lawyer Wen Zhisheng was absent from the sentencing on 28 April, when the court announced on Weibo a conviction for subversion, three years in prison suspended for four years, and deprivation of political rights — the court saying he had pleaded guilty, his wife stating publicly that he never admitted subversion and had only traded a secret trial for the suspended sentence. He returned to his Beijing home on 9 May 2017 emaciated and grey-haired. In 2018 the Beijing Bureau of Justice revoked his practising certificate on the basis of the conviction, with notification dated 6 June. Wang Qiaoling became a central figure of the 709 wives; their son Li Zeyuan was refused a passport and his studies delayed, their daughter Li Jiamei was refused school entry at six and, at thirteen, was stopped with her parents at Chengdu Tianfu International Airport on 9 June 2023 and barred from leaving China on national-security grounds, in a year when the family also faced smashed windows and the removal of their front door in an eviction campaign. UN Special Procedures wrote on his case repeatedly (CHN 6/2015, CHN 9/2016, CHN 3/2017, CHN 5/2017) and the UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports carried the case for years, recording continuing surveillance and harassment as late as 2026 — though one point needs correcting: Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 62/2018 concerned Wang Quanzhang, Jiang Tianyong and Li Yuhan, not Li Heping. In July 2025 he was still publishing long articles under his own name; as of October 2026 there is no public record of any renewed detention, and his latest health, address and income are matters of no public record.
Who he was: a Christian lawyer from Xinyang who built a rights practice in Beijing
Even Li Heping's birth year is not consistently recorded. English Wikipedia gives 26 October 1970, born in Xinyang, Henan; the 709 people file of Chinese Human Rights Defenders gives 1971. An Amnesty International profile of 2011 describes him as aged 40, which fits a birth in 1970 or 1971. Item by item on this page: year of birth, two versions stand side by side, with no authoritative identity document in the public record against which to check them; place of birth, Xinyang, Henan, consistently reported. His education is given in detail in the Amnesty profile: a bachelor's degree in law from Henan University in 1995 and a master's in law from Renmin University Law School in 2005, after earlier work in business. From 2002 he was a partner in the Beijing Global Law Firm — rendered in different documents as the Global Law Firm or the Higher Globe Law Firm, but in every case the same firm, Beijing Gaobolonghua.
He was one of the central figures of China's first generation of rights-defence lawyers. According to the career summary compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders from colleagues' materials, he was trained as an intellectual-property lawyer, yet in 2003 he took on a case later treated as a landmark of online-dissent persecution: the appeal of Yang Zili of the New Youth Study Society. Yang ultimately served eight years for subversion. The client list runs on from there. In 2005 he was engaged by the blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng in the Linyi forced-abortion cases in Shandong, and in the same year took part in the Taishi village recall campaign in Guangdong and in Guo Feixiong's case. In 2006 he was involved in the Three Grades of Servants case in Heilongjiang. In 2008 he participated in the case of Guo Quan, charged with subversion. Farmers whose land had been taken, victims of environmental pollution and people held in re-education through labour were also among his clients. He was himself a Christian, and he went on to defend members of underground churches and Falun Gong practitioners over many years — the two categories of client that, in the China of the 2000s, most lawyers would not touch.
In March 2008 he and five other lawyers — Li Xiongbing, Zhang Lihui, Li Shunzhang, Teng Biao and Wu Hongwei — filed a joint defence brief for Falun Gong practitioner Wang Bo and her parents, setting out a systematic argument for freedom of religion and analysing, article by article, the absence of a legal basis for the persecution of Falun Gong. That brief has been cited repeatedly in the literature on the Falun Gong crackdown. The same year he received the Human Rights Award of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe and, jointly with Li Baiguang, the National Endowment for Democracy's Democracy Award for Religious Freedom. Both honours are recorded in the Front Line Defenders file and in other institutional profiles. Colleagues often repeat one detail reported by The Guardian: a Chinese security agent once told him to his face that, in Beijing's eyes, he had become more dangerous than Bin Laden. The remark has no official source and this page records it as media-relayed colour, but it captures roughly how the authorities had come to see him by the end of the 2000s.
Sources: Amnesty International, Against the Law, profile of Li Heping, ASA 17/018/2011; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, 709 people file and China's Missing Rights Lawyers; Front Line Defenders case file on Li Heping; English Wikipedia entry on Li Heping, used only to document the birth-date discrepancy.
29 September 2007: an overnight abduction; a rammed car in 2008; the licence in 2009
Long before 709, Li Heping had already lived through a complete round of violence aimed at a lawyer in person. On 29 September 2007 he was abducted in Beijing by a group of men identified as plainclothes police, beaten and ill-treated through the night, and dumped at about 1 a.m. in woods in a Beijing suburb. Amnesty International's urgent appeal of the time recorded the injuries: bruising to his face, shoulders, hands and body, significant loss of hair, headache, a swollen face and loss of hearing in his left ear. When he got home he found that his lawyer's identification card had been stolen and his computer reformatted, its files erased. The abduction came one day after officers of the Beijing Public Security Bureau's domestic-security unit had told him verbally that he and his family should leave Beijing during the Seventeenth Party Congress in mid-October; his attackers also warned him to tell no one about the beating. He responded with a public statement refusing to leave Beijing. He recounted the abduction himself in a 2010 interview with the artist Ai Weiwei, the text of which China Change published only in 2016 — by which time he was in a cell again.
On 7 March 2008, as he drove his daughter to school, the car he was driving was rammed by a police vehicle. Amnesty's profile records the incident alongside the 2007 abduction. In May 2009 his licence to practise was suspended: the biographical note circulated by Chinese Human Rights Defenders says the licence was suspended in May 2009; Amnesty International's statement of July 2009 lists him among the Beijing lawyers who had failed their annual assessment and would not be re-registered; Front Line Defenders puts it as a refusal to renew the licence in 2009. The three formulations point to the same result. From 2009 he was, institutionally, scarcely able to practise normally — and he did not stop.
