第三十七案 | 牛腾宇Case 37 | Niu Tengyu
只负责网站技术运维的年轻人牛腾宇，因习近平女儿信息泄露专案被定为「主犯」，三罪并罚判刑14年。家属指控酷刑与构陷，母亲可可申诉至今。Niu Tengyu, a young website technician, was named 'ringleader' in the special case over the leak of Xi Jinping's daughter's information and sentenced to 14 years on three charges. His family alleges torture and a fabricated case; his mother Keke still petitions for him.
How the case unfolded
The case began in 2019, when personal information and photographs concerning close relatives of China's top leader appeared on overseas websites. Sources agree that the material concerned Xi Jinping's daughter, Xi Mingze, and his son-in-law, Deng Jiagui, and that it consisted of personal identity and biographical details. In line with this site's standing policy, we record only the nature of the material and publish no identity numbers, addresses or other personal particulars. Once the material surfaced, the matter escalated far beyond an ordinary online privacy dispute. According to a May 2021 statement by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a special case team was formed at the central level and a nationwide manhunt targeted people connected to the websites; at least 24 people, some of them minors, were detained across the country starting in August 2019. Niu's mother told Radio Free Asia that after the disclosure came to the attention of the leadership, the task force was set up and large numbers of officers were sent out across provincial lines. This timeline is broadly consistent across Radio Free Asia, reporting relayed by Voice of America, and human rights documentation, and it is the first key to the whole case: from the outset, this was not a local public-order matter handled by a neighbourhood police station, but a centrally driven special case under Ministry of Public Security direction.
The case landed, in practice, in Maoming, Guangdong. According to the family and the site's founder, the people who first posted the material were based overseas and beyond the police's reach, so enforcement shifted to Esu Wiki, whose users could be found inside China. Police in most localities handled those involved through summonses and warnings, according to these accounts; Maoming police alone built the matter into a major case, ran cross-provincial arrests, and reported it upward as a significant operation. In the end, 24 young people were convicted nationwide, and Niu Tengyu — who maintained the site's technical infrastructure — was designated the "ringleader" and given the heaviest sentence. On 8 February 2021, ten parents of the convicted youths jointly petitioned senior authorities, calling the case a manufactured miscarriage of justice and demanding supervision and correction. From material posted overseas, to 24 convictions inside China, to a 14-year sentence for a young man who kept a website running: each link in that chain is documented below, with its source and verification level stated.
Esu Wiki and the leak in context
Esu Wiki — the name translates roughly as "Vulgar Wiki" — grew out of China's "Esu circle," an online subculture of satire and mockery. The wiki-style site recorded internet personalities and incidents: video-platform celebrities, game developers and streamers, online feuds, and also information about officials and their families. It was registered and run by people based overseas; its founder, Xiao Yanrui, lives abroad. Xiao has told media that Esu Wiki itself avoided political content, and that he set up a separate site, Zhina Wiki, for political material and disclosures about officials, alongside other platforms such as the Red Bank Foundation. The distinction matters enormously for this case: the family, the founder and multiple human rights organizations all maintain that the Xi family material first appeared not on Esu Wiki but on Zhina Wiki, the Red Bank Foundation and similar overseas sites, and no reporting has produced a direct evidentiary chain linking the original posting to Esu Wiki or to Niu personally.
Niu's role at Esu Wiki, as described by CHRD and multiple outlets, was technical: he handled information-technology and maintenance work. He was a self-taught computer specialist, aged 19 or 20 at the time of his arrest — not the site's founder and not the person directing its content. The official judgment, however, folded the site's content on Hong Kong, Xinjiang and other topics into his "picking quarrels" liability. CHRD notes that the heavy sentence was reportedly connected in part to posts on subjects the authorities regard as politically sensitive. In other words, even within the official narrative, the sentencing logic had already overflowed the single issue of leaked personal information and absorbed a political judgement on the website's speech as a whole. How a satirical wiki, a young technician, and a leak concerning the leader's family were welded together into an "evil-force criminal group" is the question our closing commentary takes up.
