第66案 | 邵祝敏Case 66 | Peter Shao Zhumin
邵祝敏是圣座任命的温州（永嘉）教区主教，却因拒绝加入爱国会，从2016年继任前夕起被当局以「旅游」「学习」为名反复秘密带走：2017年长押约七个半月，2025年又因一台禧年弥撒被处以二十万元罚款后被带走，至今长期处于软禁之中。他从未受过审判，也从未被定罪。Peter Shao Zhumin is the Vatican-appointed bishop of Wenzhou (Yongjia), yet for refusing to join the Patriotic Association he has been secretly taken away again and again since the eve of his succession in 2016 — held for some seven and a half months in 2017–2018, and taken again in 2025 after a 200,000-yuan fine over a single Jubilee Mass. He remains under prolonged house arrest. He has never been tried and never convicted.
One bishop, two ledgers
The name Peter Shao Zhumin is entered in two completely different ledgers. In the Holy See’s ledger he is the diocesan bishop of Yongjia — the diocese the outside world calls Wenzhou. He was ordained a priest in 1989, appointed coadjutor bishop by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, consecrated on 10 November 2011, and on 7 September 2016, when his predecessor Vincent Zhu Weifang died, he succeeded automatically under canon law; the Holy See publicly confirmed the succession on 21 September 2016. In the ledger kept by Beijing and by Zhejiang’s religious affairs apparatus, the same man is not a bishop at all. His appointment was never approved by the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China or by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and he has consistently refused to join either body. The official position is therefore that the Wenzhou see is “vacant,” and that diocesan affairs are run by Father Ma Xianshi, a priest of the Patriotic Association. One man, standing in one city, is in one account the pastor of well over a hundred thousand Catholics and in the other an “illegal religious person” whose very office does not exist. Everything that has happened to him over the past decade grew out of that crack between the two ledgers.
Shao Zhumin was born on 10 September 1963. The reliable directories — Catholic-Hierarchy and the Bishops in China listing — record only that he was born in China in 1963; they do not give a birthplace, and this archive therefore does not present “born in Wenzhou” as an established fact (see the Verification Note). What is certain is that his life is bound to the Wenzhou diocese. He was ordained there, served the underground community as its vicar general and chancellor, was arrested there, sentenced there, taken away from there again and again — and each time he came back, he came back there to celebrate Mass. He is not a travelling activist or a public dissident. He is a local churchman. And the machine that persecutes him is equally local: religious affairs officials and public security and state security officers in Wenzhou and in districts such as Yueqing and Longwan, doing the same thing, in the same place, year after year.
Sources: Catholic-Hierarchy bishops’ directory (as cited in the Wikipedia entry “Peter Shao Zhumin”); Bishops in China directory; Catholic News Agency, 26 June 2017 and January 2024; Holy See Press Office statement, 26 June 2017.
Wenzhou: why this city, why this bishop
To understand why the authorities will not let go of this one bishop, it helps to understand Wenzhou’s weight on the map of Chinese Catholicism. Wenzhou is often called “China’s Jerusalem.” Its Christian population is among the largest in the country, and estimates of its Catholic population alone range from about 120,000 — the figure AsiaNews used in 2016 — to roughly 150,000 in diocesan estimates cited by ChinaAid, and 180,000 to 200,000 in ChinaAid’s reporting in 2025. The figures differ by source and year, but the order of magnitude does not: this is one of the largest Catholic communities in China, and a large share of it belongs to the “underground” church that remains loyal to the Holy See and refuses state registration. Wenzhou’s Catholics are known across the Chinese church for their organization and their fervour. A community like that, led by a bishop who will not submit, is for the religious-control apparatus a piece of the puzzle that never fits.