During the Jasmine crackdown of 2011 he was forcibly disappeared again. The biographical note records that from 29 April to 4 May 2011 he was kidnapped and disappeared, and was tortured during that time. The Front Line Defenders file records only, in brief, that he was disappeared during the Jasmine crackdown. The details of that episode — place of detention, identity of the officers, conditions of release — are a matter of no public record; this page records only the dates and the two elements, disappearance and torture, that colleagues' literature supports.
By 2015 the centre of his work had shifted from front-line court appearances to anti-torture advocacy. He took part in an EU-funded project, run with the British organisation The Rights Practice, that challenged the use of torture, and he led training on anti-torture standards drawn from UN instruments. The submission on residential surveillance at a designated location that Chinese Human Rights Defenders later filed with the United Nations states the project's nature expressly. When he was seized in July 2015, he and his assistants were working on a project to promote the Convention against Torture. Human rights organisations have returned to that fact again and again, for a plain reason: a lawyer whose profession was promoting the prohibition of torture was, in secret detention, forcibly medicated and shackled hand-to-foot. The thing he had spent years opposing was visited on him in its standard form.
Sources: Amnesty International urgent appeal of 2007, republished by ChinaAid, and profile in Against the Law, 2011; the Ai Weiwei interview with Li Heping of 2010, published by China Change on 21 August 2016; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, joint submission on residential surveillance at a designated location, May 2018, published by Safeguard Defenders; Front Line Defenders case file.
10 July 2015, in the afternoon: taken from his home by Tianjin police, and the home searched
In the early hours of 9 July 2015 Wang Yu and her family of the Beijing Fengrui law firm were taken away, and the 709 crackdown began. The following afternoon it reached Li Heping. The report that lawyers' rights organisations submitted at the time to the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers records the hour: at about 2 p.m. on 10 July, coercive measures were used against him. His wife Wang Qiaoling's later application to observe his trial at the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court states it more precisely: Li Heping was taken away from their home by Tianjin police. The Front Line Defenders file says he was taken by Beijing police. That discrepancy over the seizing authority is flagged separately in the Verification Note; the place — his Beijing home — and the timing, the afternoon of 10 July, are consistent across sources. Wang Qiaoling's memoir of October 2023 adds a family detail: their son Li Zeyuan was at a classmate's home that day and came back to find the flat full of uniformed and plainclothes officers, visibly shaken; their daughter Li Jiamei was at home and knew her father had been taken.
Police searched the home at the same time. The Front Line Defenders file records that the authorities confiscated books, files, hard drives and computers, and failed to present any warrant for the arrest, the search or the seizure. Two of his legal assistants disappeared with him: Zhao Wei, aged 24, and Gao Yue. Zhao was later arrested for subversion of state power and Gao for allegedly helping to destroy evidence — two young people pulled into the same net for no other reason than that they assisted a lawyer.
From that day Li Heping was under residential surveillance at a designated location: solitary detention at an undisclosed site for up to six months, no address given to the family, no lawyer visits, no letters and no telephone. His family and colleagues searched police stations across Beijing for him and found nothing. For six full months the outside world did not know whether he was alive or dead. Only in January 2016 did the authorities announce that he was held in Tianjin No. 1 Detention Centre — a Beijing lawyer, handled by police from another city and jailed in that city, the standard 709 arrangement for breaking the link between a detainee, his family and his lawyers.
Sources: Wang Qiaoling, Application to Observe the Trial of Li Heping, published by Human Rights in China; Front Line Defenders case file; report of Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada and others to the UN Special Rapporteur, 2015; Wang Qiaoling, memoir of 3 October 2023, China Change; Dui Hua Foundation, Dui Hua Digest, February 2016.
Formally arrested on 8 January 2016: six months of disappearance first, charges afterwards
On 8 January 2016, on the eve of the expiry of his six months of designated-location surveillance, Li Heping was formally arrested on suspicion of subversion of state power. Human Rights in China published news of the arrest notice that same day, and Amnesty International's one-year retrospective on the crackdown and the Dui Hua Foundation's records both use 8 January. In the course of this site's research one English-language report, relayed by an advocacy outlet, gave the arrest date as 20 January; it is inconsistent with the main sources, and this page adopts 8 January while marking the 20 January version unverified — see the Verification Note. His assistant Zhao Wei was arrested the same day; Gao Yue was arrested on an allegation of helping to destroy evidence.
After the arrest, every procedural step contracted. In February 2016 the lawyers retained by his family were informed that Li Heping had dismissed them. The lawyers had no way to verify that with the man himself: they could not see him at all. Amnesty International's first-anniversary account records the point deliberately, because it exposes a fixed method — first make the detainee disappear, then use the detainee's name to expel the family's lawyers, then install a state-appointed lawyer, and finally hold the trial where no one can see it. His family-retained lawyer Ma Lianshun told media that he had been informed of no charges and did not know where Li was held.
The case then sat with the Tianjin procuratorate for nearly a year. In December 2016 Radio Free Asia reported that Li Heping had been indicted for subversion of state power, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's annual report cited that report of 9 December 2016 in a footnote. The full text of the indictment has never been published, and beyond the month of December its exact date is a matter of no public record; this page marks it as such. What can be confirmed is the skeleton of the accusation, which the court later repeated in announcing its judgment: that since 2008 he had repeatedly used the internet and interviews with foreign media to discredit and attack state power and the legal system; that he had accepted foreign funding; that he had employed and funded others to hype cases and stir discontent; and that he had colluded with foreign persons and with lawyers and illegal-religion figures at home who harboured subversive thinking. In other words, the indictment alleged no act of violence at all. It alleged interviews, funding, speech and association — a lawyer's practice and expression themselves.
Sources: Human Rights in China, notice of arrest, 8 January 2016; Amnesty International, one-year retrospective on the 709 crackdown, July 2016; Dui Hua Foundation records, February 2016; Radio Free Asia report of 9 December 2016, as cited in the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2017, criminal-justice chapter footnote.