Arrest and interrogation
Public sources disagree on the arrest date, and we record the discrepancy openly. CHRD's statement gives 16 August 2019 as the date Niu was detained. Human Rights in China (HRIC), in material carried by the ANI news agency, gives 22 August 2019 and describes plainclothes officers posing as property-management staff coming to his home in Jiaozuo, Henan, handcuffing him and seizing computers, phones, hard drives, bank cards and documents. His mother told Radio Free Asia he was taken in "early August 2019." The dates differ by several days and may reflect different stages or locations of the same detention; no judgment text is publicly available for word-by-word checking. This site uses 22 August 2019 for index sorting because it carries a concrete scene description, and flags the conflict as unverified pending primary documents. After the arrest, Niu was initially held on suspicion of assisting information-network criminal activity, and the accusations grew heavier over time — one of the main grounds on which his family and lawyers describe the case as arrest first, charges assembled afterwards.
The torture allegations from the interrogation phase are the gravest element of this case, and the one requiring the most careful wording. Everything in this paragraph comes from Niu's own accounts to his lawyers, his mother's public statements and petition materials, as compiled and published by CHRD. None of it has been verified by any independent on-site investigation, and the authorities have never publicly responded to or investigated it. This site therefore records it strictly as allegations by the family and lawyers, not as established fact. As relayed by CHRD: in October 2019, while held at a police station in the Maopo area of Guangdong, Niu was fixed in an interrogation chair and questioned continuously for seven days and seven nights without sleep. During residential surveillance at a designated location in late 2019 and January 2020, he was allegedly stripped naked every two or three days, suspended by his wrists and beaten for sessions of about two hours, subjected to burning of his genitals with a lighter and the pouring of saline solution, forced to kneel before his interrogators, and photographed naked for a mocking photo album. During one session on 13 January 2020, lasting from early afternoon until the following morning, he allegedly lost consciousness repeatedly, and nerves in the thumb and index finger of his right hand were damaged. His mother says he was beaten unconscious, revived with cold water, and pressed to admit he was the ringleader. His lawyers, including Bao Longjun and Wang Yu, formally complained about the alleged torture, sought exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, and asked for interrogation recordings to be produced and investigators to testify; according to CHRD, none of these applications was granted. China is a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, and CHRD called for a prompt and impartial investigation. As of our last verification, there is no public record of any investigation being opened, and no public record of any officer being disciplined.
Trial and appeal
The case was tried in Maoming in November 2020, with 24 defendants in total. Sources again diverge on the first-instance date: Radio Free Asia reported on 27 January 2021 that the Maonan District People's Court had sentenced Niu to 14 years on 30 December 2020, while CHRD's statement dates the guilty verdict to 6 February 2021. The two dates, more than a month apart, may correspond to the pronouncement of sentence and the date or delivery of the written judgment; because the full judgment has never been published, this site records both and marks the point unverified rather than silently choosing one. The structure of the sentence is identical in every source: eight years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble, five years for infringing citizens' personal information, and two years for illegal business operations, combined as 14 years, plus a fine of 130,000 yuan. Among the co-defendants whose sentences are publicly known, Wang Liheng received a combined five years and a 20,000-yuan fine, and Qi Xiaodong received three years for picking quarrels; the names and sentences of many other defendants have never been fully published. According to statistics relayed by the rights site Weiquanwang, the 24 included nine minors and five people who were under 20 when arrested, among them high-school, vocational-school and university students. All 24 were convicted.
The family and founder Xiao Yanrui have raised a specific frame-up allegation, which we record as an allegation. Xiao says that while held at a detention centre in Foshan, Niu was once handed a police computer to type on and accidentally recovered two near-identical case files, one of which named another site participant, Gu Yangyang, as the ringleader, while the version ultimately submitted upward had Gu removed and Niu in his place. Gu was briefly detained, released, and promptly sent abroad by his family; claims about his family's connections and intervention are single-source and rumour-based, and this site marks them unverified and draws no factual conclusion about any individual from them. On 23 April 2021, the Maoming Intermediate People's Court rejected the appeal and upheld the verdict. CHRD and Radio Free Asia both report that family members and lawyers were not permitted to attend the second-instance proceedings and that the lawyers' written opinions were not considered, making the appeal close to a paper review. Lawyer Bao Longjun told Radio Free Asia that the available evidence could not support a conviction and that the case was fundamentally political. After the judgment took effect, Niu remained for a time at Maoming No. 1 Detention Centre; in May 2021 his family learned he would be transferred to a prison to serve his sentence.