The diocese’s modern history is itself a history of suffering. Shao’s predecessor, Bishop Vincent Zhu Weifang, spent sixteen years in reform-through-labour camps (1955–1971, in some accounts during the Cultural Revolution) and a further six years in prison from 1982 to 1988. Late in life Zhu crossed into the official community, received government recognition, and in 2010 became bishop of Wenzhou — an arrangement through which the Holy See hoped to reconcile the diocese’s two communities: Zhu, recognized by the state, as diocesan bishop, and Shao, of the underground community, as his coadjutor and designated successor. It was, in other words, a reconciliation plan. The authorities’ answer to that plan was to remove the successor before the old bishop had even died. And between 2014 and 2016 Zhejiang province carried out a sweeping campaign of cross and church demolitions: on 28 April 2014 the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou was torn down by more than a thousand armed police and government-hired personnel; by December 2014, according to ChinaAid’s tally, more than 425 churches in the province had been targeted, and outside estimates held that about a quarter of Zhejiang’s churches had lost their crosses that year. Multiple accounts trace the campaign to the provincial party secretary Xia Baolong, who on an inspection visit reportedly found a church cross “too conspicuous.” Shao Zhumin succeeded as bishop on ground that had just been ploughed over. He did not inherit a settled diocese; he inherited a diocese that had just watched its crosses come down.
Sources: AsiaNews, 8 September 2016; Catholic News Service, 8 September 2016; ChinaAid, Top 10 Persecution Cases of 2014 and its Sanjiang church reporting; ChinaAid, 4 July 2025 (diocesan population estimate).
Before the mitre: 1999, 2005, and a nine-month sentence
Shao Zhumin was being taken away long before he became a bishop. Public records indicate that in 1999, as a priest of the underground church, he was detained together with Jiang Sunian. The two men became a fixed pair in the leadership of Wenzhou’s underground community — Shao as vicar general, Jiang as chancellor — and in almost every major removal that followed, both names appear. On 27 October 2005, Shao, Jiang and five other priests concelebrated the closing Mass of the Year of the Eucharist for about six hundred faithful at Yongqiang parish. Afterwards, at a restaurant, public security officers seized Shao at the counter while he was ordering food; alerted lay Catholics quietly led the other priests out through a kitchen back door to keep them from being taken too. Jiang, who had left separately, was stopped at a toll booth in Bailou, Shuangyu township, and taken into custody. AsiaNews reported at the time that local Catholics could not understand why these two had been singled out, because the situation of the underground community had been “calm” for some time. That detail is worth remembering. Already in 2005, the logic of the arrests was not “something happened,” but “these are the leaders.”
The one case that produced an actual court judgment came in 2006–2007. In September 2006 Shao and Jiang travelled to Europe and met Vatican officials in Rome. Because the government would not issue passports to senior underground clergy, they had travelled on other people’s documents. On their return they were detained in Shenzhen, formally arrested on 11 October, and charged with illegally crossing the border and using false papers. In April 2007 (some accounts say the verdict came in March), a Wenzhou court sentenced Shao to nine months and Jiang to eleven months in prison. Shao was released in May 2007, a month early, because of illness he had contracted in detention — an illness that left him deaf in one ear, an injury that stayed with him for years; during his long detention in 2017 he would be taken to Beijing Tongren Hospital for ear surgery. Jiang served his full term and was released in August 2007. This remains the only occasion in Shao’s life when the state used a court, a charge and a fixed sentence against him, and that is precisely why it matters. It proves the authorities were perfectly capable of using judicial process when they wished. Later, against a bishop, they chose something more convenient than process: removals with no case number, no lawyer, no appeal and no release date — only the words “going on a trip.”
Sources: AsiaNews / UCA News, 28 October 2005 (republished by the Cardinal Kung Foundation); Congressional-Executive Commission on China case records; Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, as reported by Reuters and the Gospel Herald, 2007; Voice of the Martyrs Canada update, 23 May 2007.
A trip to Sichuan in 2013: a rehearsal for “transformation” (unverified)
In the years before his succession, the authorities’ methods were mainly “talks” and pressure. According to an account later recalled in National Review, in 2013 officials tried to persuade Shao to join the Patriotic Association and even took him on a compulsory “trip” to Sichuan, where he was seated across from a government-appointed bishop of Leshan whom the Holy See did not recognize. Shao did not yield, and he was eventually released. This account currently rests on a single source chain, with no contemporaneous AsiaNews or UCA News report to corroborate it, and this archive marks it unverified. It is recorded only as a clue to how the method evolved: courtesy first, then escalation. If the account is accurate, nothing that happened after 2016 was improvised. It was a procedure that had already been tested, had already failed to break him, and was then steadily intensified anyway.