The torture: what he himself said, through his wife and his friends
There is no public courtroom statement by Li Heping about what happened to him in detention, and there are no lawyers' meeting notes — he never once saw a lawyer his family had chosen. The torture record that exists comes through three mutually corroborating channels: his account to his wife Wang Qiaoling, given by her in testimony to the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China in May 2017 and to the BBC and other media; his account to his friend Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, published by Fu in the Wall Street Journal on 29 May 2017; and the formal submissions filed with the United Nations by Chinese Human Rights Defenders on the basis of his case materials. This page attributes each item to those chains at the outset: everything that follows is an allegation by Li Heping himself or by his wife, and the Chinese authorities have never published any process or conclusion of an investigation into any of it.
The first item is forced medication. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission to the United Nations is the most specific: during the first weeks of residential surveillance at a designated location he was forced to take medicine said to be for high blood pressure — between one and six tablets a day — although he had no history of hypertension; if he resisted, he would be held down and forced to take it. The side effects he described were muscle pain, blurred vision and brain fog. In her video testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission hearing of 18 May 2017, Wang Qiaoling said the forced medication continued for 22 months, six pills a day, with guards pinning down his arms and legs when he refused, and that afterwards he suffered muscle pains, lethargy and blurred vision. Bob Fu's article uses the same span of nearly two years. The starting and ending months of the medication, the name of the drug and any dosage record are matters of no public record. The accounts differ in scale — the first weeks in the UN submission, 22 months in the wife's testimony — and this page's reading, that forced medication began in the first weeks of secret detention and continued over a long period thereafter, is a synthesis of the sources and is marked as a synthesis, not an established chronology.
The second item is combined shackling. Wang Qiaoling told the BBC that in May 2016, in Tianjin No. 1 Detention Centre, her husband was put in handcuffs and leg shackles linked by a short iron chain, and wore the device 24 hours a day for a full month. The chain was so short that he could not stand upright; he could only stoop, even in sleep. The guards' purpose, she said, was to make him confess. Amnesty International's statement of July 2017 summarises the same detail — chained for up to 24 hours a day — and places it alongside the forced medication as a core fact of the ill-treatment in this case. Combined hand-and-leg cuffs of this kind have been documented in Amnesty International's research on the trade in torture equipment: their function is not restraint but continuous stress position.
The third item is electric shocks and other physical abuse. An open letter by senior lawyers and judges from several countries, published for the Day of the Endangered Lawyer in January 2017, recorded reports that Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang had been tortured with electroshocks until they fainted, and expressed particular concern. The list Wang Qiaoling gave The Guardian was longer: electric shocks, starvation, sleep deprivation, confinement in frigid cells, beatings, and a month shackled in a stooping position. Through Bob Fu, Li Heping said in his own words that there were times in detention when he wanted to commit suicide, and that he survived because of his Christian faith, his wife's courageous advocacy and the attention of the international community — describing the experience with the idiom nine deaths, one life. He said it to a friend, not to a camera: on his release he had signed an arrangement to give no further media interviews, and thereafter his voice reached the public mostly through his wife and his friends. That, too, belongs in the archive. Silencing him was the part of the suspended sentence that was never written into the judgment.
Sources: Chinese Human Rights Defenders, joint submission on residential surveillance at a designated location to UN Special Procedures, May 2018; Wang Qiaoling, video testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing of 18 May 2017, hearing record CHRG-115hhrg25459; BBC reporting on Li Heping's torture, republished by Human Rights Voices; Bob Fu, "China's Tortured Lawyers," Wall Street Journal, 29 May 2017, republished by ChinaAid; The Guardian, international lawyers' letter, 23 January 2017.
His brother Li Chunfu: the man sent home on 12 January 2017
Nothing Wang Qiaoling said afterwards can be understood without one scene from January 2017. Li Heping's younger brother, the lawyer Li Chunfu, had been taken on 1 August 2015, held for six months in designated-location surveillance like his brother, and arrested in January 2016 for subversion. On 5 January 2017 he was granted bail, and on 12 January police delivered him home. Wang Qiaoling published the first account of that homecoming on China Change: the Li Chunfu who came home was mentally broken and physically frail, diagnosed with schizophrenia-like symptoms and hospitalised. From relatives the family learned that in secret detention he had been subjected to severe torture, including being locked, repeatedly and for stretches of time, in a metal cage the size of a bed. The international lawyers' letter likewise recorded that after his release Li Chunfu displayed signs of severe mental illness, with colleagues describing him as a broken man.
The elder brother was still in a Tianjin cell. The younger brother had been let out first — in that condition. In her article of 17 January 2017 Wang Qiaoling set down her fear for her husband and called on the United Nations to investigate Li Chunfu's treatment and to secure lawyer access to Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang at once. Everything that happened in the following four months — the secret trial, the state-appointed lawyer who travelled to Beijing to fetch her to Tianjin, the telephone call in which her husband asked her to come and collect him and she refused — has to be read against that background. She did not lack knowledge of the price of cooperating and of refusing. Li Chunfu's homecoming was the price list.
Sources: Wang Qiaoling, articles of 13, 15 and 17 January 2017, China Change; The Guardian, international lawyers' letter, 23 January 2017, republished by ChinaAid.
25 April 2017: a secret trial; 28 April: a verdict — and a defence lawyer who was not in court
On 25 April 2017 the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court tried Li Heping behind closed doors on the ground that the case involved state secrets. His wife had not been told. The lawyers his family had retained had not been told. The family learned of the trial only after it was over. The detail at the sentencing stage is more absurd still. According to the follow-up report that Chinese Human Rights Defenders submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, Wen Zhisheng, the lawyer the authorities had appointed for Li Heping, did not appear at the Tianjin court at all on 28 April 2017, the day the verdict was pronounced. He was in Beijing, trying to force Wang Qiaoling to travel to Tianjin with her daughter. Human Rights Watch's commentary of the same days makes the same point: the man who was supposed to defend Li Heping was travelling with police to put pressure on his wife. A defence lawyer who does not attend his own client's sentencing, and a trial of which the defendant's wife knew nothing: that is the whole of this case's public judicial process.