His mother Coco's petitions
Niu's mother, known online as Coco — written Keke in some English reporting — is the most important voice this case has had. For nearly two years after her son was taken, she did not see him at all: their first meeting came on 4 May 2021, the first since August 2019. CHRD records that Niu appeared determined to seem in good spirits but would not let his mother see his injured fingers, which she believed was to spare her pain. After that meeting she pursued every channel open to her: joint petitions with other parents, lawyers engaged to file for retrial and lodge complaints, formal protests over the torture allegations, and repeated mailings to courts at several levels. In August 2022 she wrote an open letter to Xi Jinping himself, stating that her son had been framed. Wire reporting based on her accounts says lawyer after lawyer was pressured into withdrawing; by 2022 she was on her fourteenth lawyer. Petition materials mailed by counsel were, in her account, met with courts saying nothing had been received, and applications to visit were repeatedly blocked. Her own treatment, as she described it to CHRD for its April 2024 report on the punishment of activists' families, included police harassment, her home's water and electricity being cut, air conditioning cut in summer heat, noise made outside at night to prevent sleep, constant following, and a smear campaign; she said the accumulated stress and pain had left her barely able to manage daily life. These details are her own account as recorded by CHRD and are flagged here as family testimony, not independently verified.
No institutional door has opened. There is no public record of any Guangdong court accepting a retrial petition, no public record of a procuratorate investigation into the torture complaint, and no public record of visiting restrictions being relaxed. Her campaign has therefore moved steadily outward: interviews with overseas media, persistent posting on social platforms, and close contact with international human rights organizations. She told Radio Free Asia the case would stand as a stain on the history of China's legal system and that the miscarriage of justice had to be overturned. That is her stated position, recorded here as such rather than endorsed as a legal conclusion. What every strand of reporting confirms as objective fact is simpler: since the April 2021 appeal decision, through 2023, 2024 and beyond, she has never stopped petitioning, and the case has never entirely left public view because of it.
Prison conditions and current situation
On where Niu is serving his sentence, the reporting changed over time. Radio Free Asia reported on 20 May 2021 that he would be transferred from Maoming No. 1 Detention Centre to Yangjiang Prison in Guangdong. Later sources converge elsewhere: material from Human Rights in China carried by wire services states that he is serving his sentence at Sihui Prison in Zhaoqing, Guangdong, with the term reported to end on 10 September 2033; ChinaAid's reporting on his mother's blocked visits likewise locates him at Sihui Prison. The two locations need not contradict each other — they may reflect an initial transfer to Yangjiang followed by a later move to Sihui — but no public record gives a transfer date, so this site marks the sequence unverified and treats Sihui Prison as the current location on the strength of multiple later sources. On prison treatment, ChinaAid reported that his mother was forcibly returned to her home in Jiaozuo and that Guangdong authorities refused to arrange a mother-and-son meeting; she suspects that his mental state in prison is abnormal and connects her suspicions to the refusal of visits. Her further suspicion of poisoning is recorded here strictly as a family allegation: there is no independent evidence for it, and this site does not relay it as fact. She also states that his rights to visits, correspondence and medical parole have been denied. Neither the prison nor Guangdong's prison administration has publicly responded to these allegations, as far as any record available to us shows.
Health is the family's most concrete fear. According to the lawyers and family, the nerve damage to his hand from the alleged interrogation abuse could become a lifelong disability without timely treatment. On the eve of his transfer to prison in 2021, his mother said publicly that she feared most for his health and recovery, and that given her own condition she did not know whether she would ever see her son again. Since then, public information about his condition inside prison has been extremely scarce: no regular family visit reports, no published medical records, no official account of his situation. That vacuum is itself part of the record. How a young man sentenced to 14 years is actually faring behind the walls is, beyond his family's fragmentary worries and allegations, unknown to the outside world, and this site writes "no public record" rather than filling the gap with conjecture.