Source: National Review, as relayed by the Gospel Herald (single source, unverified).
23 August 2016: the succession had not begun, and the bishop was already gone
By late August 2016 word had spread through the diocese that Bishop Zhu, aged ninety, was dying. Under canon law a coadjutor succeeds at the very moment the diocesan bishop dies or retires. No ceremony is needed, and no government approval is needed. The authorities evidently understood this at least as well as the faithful did. On 23 August 2016 police took Shao Zhumin and his secretary Jiang Sunian out of Zhejiang province. AsiaNews’ sources in the unofficial church put the reason plainly: the government did not want Shao to preside at Zhu’s funeral. Zhu died on 7 September 2016 (some reports say the evening of 6 September; his age is given as ninety in AsiaNews and eighty-eight in some Chinese reports, and this archive relies on the date of death rather than the age). In other words, before the old bishop had died, the successor had already been dealt with. On 7 September 2016 — the day Shao Zhumin became, in the law of the Church, the diocesan bishop of Wenzhou — he was somewhere in northwest China on a police “trip,” unable even to attend his predecessor’s funeral.
The details of that “trip” can be assembled from several reports: Shao was taken to northwest China; Jiang was escorted to Yunnan; another priest was held in a hotel in Hangzhou. Zhu’s funeral was set for 13 September. Local police issued only four hundred attendance permits; members of the underground community were expressly forbidden to attend. The funeral of the bishop of a diocese of well over a hundred thousand Catholics became a ticketed event from which the new bishop was absent. ChinaAid later summarized this removal as running from 23 August to 8 October 2016 — forty-six days spanning the death, the funeral and the succession itself. This archive takes 23 August 2016 as its sort date: the first secret removal in Shao’s succession, and the first page of nearly a decade of removals that followed. Strictly speaking he was still coadjutor on the day the operation began, but its purpose and its duration were aimed squarely at the succession, and every major account treats it as the opening act of the persecution of Bishop Shao — which is why it is dated as such here.
Sources: AsiaNews, 8 September 2016 (republished by Herald Malaysia, International Christian Concern and CatholicPhilly / CNS); ChinaAid case page, February 2023 (date range); succession confirmed by the Holy See on 21 September 2016 (as reported by CNA, 26 June 2017).
2017: five days at Holy Week, a seven-month disappearance, and a rare Vatican statement
In the spring of 2017 the removals began to show a calendar pattern. The U.S. State Department’s 2018 International Religious Freedom Report records that security officials took Shao away before Holy Week (9–15 April) 2017 and held him for five days — the aim, as in so many later cases, was to make him absent during the most important season of the Church’s year. Then, on 18 May 2017, Shao was summoned by the religious affairs bureau and disappeared for months. This time it was not days but a long vanishing: neither the diocese nor his family was given any reason for the removal, nor any word of where he was held. In June an unconfirmed report claimed he had been seen at Wenzhou airport with officials. On 20 June Germany’s ambassador to China, Michael Clauss, posted a statement on his embassy’s website noting that the bishop appeared to have been forcibly moved to unknown locations four times in the past year, and calling on China to grant him full freedom of movement. On 26 June 2017 the director of the Holy See Press Office, Greg Burke, issued a formal statement — a rare step for the Vatican to take over the personal situation of a single Chinese bishop. The Holy See, it said, was “observing with grave concern the personal situation of Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou, forcibly removed from his episcopal see some time ago”; the diocesan community and his relatives had “no news or reasons for his removal, nor do they know where he is being held”; the Holy See was “profoundly saddened” by this and similar episodes, hoped he might return to his diocese as soon as possible and “be assured the possibility of serenely exercising his episcopal ministry,” and invited everyone to pray for him and for the path of the Church in China.