On 28 April 2017 the court announced the judgment through its official Weibo account: Li Heping was guilty of subversion of state power and sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for four years, with deprivation of political rights. The court's published reasoning held that he had repeatedly used foreign-media interviews and the internet to attack and discredit state organs and the legal system; that he had used foreign funds and employed and funded others to hype cases and stir discontent among people already dissatisfied with the social system; and that he had colluded with persons of subversive thinking, endangering national security and social stability. The court also announced that Li had pleaded guilty at trial, would not appeal, and had thanked the court. The UN Secretary-General's reprisals report dates the conviction to 27 April, one day earlier than the court's announcement and the date used by the human rights organisations; this page follows 28 April and notes the one-day discrepancy here.
On the guilty plea there are two directly conflicting accounts, and they must stand side by side. The court, and the Front Line Defenders file following it, record that he pleaded guilty and did not appeal. Wang Qiaoling stated publicly, around the time of his return home, that Li Heping had never pleaded guilty and had never admitted subverting state power; that, fearing he might be tortured to death and never see his family again, he had reached an arrangement with the authorities — the trial would be held in secret and he would receive a suspended sentence — but that he did not admit guilt. Which account is true cannot be checked, because no full trial transcript is public: trial record, no public record. This page states only what the record supports: anything said in a closed courtroom by a man who had been forcibly medicated for the better part of two years, shackled for a month and never allowed to see a lawyer of his choice cannot be read as a free statement.
A suspended sentence was pronounced — and the man was not released. After 28 April Li Heping's whereabouts became unknown again. On 2 May 2017 Human Rights Watch published a commentary whose headline stated the problem directly: sentenced and suspended, still jailed. Wang Qiaoling refused the demand that she travel to Tianjin to collect him, and her reason was on the record: families of previously released lawyers had been lured into reunions that ended with the whole family under house arrest, and in the telephone call with her husband she told him it was not that she did not miss him — if she went, the whole family would lose its freedom — before the call was cut off. In the statement she issued with Li Wenzu through China Change she put the question she has never had answered: you lock a man up and torture him for nearly two years, and then you come and tell me this is the best outcome — why did the family not even know about the trial? The confrontation itself took place on the morning of 28 April 2017: as she stepped out of her building holding her daughter, she was surrounded by state-security officers from Beijing and Tianjin, the head of Tianjin's Jiaguosi police station, and staff of the neighbourhood property company.
Sources: Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, judgment announcement on its official Weibo account, 28 April 2017, as relayed by Human Rights Watch, Reuters and the Associated Press, retained as material for the prosecution's position; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, follow-up report to the UN Committee against Torture, June 2017; Human Rights Watch commentary, 2 May 2017; Wang Qiaoling and Li Wenzu, video statement of 28 April 2017, translated by China Change; Christian Solidarity Worldwide briefing, 3 May 2017.
9 May 2017: home at last — emaciated, his hair turned white
On 9 May 2017 Li Heping returned to the family home in Beijing. Amnesty International's urgent-action update confirms that date and records the detail every report mentioned: photographs showed he had lost a great deal of weight and his hair had turned noticeably grey. His wife said he was extremely thin, that he looked some twenty years older, that his mental state was not too bad but that he had trouble expressing himself, no longer sounded like the confident young lawyer he had been, and had become closed in on himself. Before the release, according to friends, officials had spent ten days trying to help him gain weight; even so, he came home roughly thirty pounds lighter than when he was taken. Those physical details come from his wife and friends; no medical record is public, and this page records them as family and friends' accounts.
Coming home did not mean freedom. A four-year suspended sentence meant that throughout the probation period, if the authorities decided he had breached the conditions of supervision, the three-year prison term could be activated at any time. He had signed an arrangement to give no further media interviews; plainclothes officers kept watch around the home, and his wife was followed when she went out to be interviewed. Front Line Defenders, welcoming him home, wrote that the authorities would likely maintain extensive and invasive monitoring of him and his family throughout the probationary period. Events proved that to be no rhetorical flourish. His daughter Li Jiamei's schooling and his son Li Zeyuan's passport became a years-long battleground from that year on, set out in the family section below.
On 18 May 2017 Wang Qiaoling's video testimony was played at a hearing of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The hearing brought six wives of 709 detainees before Congress, two of them by recording; Wang Qiaoling was one of the two. She told United States lawmakers, on the record, the details of twenty-two months of forced medication. Her husband had been home for nine days and was saying nothing in public. She had already placed her testimony in the formal hearing record of the United States Congress.
Sources: Amnesty International urgent-action update ASA 17/6307/2017; Radio Free Asia report on the homecoming, May 2017, republished by ChinaAid; Christian Solidarity Worldwide briefing, 10 May 2017; Congressional hearing record CHRG-115hhrg25459, 18 May 2017.
Wang Qiaoling and the 709 wives: from searching for husbands to speaking for everyone
Wang Qiaoling needs a section of her own in this file. After her husband was taken she joined with Li Wenzu, wife of Wang Quanzhang; Yuan Shanshan, wife of Xie Yanyi; Liu Ermin, wife of Zhai Yanmin; and the other 709 families in the group that became known worldwide as the 709 wives. What they did is listed in their own retrospective essay of 2020: countless applications for administrative reconsideration, administrative lawsuits, complaints and accusations; a red-bucket performance-art protest at the gates of the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court; a fashion-show protest at the Supreme People's Procuratorate; a walk on foot from Beijing to Tianjin to look for their husbands; and, on 17 December 2018, the collective head-shaving outside the Supreme People's Court — wo keyi wufa, ni buneng wufa, I can be without hair, you cannot be without law, a pun in which the words for hairless and lawless sound the same. Over five years the wives were detained or summoned some twenty times between them. Wang Qiaoling herself was criminally summoned at the Boxing Road police station in Beijing's Yizhuang development zone after she retained a lawyer for her husband to sue Xinhua Net for defaming Li Heping. On 2 March 2019 she was criminally summoned again and interrogated for six hours at Lingshan police station by the Luoshan County Public Security Bureau in Xinyang, Henan, because she had travelled to visit Jiang Tianyong after his release from prison. That summons is recorded in the UN Secretary-General's reprisals report.