Impact on the family
The damage to the family has been total. Niu grew up in a single-parent household, living with his mother and his maternal grandparents. According to overseas Chinese-language reporting from early 2024, after the case began, his grandparents died in succession, unable to bear the shock. His mother lives with heart problems, and years of travelling to petition, of pressure and of the harassment she describes have broken her health; in her own account, quoted in CHRD's 2024 report, she is close to unable to care for herself and needs round-the-clock help. A three-generation household of grandparents, mother and son was reduced within five years to a sick woman petitioning alone for a son behind bars. The financial weight — a 130,000-yuan fine, the fees of more than a dozen lawyers over the years, and the travel and lodging costs of petitioning across provinces — needs no embellishment for an ordinary family; exact totals have no public record, and this site offers no estimate. The other 23 families carry their own versions of the same burden, among them the parents of high-school and university students; the parents' joint letter of February 2021 is one of the few public traces of their collective voice. Since then most of those families have fallen silent. Only Coco is still speaking.
International response
International attention accumulated from the moment of sentencing. In its May 2021 statement, Chinese Human Rights Defenders measured the case item by item against the UN Committee Against Torture's recommendations to China — access to a lawyer, transfer of interrogation recordings, exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, investigation of torture complaints — and found every safeguard missing, calling for an immediate investigation and for Niu's release. Human Rights in China has followed the case continuously, publishing case summaries at successive anniversaries covering the arrest, the torture allegations, the appeal procedure and the prison location; its most recent statements, in 2026, still give Sihui Prison and a 2033 release date as the current position. Radio Free Asia and Voice of America have reported each turning point since January 2021 — the verdict, the torture complaint, the prison transfer, the mother's open letter — and remain the main channels through which information about the case reaches the international public. On 8 December 2023, more than one hundred human rights and democracy organizations and more than three hundred activists worldwide jointly signed an open letter calling for Niu's rescue; Chinese and English versions were submitted to the White House petition channel, to the fifteen member states of the UN Security Council, to human rights bodies worldwide, to human rights officers at foreign embassies in China, and to the Chinese government. Support rallies were held the same month in Los Angeles and elsewhere. A China-related human rights bill introduced in the United States Congress in 2025 names Niu as an individual case, recording that he was held in residential surveillance at a designated location, was reportedly severely tortured, and received a 14-year sentence in late 2020. In 2026, the overseas group China Action projected Niu's portrait on a giant scale onto the Chinese embassy in Berlin, the Reichstag parliamentary complex and the Berlin Television Tower, demanding his immediate release; the exact dates of that action rest on Hong Kong media reporting, this site has not obtained the organizers' original announcement, and the detail is marked unverified. Two negative findings belong in this section as well: our searches found no original PEN America statement devoted to this case, so PEN is not listed here as a verified voice and claims to that effect are marked unverified; and we found no public record of any formal diplomatic representation on this case by the European Union or any national government.
Latest status
As of this site's last verification in October 2026, the confirmable position is as follows. Niu Tengyu remains in Sihui Prison, Guangdong, with his sentence reported by Human Rights in China to run until 10 September 2033, by which time he will be in his mid-thirties. His mother Coco is still petitioning and speaking out; the December 2023 international joint letter and her testimony in CHRD's 2024 report are her two fullest public records of recent years, and the 2025 congressional bill text, the 2026 overseas solidarity actions and HRIC's anniversary statements show the case remains open on the international human rights agenda. The other half of the record must be stated just as plainly: since the appeal decision of April 2021, no Chinese official channel has published any new information about this case — no retrial news, no sentence-reduction report, no finding on the torture allegations, and no record of any officer being held accountable. Prisoner status is not public in China, and everything the outside world knows about Niu's situation rests on fragmentary material from his family and human rights groups. This page will be updated as soon as any verifiable development appears, whether that is publication of the judgment, acceptance of a retrial petition, restoration of family visits, or an official response.