Only one corner of that long detention ever became visible, and it was medical. On 11 September 2017 Shao underwent ear surgery at Beijing Tongren Hospital; he posted a photograph and a short message on WeChat asking the faithful to pray for him and not to visit. About a week before the opening of the Communist Party’s 19th National Congress in October, he was moved again, from Beijing to Xining, the capital of Qinghai province some 2,500 kilometres from Wenzhou, where he stayed in the home of a Catholic family — presented as six months of post-operative convalescence, while security and religious affairs officials from Wenzhou were stationed in Xining to watch him. On 18 December 2017 the Wenzhou diocese began a monthly prayer campaign for its bishop; AsiaNews noted this was his fourth removal since succeeding in September 2016. The State Department’s report supplies the end date: Shao was released on 3 January 2018. Counted from 18 May 2017, that is about seven and a half months — the “seven months in detention” of the Catholic press. Those seven months produced no indictment, no record of a family visit and no release document: only an ear operation and a borrowed house 2,500 kilometres away to prove the man was still alive.
Sources: Holy See Press Office statement, 26 June 2017 (press.vatican.va); CNA, 26 June 2017; U.S. State Department, 2018 International Religious Freedom Report, China section; AsiaNews, 20 December 2017 (via Herald Malaysia); UCA News reporting.
2018: in the year of the Vatican agreement, fourteen days in Yueqing
On 22 September 2018 the Holy See and Beijing signed their provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops, and expectations rose that the underground church’s situation might ease. Less than two months after the signing, Shao disappeared again. On 4 November 2018 he had celebrated a memorial Mass attended by more than five hundred people at the tomb of the late Bishop Lin Xili, which drew official attention. On 9 November, officials of the Yueqing religious affairs bureau took him away, saying he would be released in ten to fifteen days; outside observers also linked the timing to a central religious-inspection team then present in Wenzhou. According to UCA News and the account carried in the State Department’s report, he was held for fourteen days, subjected during that time to several days of interrogation “as in the Cultural Revolution,” and released on 23 November. Father Bernardo Cervellera, AsiaNews’ editor, wrote that this was the bishop’s fifth arrest in two years and asked why international opinion met it with silence. He also named the substance of these detentions: they are not punishment for something already done, but dozens of days of “study” and interrogation used to sell a man the same proposition over and over — join the Patriotic Association, accept a church “independent” of the Holy See. Shao’s answer, from 2013 to 2018, never changed.
The institutional background changed that year as well. The revised Regulations on Religious Affairs took effect on 1 February 2018, sharply narrowing the legal space for unregistered religious activity, venues and personnel; the same year, the State Administration for Religious Affairs was absorbed into the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, making party control of religion explicit. Shao’s worsening situation was not personal misfortune. It was this tightening system projected onto one man: after the new regulations, every Mass he celebrated could more easily be written up in official language as an “unapproved illegal religious activity” — the precise legal formula that would appear, six years later, on a 200,000-yuan fine.
Sources: U.S. State Department, 2018 International Religious Freedom Report, China section; UCA News, November 2018 (as compiled in the Taiwan Mainland Affairs Council’s religious freedom records); AsiaNews commentary by Bernardo Cervellera (via Gloria.tv).
2019–2021: the quiet years, and the arrival of collective punishment
For 2019 and 2020 there is no public report of a prolonged removal of Shao Zhumin, and this archive records that plainly: no publicly reported removal can be verified for those two years. But “no news” did not mean a return to normal life. He remained unrecognized and under surveillance, and the everyday control of Wenzhou’s underground church tightened in parallel: ChinaAid and AsiaNews reported through these years that plainclothes officers regularly entered underground church premises on Sundays to keep children and teenagers out, and that neighbourhood offices were later assigned to stand watch at church doors on Sunday mornings. The form of persecution widened from “remove the bishop” to “keep the bishop’s flock outside the door.”