On 1 March 2017 Wang Qiaoling, Li Wenzu, Chen Guiqiu and Jin Bianling, four wives of 709 detainees, wrote jointly to the co-chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, to President François Hollande of France and to other foreign leaders, thanking the international community for its sustained attention to the 709 lawyers. The letter carried the families' campaign out of the police stations and court gates of China and onto the desks of foreign heads of government. That August, her contact with the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights during his visit to China became a standing item in the Secretary-General's reprisals reports for years afterwards: in its replies to the United Nations the Chinese government stated that her freedom of movement had not been restricted and that she had not been unlawfully surveilled or harassed, while the information recorded in the reports pointed the other way.
In October 2023 she published a long memoir on China Change, introducing herself in a new way — as the mother of Li Zeyuan and Li Jiamei. On 11 April 2024 she and Li Wenzu took part together in an online international press conference organised by the Rights Defense Network, describing their experiences of the previous year. In May 2025, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 709, she published a commemorative essay opening with a line from the Psalms. A retrospective on twenty years of China's human rights lawyers published by Human Rights in China in 2025 observed that she had once agonised over whether to speak out publicly or stay silent, and was now completely undaunted. The sustained public record establishes one fact: the suspended sentence silenced Li Heping. It did not silence his family.
Sources: the 709 families' retrospective essay of 2020, republished by Practice Source; the joint letter of the four 709 wives of 1 March 2017, China Change; UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports A/HRC/42/30 and A/HRC/63/62; Human Rights in China, Twenty Years of China's Human Rights Lawyers, 2025; Chinese Human Rights Defenders report on the head-shaving protest, January 2019.
The impact on the family: a son's passport, a daughter's schooling, and a ten-year siege
The persecution reached the children in precise, documentable ways. The son, Li Zeyuan, was 15 in 2015 and had just started high school. Police refused him a passport on national-security grounds; he could not attend the university he longed for and his studies were delayed. That fact is recorded independently in three places: his mother's memoir of 2023, Human Rights in China's retrospective on the persecution of lawyers, and the statement of the Dutch organisation Lawyers for Lawyers. The daughter, Li Jiamei, was in the senior class of kindergarten in 2015 and had already been admitted to a bilingual school, the same school her brother attended. Human Rights Watch's article of August 2016 records that at the age of six she was refused entry to a primary school because police would not issue the residence documentation she needed to enrol, and that the passport applications of both children had been refused as national-security threats. Only in May 2018 did Wang Qiaoling find a school for her daughter, by then eight years old. The two years in between are years no document will ever give that child back.
In 2023 the family came under a fresh siege. The US State Department's 2023 Country Report on Human Rights Practices records that from April to June 2023 the families of Li Heping and of Wang Quanzhang moved home repeatedly under continuous harassment intended to force them out of Beijing, including death threats, smashed windows, police visits immediately after new leases were signed, sudden and drastic rent increases, young men blocking the entrances to their homes, landlords changing locks and utilities being cut off. The information recorded in the UN Secretary-General's reprisals report is more specific still: between March and October 2023 their landlord, allegedly under pressure from the authorities, threw stones at their home and removed the entrance door in an attempt to force the family out; their calls to the emergency number were ignored; and years of surveillance, intimidation and police harassment had affected their daughter's well-being. On 9 June 2023 Li Heping, Wang Qiaoling and their daughter were stopped by border police at Chengdu Tianfu International Airport and prevented from boarding a flight to Thailand; the ground read out to them was that their departure might endanger national security, and the three were taken to a police station for interrogation. Lawyers for Lawyers issued a statement at once calling for the travel restrictions on Li Heping to be lifted, noting that his 13-year-old daughter, travelling with him, had also been barred from leaving, disrupting her education, and that his 23-year-old son's studies had likewise been delayed by official obstruction.
The family's current address, the two children's present schooling, and Li Heping's health and income are, as of October 2026, matters of no public record, and this page does not speculate about them. What can be confirmed is only the trail left by public activity: Wang Qiaoling was still addressing an international press conference in April 2024; Li Heping himself was still active in the Beijing area and writing publicly in July 2025; and the UN Secretary-General's 2026 report still describes the family as subject to continuing police surveillance, harassment and movement restrictions.
Sources: US Department of State, 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, China; UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports, as published by ISHR; Human Rights Watch, 15 August 2016; Lawyers for Lawyers statement on the travel restrictions, June 2023; Wang Qiaoling, memoir of October 2023, China Change.
6 June 2018: the practising certificate is revoked
The suspended sentence's next move fell on the licence. Human Rights Watch's report of July 2018 records that in May 2018 the Beijing Bureau of Justice revoked Li Heping's licence to practise law, citing his criminal conviction. The UN Secretary-General's reprisals report gives the more precise point: on 6 June 2018 the Beijing Judicial Bureau notified Mr Li that he had been disbarred as a result of the criminal conviction. This page records the two together — the revocation recorded by Human Rights Watch in May 2018, and the formal notification dated 6 June 2018 on the UN report's account — the difference being, in all likelihood, that between the decision and its notification.
Two episodes must be kept apart. His licence had already been suspended and left unrenewed in 2009, an act of annual-assessment administration. The 2018 revocation was different in kind: its stated basis was the 2017 conviction for subversion of state power. Conviction, suspended sentence, revocation — the three form a single chain. First a secret trial preserves an effective subversion conviction; then the conviction is used to extinguish the professional qualification for good. After the revocation he was, in law, no longer a lawyer. In 2022 a China Human Rights Lawyers Day interview programme included him as one of five disbarred 709 lawyers, in a discussion whose subject was precisely how China uses disbarment to clear rights lawyers from the field. His employment and income after revocation largely vanish from the public record; item by item: employment and income after disbarment, no public record.
Sources: Human Rights Watch, China: Free Rights Lawyers, Reinstate Law Licenses, July 2018; UN Secretary-General's reprisals report A/HRC/42/30; China Change report on the China Human Rights Lawyers Day interviews, 25 July 2022.