Verification note
This page grades its evidence in three tiers. Tier one, corroborated across multiple sources: 24 people convicted; Niu designated ringleader; the three charges and their individual terms of eight, five and two years; the combined 14-year sentence and 130,000-yuan fine; the appeal rejected and the verdict upheld on 23 April 2021; the leaked material concerned Xi Mingze and Deng Jiagui and first appeared on overseas sites; Niu's role was technical maintenance of the website. These points are supported by CHRD's statement, Radio Free Asia reporting, Weiquanwang materials and wire coverage. Tier two, single-source or relayed accounts: imprisonment at Sihui Prison and the 10 September 2033 end date, from Human Rights in China material carried by news agencies; the scale of the December 2023 joint letter, from ChinaAid reporting; the details of the harassment of his mother, from her own testimony as recorded in CHRD's 2024 report. Tier three, allegations by the family or lawyers that have not been independently verified: every detail of the alleged torture, the "two case files" and ringleader-substitution account, the suspicion of poisoning in prison, and claims that another participant's family intervened on his behalf. This site presents all tier-three material strictly as allegation. Two date conflicts remain unresolved because the judgment and other primary documents are not public: the arrest, given as 16 August 2019 by CHRD and 22 August 2019 in HRIC-relayed reporting; and the first-instance verdict, dated 30 December 2020 by Radio Free Asia and 6 February 2021 by CHRD. Both are marked unverified. Niu's exact date of birth has no public record; this site gives only circa 1999–2000, Gaoping, Shanxi origin, and residence in Jiaozuo before arrest. No identity details concerning Xi Mingze are published here; only the nature of the incident is recorded. Some early English-language reports misstated the combined sentence as 15 years; checked against the structure of the individual terms, this site uses 14 years and does not adopt the 15-year figure.
Our Take
Our commentary stays with the facts of this case. First: the material was first posted overseas, and the people who posted it could not be reached, so a young man who maintained a website's technical systems inside China was named ringleader and given 14 years. Whatever that is, it is not law enforcement on evidence; it is substitution — finding someone to carry the case. In the family's account, the incentives are written plainly: most localities closed the matter with summonses and warnings, while Maoming alone turned it into an "evil-force criminal group" case, with cross-provincial arrests and credit reported upward. Second: the arithmetic of the sentence was assembled to fit a conclusion — the site's everyday satirical content and its posts on Hong Kong and Xinjiang were poured into the elastic offence of picking quarrels to reach eight years, then personal-information and illegal-business counts were stacked on top to reach fourteen. Third: the defence asked for the interrogation recordings, asked for torture-tainted confessions to be excluded, asked for the investigators to testify — and every application vanished without trace, while the appeal was decided without family or lawyers in the room. Whether a defendant is guilty is a question of evidence; whether a case is a miscarriage of justice can be read from its procedure, and this procedure does not withstand inspection at a single point. Fourth: after the verdict, a petitioning mother describes cut utilities, blocked visits and constant harassment — that is no longer adjudication but collective punishment of a family. The starkest fact in this file is the proportion: one photograph and material posted on overseas websites, exchanged for the whole of a young man's life from age twenty to thirty-four. Every legal system protects citizens' personal information, and that is not in dispute. But treating information about the leader's family as an untouchable imperial secret, defended with a special task force, torture allegations and a 14-year sentence, protects not privacy but privilege. We keep this record so the account stays on file: who ordered, who handled, who signed — preserved on this page and in the linked profiles, where the passage of time will not erase them.
Sources
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), "Chinese authorities must investigate torture claims by detained web designer," 13 May 2021, nchrd.org.
- Radio Free Asia, "Court in China's Guangdong Jails 24 Over Posts on Xi Jinping's Family," 27 January 2021; "Man Jailed Over Photo of Chinese Leader's Daughter 'Soon to be Transferred'," 20 May 2021, rfa.org (archived via GlobalSecurity).
- Weiquanwang (Rights Defense Network) materials and Shao Zifu's commentary, "'Esu Wiki' youths heavily sentenced: official lawlessness in plain sight," February 2021.
- Human Rights in China (HRIC) case materials on Niu Tengyu, carried by ANI and republished by Devdiscourse (arrest account, Sihui Prison, sentence end date).
- ChinaAid, "Niu Tengyu, sentenced to 14 years in prison, claims to have been tortured" (8 December 2023 international joint letter; blocked visits), chinaaid.org.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), "China Punishes Activists and Families to Quash Dissent," April 2024, nchrd.org (Coco's account of harassment).
- United States Congress, 119th Congress, H.R. 5303 bill text, individual case entry for Niu Tengyu, 2025.
- Pulse HK (Chaser News) reporting on China Action's Berlin projection action in support of Niu Tengyu, YouTube, 2026.