In March 2021 collective punishment landed, clearly and for the first time, on somebody else. On 16 March, Huang Ruixun, a 56-year-old Catholic layman in the Wangli area of Cangnan (named in public reporting), received Shao and about twenty Catholics in his private chapel and gave the bishop lunch and a room to rest in. He was fined 200,000 yuan for providing a venue for “illegal religious activities.” The penalty document’s reasoning was explicit: Shao had been “ordained by a foreign institution,” which offended the principle that the Church in China must be “independent, autonomous and self-administered.” The significance of that fine is that it spread the cost from the bishop himself to anyone who dares open a door to him: host a bishop for a meal, and the price is 200,000 yuan. That autumn the bishop’s own turn came again. On 25 October 2021, on the eve of All Saints’ and All Souls’, police took Shao to an undisclosed location; the official explanation was, once more, “tourism.” UCA News noted it was his sixth removal since his 2016 succession. He returned to the diocese about two weeks later — the exact release date is not in the public record — and the faithful held prayers of thanksgiving for his return. At the same time, Wenzhou authorities installed iron barriers at the entrance to the Catholic cemetery to restrict the faithful gathering there in the All Souls’ season. Removing the bishop and fencing the cemetery were two moves in the same feast-day security operation.
Sources: AsiaNews, April 2021 (as reported by Religion Clause and the Christian Post; the Huang Ruixun fine); AsiaNews / UCA News, 26 October–12 November 2021 (as reported by CNA, the National Catholic Reporter and ChinaAid).
Holy Week 2022 and the start of 2023: no funerals, no feasts
On 7 April 2022, before Holy Week, the authorities put Shao on a plane to somewhere else — reportedly to prevent him from celebrating the Holy Week liturgies, above all the Chrism Mass, the one Mass of the year at which a bishop gathers with all the priests of his diocese. At the end of January 2023 the same script was staged around a funeral instead. On 29 January, Father Leo Chen Nailiang, a 90-year-old priest of the underground church who had spent years in a labour camp for his faith after joining the Church in the late 1940s, died in Pingyang. On 31 January AsiaNews reported that Shao and Jiang Sunian had again been taken to an undisclosed location, that the underground faithful were banned from Chen’s funeral, and that the funeral Mass was celebrated instead by three priests of Rui’an parish. A bishop forbidden to bury his own priest, just as seven years earlier he had been forbidden to bury his own predecessor: the scene of September 2016 was replayed almost exactly in January 2023. Neither removal produced a publicly reported release date, and this archive marks those dates as not in the public record.
The Christmas season of 2023 brought a shorter, more frequent rhythm. On 16 December security officers took Shao away and released him two days later. On 24–25 December he was transferred to Taishun county in Wenzhou so that he could not preside at the Christmas Mass. Afterwards he let it be known that it had still been one of the most peaceful Christmases of his life — a sentence carried by AsiaNews, and a key to why a decade of pressure has not broken this man: the authorities can decide where his body is; they cannot decide what the Mass means to him. At the same end of year, a second front opened inside the diocese: without Shao’s consent, the official community pushed through a series of decisions — redrawing parish boundaries, transferring priests, downgrading the Diocese of Lishui to parish status under Wenzhou, and promoting seminarians — turning the slogan of a “vacant see” into an accomplished administrative fact.
Sources: AsiaNews, 31 January 2023 (via LiCAS News, ChinaAid and China Zentrum); AsiaNews, January 2024 (via ChinaAid and CNA; the two December 2023 removals).
2 January 2024: the arrest that followed a letter
On 31 December 2023 Shao wrote to Father Ma Xianshi, the state-appointed administrator of the diocese. Writing in conscience as the diocese’s bishop, he protested the decisions taken without his consent — the parish redrawings, the priest transfers, the change to Lishui’s status, the seminarian promotions. Under canon law such matters require the bishop’s decision or approval, and orders conferred by someone lacking legitimate authority are automatically without effect. He asked to meet Ma to discuss the diocese’s difficulties. The answer he received was that a meeting was “inconvenient.” The day after the letter, on the night of 2 January 2024, security officers took Shao away and told him to “take clothes for spring, summer, autumn and winter.” The phrase, passed on by AsiaNews’ source, needs no translation for anyone who knows this system: it is the announcement of a long detention, not a few days of “tourism.” The faithful did not even know where he would be held. After that, reliable news of him became scarce. A summary of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2025 annual report states that Zhejiang authorities fined him at some point in 2024, detained him for a week after he refused to pay, took him again before Holy Week, and by July 2024 were escalating to arrests and threats against clergy and laypeople to force his submission. Those details currently rest on that single report chain, and their months and amounts closely resemble the fine-and-arrest cycle of 2025, so this archive flags them as requiring further verification (see the Verification Note). The broader judgement — that pressure continued to escalate through 2024 and spread to the clergy around him — is consistent with every other source.