After the probation expired: from the Chengdu airport exit ban to five hours with the traffic police in 2025
The four-year probation period, counted from the judgment of 28 April 2017, expired in or around 2021. Whether the expiry was ever formally confirmed, and whether an official document records that the original three-year term will not be executed, is not verifiable from any public judicial instrument — item by item: official confirmation of the completion of the probation period, no public record. What can be confirmed is that he was not taken back into custody to serve the three years, and that no renewed criminal detention of Li Heping has ever been publicly reported. The surveillance, the exit ban and the eviction pressure, by contrast, never stopped — the 2023 evictions and the Chengdu airport interception took place two years after the probation expired.
The most recent public trace is an article in his own hand. On 24 July 2025 China Change published Li Heping's long first-person account of the night of 11–12 July 2025: after three games of Go at his younger brother Li Chunfu's home, he drove back towards his own home and was stopped on the old Jingyu line by the Luhe traffic police brigade of Tongzhou District; the argument ran from 11 p.m. until 4 a.m., five hours. In the article he wrote that the 709 crackdown was already one of the greatest injustices of the age, and that if he were now framed by these traffic police he might as well dash his head against a wall and die on the spot. The article establishes several things: that as of July 2025 he was in the Beijing area, in normal contact with his brother Li Chunfu, able to drive, and still writing publicly under his own name in open criticism of law-enforcement officers. That is not the trail of a silenced man; neither is it the trail of a free one — an article cannot say whether watchers were posted outside his home as he wrote it. The UN Secretary-General's 2026 reprisals report, A/HRC/63/62, supplies that half of the answer: during its reporting period Li Heping, Wang Qiaoling and their family continued to face police surveillance, harassment and intimidation, with close relatives also affected and movement restrictions continuing; on 10 July 2026 the Chinese government replied to the United Nations rejecting the allegations of retaliation against persons cooperating with UN human rights mechanisms.
As of October 2026 this site has searched the published material of Front Line Defenders, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Lawyers for Lawyers and the United Nations and has found no report that Li Heping has been detained, prosecuted or imprisoned again. His latest state of health, his current address and his work and income are matters of no public record. His current status is therefore recorded as follows: inside China, not in custody, a disbarred lawyer living under continuing surveillance and exit restrictions, his most recent public writing in his own name dated July 2025.
Sources: Li Heping, first-person article of 24 July 2025, China Change; UN Secretary-General's reprisals report A/HRC/63/62, 2026; Lawyers for Lawyers statement, June 2023; US Department of State, 2023 Country Report on Human Rights Practices.
The international response, in full: from UN experts' letters to the Secretary-General's reprisals reports
The international response to this case ran for eleven years. In chronological order: on 16 July 2015 UN human rights experts publicly urged China to halt the detentions of lawyers. On 16 February 2016 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed deep concern at the clampdown on lawyers and activists. The formal Special Procedures communications on Li Heping's individual case are a matter of record: CHN 6/2015 on the 709 detentions, CHN 9/2016 on the reprisal allegations following Wang Qiaoling's contact with a Special Rapporteur, and CHN 3/2017 and CHN 5/2017. The joint statement of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Front Line Defenders confirms that UN human rights experts wrote to the Chinese government on Li Heping's case in March and April 2017. One widely repeated error must be corrected here. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 62/2018, A/HRC/WGAD/2018/62, found the detention of Wang Quanzhang, Jiang Tianyong and Li Yuhan arbitrary. It was not an opinion on Li Heping. This site has found no numbered Working Group opinion on Li Heping's own detention. His case's documentary trail at the United Nations consists of Special Procedures communications, the follow-up process of the Committee against Torture, and the Secretary-General's reprisals reports — not an arbitrary-detention opinion. To credit him with somebody else's opinion would flatter the file and falsify the archive. This page does not do it.
On the European side, the EU Delegation to China issued a statement on 27 January 2017 expressing concern at the cases of possible mistreatment of Li Heping, Xie Yang, Wang Quanzhang and other lawyers. In February 2017 the diplomatic missions of eleven countries in Beijing wrote jointly to the Minister of Public Security, Guo Shengkun, urging an investigation into the credible torture allegations concerning Li Heping, Xie Yang and Li Chunfu, and an end to residential surveillance at a designated location. Earlier that month senior lawyers and judges from several countries had published their letter in The Guardian, singling out the reports that Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang had been given electric shocks until they fainted. Around the verdict and the homecoming in May 2017, Human Rights Watch, Front Line Defenders, Amnesty International and Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued statements in succession; on 18 May 2017 Wang Qiaoling's testimony entered the hearing record of the United States Congress, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China carried the case in its annual reports thereafter. The legal profession's own organisations responded in a comparable chain: the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which had given him its award, Lawyers for Lawyers in the Netherlands, and other bar bodies spoke on the case repeatedly, most recently, on the verifiable record, in the June 2023 joint statement demanding that his travel restrictions be lifted. The Secretary-General's reprisals reports carried the line to the present day: the reports of 2017, 2019 and 2026, with the case continuing through the series, record everything from the secret detention and forced medication to the smashed windows, the forced evictions and the exit ban of 2023.
None of these responses changed the verdict, restored his licence or lifted the 2023 exit ban. Their function is different. Every procedural step backwards left a numbered document outside the system. Eleven years on, this case's domestic judicial file is almost entirely closed to the public — the indictment unpublished, the trial record unpublished, the full judgment unpublished — and the complete record the public can actually read is the one assembled from these international documents and the family's testimony. That is why this page verifies item by item, discrepancies included.
Sources: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, statements of 16 July 2015 and 16 February 2016; UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports A/HRC/36/31, A/HRC/42/30 and A/HRC/63/62; Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 62/2018, cited to correct a misattribution; EU Delegation to China statement, 27 January 2017; Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Front Line Defenders, 709 Crackdown 2.0 joint statement, 2023.
Full Timeline
26 October 1970: Li Heping is born in Xinyang, Henan, on the Wikipedia account; Chinese Human Rights Defenders gives 1971 — see the Verification Note. 1995: bachelor's degree in law, Henan University. 2002: partner in the Beijing Global Law Firm; his sensitive-case practice begins around this time. 2003: he acts in the appeal of Yang Zili. 2005: master's in law from Renmin University; he takes part in the Chen Guangcheng and Linyi forced-abortion cases, the Taishi village campaign and the Guo Feixiong case. 2006: involvement in the Three Grades of Servants case. 29 September 2007: abducted and beaten overnight, dumped in woods outside Beijing in the early hours of 30 September, with hearing loss in his left ear; his lawyer's card is stolen and his computer reformatted. 7 March 2008: the car in which he is driving his daughter to school is rammed by a police vehicle. March 2008: joint defence brief with five other lawyers for the Falun Gong practitioner Wang Bo and her parents. 2008: Human Rights Award of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, and the NED Democracy Award for Religious Freedom jointly with Li Baiguang. May 2009: licence suspended and not renewed at the annual assessment. 29 April to 4 May 2011: disappeared during the Jasmine crackdown and tortured, according to colleagues' literature. Before 2015: he leads and joins the EU-funded anti-torture project, and at the time of his seizure is working on a project promoting the Convention against Torture.
9 July 2015: the 709 crackdown begins. About 2 p.m., 10 July 2015: Li Heping is taken from his Beijing home by Tianjin police — the Front Line Defenders file says Beijing police; the home is searched and books, files, hard drives and computers are confiscated with no warrant shown; his assistants Zhao Wei and Gao Yue are taken with him; he is placed under residential surveillance at a designated location and disappears for six months. 1 August 2015: his brother Li Chunfu is taken. January 2016: the authorities announce he is held in Tianjin No. 1 Detention Centre. 8 January 2016: formal arrest on suspicion of subversion of state power — a single relayed report gives 20 January, unverified; Zhao Wei is arrested the same day and Gao Yue on an evidence-destruction allegation. February 2016: the family-retained lawyers are told he has dismissed them, a claim they cannot verify with him. May 2016: on his wife's account, he spends a full month in Tianjin No. 1 Detention Centre wearing combined hand and leg shackles linked by a short chain. August 2016: his wife's contact with the visiting UN Special Rapporteur, which afterwards becomes a standing item in the Secretary-General's reprisals reports. December 2016: Radio Free Asia reports he has been indicted for subversion. 5 January 2017: Li Chunfu is granted bail; on 12 January he is delivered home mentally broken and is hospitalised. 27 January 2017: the EU issues its statement of concern at the mistreatment cases. February 2017: eleven diplomatic missions write jointly urging an investigation of the torture allegations. 1 March 2017: four 709 wives write jointly to foreign leaders. March and April 2017: UN human rights experts write to the Chinese government on his case.
25 April 2017: closed-door trial at the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court on the ground of state secrets; neither family nor family-retained lawyers have been notified. Morning of 28 April 2017: Wang Qiaoling, leaving her building with her daughter, is surrounded by state-security officers from Beijing and Tianjin, while the state-appointed lawyer Wen Zhisheng tries to take her to Tianjin; the same day the court announces the judgment on Weibo — guilty of subversion of state power, three years in prison suspended for four years, with deprivation of political rights; the court says he pleaded guilty and would not appeal, his wife says he never admitted subversion; after the verdict his whereabouts are again unknown, and the state-appointed lawyer did not attend the sentencing. 2 May 2017: Human Rights Watch comments that he remains jailed despite the suspended sentence. 9 May 2017: Li Heping returns to his Beijing home, visibly emaciated, his hair turned grey; he has signed a no-interviews arrangement and plainclothes officers watch the home. 18 May 2017: Wang Qiaoling's video testimony is played at the Congressional-Executive Commission hearing, disclosing twenty-two months of forced medication among other details. May 2018: Human Rights Watch records the revocation of his licence by the Beijing Bureau of Justice on the basis of the conviction; 6 June 2018: the UN report dates the formal notification of disbarment to this day. 17 December 2018: Wang Qiaoling shaves her head outside the Supreme People's Court with Li Wenzu, Yuan Shanshan and Liu Ermin. 2 March 2019: Wang Qiaoling is criminally summoned and interrogated for six hours in Luoshan, Henan. Around 2021: the four-year probation period expires; no official confirmation is a matter of public record, and he is not taken back into custody. March to October 2023: the landlord, under pressure, throws stones at the home, smashes windows and removes the entrance door to force the family out, as recorded in the UN report; April to June 2023: repeated forced moves, death threats and utility cut-offs, as recorded in the US State Department report. 9 June 2023: the family of three is stopped by border police at Chengdu Tianfu International Airport and barred from leaving China on national-security grounds. 11 April 2024: Wang Qiaoling and Li Wenzu address the Rights Defense Network's online international press conference. May 2025: Wang Qiaoling publishes her tenth-anniversary commemorative essay. Night of 11–12 July 2025: Li Heping's five-hour confrontation with the Luhe traffic police brigade in Tongzhou; on 24 July his own long account is published by China Change. 2026: the Secretary-General's reprisals report A/HRC/63/62 records continuing surveillance, harassment and movement restrictions on the family, and a Chinese government reply of 10 July 2026 rejecting the retaliation allegations. October 2026: no public record of any renewed detention; latest health, address and income are matters of no public record.
Verification Note
The evidence on this page is graded as follows. Tier one: the judgment points announced on the court's official Weibo account, retained as material for the prosecution's position and labelled as such; Wang Qiaoling's application to observe the trial at the Tianjin No. 2 court; Li Heping's own article of 2025; the record of Wang Qiaoling's testimony to the United States Congress. Tier two: UN Special Procedures communication numbers, the UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports, the US State Department's country reports, and the formal documents of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Front Line Defenders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Tier three: reporting by the BBC, The Guardian, Radio Free Asia, Reuters and the Associated Press, and bulletins of advocacy organisations such as ChinaAid and Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Any claim resting on a single tier-three chain is identified in the text by its source or marked unverified.