One widespread misreading must be corrected here. Many secondary pages date the “2 January” arrest to 2025, and some describe a detention “around November 2024.” Having checked the original reporting, this archive confirms: AsiaNews’ story about the four seasons of clothing and the letter to Father Ma was published in January 2024, CNA’s report is dated 13 January 2024, and the removal took place on 2 January 2024, triggered by the letter of 31 December 2023. For November 2024, this archive found no public report of any removal of Shao Zhumin at all. What actually happened at the end of 2024 was the Jubilee Mass of 27 December, described below. Shifting the year by one drags the whole timeline with it, which is why the correction is stated explicitly.
Sources: AsiaNews, January 2024; CNA / National Catholic Register, 13 January 2024; ChinaAid, January 2024; USCIRF 2025 Annual Report as summarized by Gaudium Press (details unverified).
Christmas 2024 to Easter 2025: a 200,000-yuan fine for one Mass
At Christmas 2024 Shao wrote an open letter to the faithful of the diocese inviting them to celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year in communion with the universal Church, and to pray for Pope Francis, who was then in poor health. On 27 December he presided at the Jubilee opening Mass at Sanjia Catholic Church in Longwan, Wenzhou, with twenty-two priests concelebrating and about two hundred faithful attending. Every photograph taken at that Mass later became evidence: the Longwan District Comprehensive Administrative Enforcement Bureau opened a case based on the photos, held that the Mass had not been registered and approved by the official religious authorities, and in February 2025 fined Sanjia church 200,000 yuan under Article 71 of the Regulations on Religious Affairs, calling it a “serious” violation — a sum at or near the statutory maximum. On related “unauthorized construction” grounds the authorities also demanded the demolition of Shao’s residence and of the chapel where he had celebrated. Sanjia church attended a hearing on the penalty on 10 February. Shao refused to pay; his reasoning had not changed in decades — the Church’s activities, he held, break no law. On 6 March 2025 (some reports say 7 March), state security and public security officers took him away, stating that the detention was for his “own safety.” The place of detention was not disclosed, the faithful feared for his health, and the underground church of Wenzhou launched a prayer campaign for him. On 25 February, before his removal, he had written once more to the whole diocese asking the faithful to pray for the ailing Pope, attend Mass and recite the Rosary.
The removals did not stop there. On 10 April 2025, before Easter, Shao was again taken away illegally, his whereabouts unknown, and local police reportedly banned priests from holding memorial Masses. That report comes from ChinaAid alone and is marked unverified here, though it matches the nine-year pattern of removals on the eve of every great feast. In July 2025 ChinaAid reported a further escalation in the method: Wenzhou authorities arrested a number of priests, religious sisters and laypeople who had travelled abroad in 2024, charging them with “illegal border crossing” and characterizing their pilgrimages as “disguised tourism.” It is, as analysts noted, the very charge once used against Shao himself in 2006 — the charge that gave him nine months in prison then is now being used to pick off the people around him one by one, with the same objective: force the bishop to “transform” and join the Patriotic Association. The same month brought reports that a Wenzhou sister who had organized a pilgrimage had been held in solitary detention for more than three months and might face a heavy sentence. By then the full shape of the machine was visible: for the bishop, removals without term and house arrest; for priests and sisters, criminal charges; for parishes, maximum fines and demolition threats; for ordinary believers, the warning that even hosting the bishop can cost 200,000 yuan.