Known discrepancies and corrections are set out item by item. First, the birth year: Wikipedia gives 1970, Chinese Human Rights Defenders gives 1971; both are presented. Second, the seizing authority: his wife's filing and most reporting give Tianjin police, the Front Line Defenders file gives Beijing police; this page leads with the wife's documentary account and presents the other alongside it. Third, the formal arrest date: the main sources — Amnesty International, the Dui Hua Foundation and Human Rights in China — agree on 8 January 2016; one advocacy-relayed report gives 20 January on a single source chain and is marked unverified. Fourth, the conviction date: the court announced the judgment on 28 April 2017, while the UN Secretary-General's report gives 27 April; this page follows 28 April and notes the one-day difference. Fifth, the guilty plea: the court and Front Line Defenders record a guilty plea and no appeal, while his wife states publicly that he never admitted subverting state power and accepted only an arrangement of a secret trial in exchange for a suspended sentence; the two accounts conflict directly, no trial transcript is available, and both are presented. Sixth, the duration of the forced medication: the Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission to the United Nations stresses that it began in the first weeks of secret detention, while his wife's testimony gives a continuation of 22 months at six pills a day; this page uses the formulation that it began in the first weeks and continued over a long period, and notes that no month-by-month record exists. Seventh, the electric-shock allegation: it appears in the reports cited by the international lawyers' and judges' letter of January 2017 and in his wife's account to The Guardian; it is an allegation by Li Heping and his family, with no independent medical or official investigative record, and is recorded as an allegation rather than an established conclusion. Eighth, the homecoming date: Amnesty International and most reporting give 9 May 2017, while a Lawyers for Lawyers statement gives 10 May; this page follows 9 May and notes the difference. Ninth, the disbarment: Human Rights Watch dates the revocation to May 2018 and the Secretary-General's report dates the notification to 6 June 2018; both are presented. Tenth, the length of the deprivation of political rights: English-language secondary reporting is inconsistent and no full judgment text is public, so this page gives no number of years. Eleventh — a correction to this page's own commissioning brief: the brief listed a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention opinion among this case's international responses. On checking, Opinion No. 62/2018 of the Working Group concerned Wang Quanzhang, Jiang Tianyong and Li Yuhan; this site has found no Working Group opinion on Li Heping personally, and his United Nations trail consists of the Special Procedures communications CHN 6/2015, CHN 9/2016, CHN 3/2017 and CHN 5/2017, the Committee against Torture follow-up process and the Secretary-General's reprisals reports. The text has been written according to the verified record. Twelfth, the brief's timing of an April 2017 trial and a May 2017 suspended sentence is imprecise: the secret trial was held on 25 April and the judgment announced on 28 April 2017; what happened in May was the homecoming of 9 May. In addition, Li Heping was not released on bail or unconditionally: he went home carrying a four-year probation period and a deprivation of political rights, and no official confirmation of the probation's completion is a matter of public record.
Our Take
The distinctive cruelty of the Li Heping case is that he was a student of torture who became its witness. He ran an anti-torture project, taught others the UN definition of torture, and was then, in secret detention, held down and made to swallow unidentified pills, and locked for a month in a short chain linking his hands to his feet so that he could only stoop. When he was seized, the work in his hands was the promotion of the Convention against Torture — a treaty China itself ratified in 1988. The indictment never mentions that project by name, yet its skeleton — foreign funding, foreign media, contact with foreigners — is precisely that project and his entire professional life assembled into a charge sheet. When a state convicts a lawyer of subverting state power for publicising a treaty the state has signed, the conviction is itself the plainest commentary on the treaty.
The second thread of the case is the price put on silence. The court says he pleaded guilty and gave thanks; his wife says he never admitted subversion and merely traded a secret trial for a suspended sentence. Readers can judge which sits better with the facts: a man forcibly medicated for the better part of two years, who had just seen his younger brother sent home with his mind shattered, will say many things in a closed courtroom, and every one of them has to be read inside quotation marks. Then came the rest: the licence revoked, the plainclothes watchers outside the home, a son refused a passport and the university he wanted, a daughter refused a school at six and stopped at an airport at thirteen, and a landlord removing the family's front door. The three-year prison term was never executed. The punishment never stopped for a single day; it simply changed into forms that require no judgment. That is why this page records the case with every discrepancy and every gap left visible: most of what was done to this family was done outside the documents, and an archive that recorded only the documents would miss half the persecution.
Sources
Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, judgment announcement on its official Weibo account, 28 April 2017, as relayed by Human Rights Watch, Reuters and the Associated Press, retained as material for the prosecution's position; Wang Qiaoling, Application to Observe the Trial of Li Heping, published by Human Rights in China; Wang Qiaoling, testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing of 18 May 2017, hearing record CHRG-115hhrg25459; Amnesty International, Against the Law profile, ASA 17/018/2011; urgent appeal of 2007; one-year retrospective on the 709 crackdown; urgent-action update ASA 17/6307/2017; Front Line Defenders case file on Li Heping; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, 709 people file; follow-up report to the UN Committee against Torture, June 2017; joint submission on residential surveillance at a designated location to UN Special Procedures, May 2018; 709 Crackdown 2.0 joint statement, 2023; Human Rights Watch commentary of 2 May 2017; article on the persecution of families, 15 August 2016; report on lawyers' licences, July 2018; Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, statements of 16 July 2015 and 16 February 2016; UN Secretary-General's reprisals reports A/HRC/36/31, A/HRC/42/30 and A/HRC/63/62; Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 62/2018, cited to correct a misattribution, its subjects being Wang Quanzhang, Jiang Tianyong and Li Yuhan; EU Delegation to China statement, 27 January 2017; US Department of State, 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, China; Lawyers for Lawyers statement on travel restrictions, June 2023; Bob Fu, China's Tortured Lawyers, Wall Street Journal, 29 May 2017; BBC reporting on Li Heping's torture; The Guardian, international lawyers' letter, 23 January 2017; Radio Free Asia reporting, December 2016 and May 2017 and June 2023; Christian Solidarity Worldwide briefings, May 2017; Wang Qiaoling's memoirs and essays, 2017–2025, China Change and Human Rights in China; Li Heping, first-person article of 24 July 2025, China Change; Dui Hua Foundation, Dui Hua Digest, February 2016.