Sources: AsiaNews, February and March 2025; ChinaAid, 15 February, 11 March, April and 4 July 2025; ZENIT, 19 March 2025; Voice of the Martyrs Canada briefing, 20 March 2025; Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual report as summarized by Bitter Winter and ZENIT.
What this has done to the diocese, to those around him, and to his family
What does it mean for a diocese when its bishop is missing for nearly half of its great feasts across a decade? It means Chrism Masses not celebrated, confirmations not administered, priest assignments and parish business taken over by another apparatus, and seminarians whose promotion depends on the official community’s goodwill. Every item Shao protested in his letter at the end of 2023 is an item on that list of slow annexation. The deeper damage is to people. Wenzhou’s Catholics have organized prayer campaign after prayer campaign for him — the monthly prayers begun in December 2017, the thanksgiving prayers on his return in 2021, the prayer appeal after his removal in March 2025. Those campaigns are acts of faith, but they are also the only public language left to a community that is not permitted to protest. As for his family, the public record is strikingly thin: the Holy See’s 2017 statement says only that “his relatives have no news,” and later reporting speaks almost entirely of the faithful’s concern. There is no reliable published interview with, or account of, his parents or siblings. This archive records that plainly: the situation of his family members is not in the public record, and no speculative description is offered. That blank is itself part of the system of secret detention — it cuts a person out of his web of relationships entire, leaving only a name for the outside world to pray for.
Sources: Holy See Press Office statement, 26 June 2017; AsiaNews, December 2017, November 2021 and March 2025.
The Holy See, the agreement, and the world: what was said, and what was not
Shao’s case is a litmus test for relations between China and the Vatican. In June 2017 the Holy See spoke for him publicly and the German ambassador appealed openly — the high-water mark of outside pressure, reached before the agreement was signed. After the provisional agreement of September 2018, the Holy See’s public voice dropped noticeably: when Shao was taken in January 2024, the Holy See Press Office issued no statement, a silence CNA pointedly noted. The agreement was renewed in 2020 and 2022, and in October 2024 it was renewed again, this time for four years, to 2028. At no renewal did his situation observably improve: the removals after the signing (November 2018; 2021; 2022; at least twice in 2023; 2024; at least twice in 2025) are no fewer than those before it. The American record, by contrast, is continuous: successive State Department religious freedom reports log his removals year by year; USCIRF repeats its recommendation that China be designated a country of particular concern; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China tracks the case in its annual reports, and its 2025 report cites him expressly as evidence that persecution did not end with the agreement’s renewal. In April 2026 Human Rights Watch published a report on the situation of Catholics in China and, reviewing the status of the underground bishops, listed Peter Shao Zhumin alongside Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin as bishops who “remain under house arrest.” That is, as of October 2026, the most authoritative public record this archive can find of his latest status. On its basis, his current situation is stated as follows: since the removals of March and April 2025 there has been no public report of his restoration to free exercise of his ministry in the diocese; international human rights reporting in 2026 still lists him as under house arrest; whether he has been allowed home for short periods, and where exactly he is held or housed, are not in the public record. A bishop who turned sixty-two at the end of 2025, deaf in one ear since his imprisonment in 2007, has thus spent the tenth year of his episcopate inside the two words “house arrest.”
Sources: Holy See Press Office statement, 26 June 2017; CNA, 13 January 2024; USCIRF 2025 Annual Report; CECC annual report (2025); Human Rights Watch, “China: Pressure on Catholics Escalates,” 15 April 2026; Fortify Rights commentary, April 2026.
Full Timeline
10 September 1963: Peter Shao Zhumin is born. No authoritative public record of his birthplace exists; this archive does not assert he was born in Wenzhou (unverified).
10 August 1989: Ordained a priest.
1999: Shao and Jiang Sunian are detained (details not in the public record; noted in AsiaNews reporting relayed by the Cardinal Kung Foundation, which records that both men had also been detained in 1999).
27–28 October 2005: After Shao, Jiang and five other priests celebrate the closing Mass of the Year of the Eucharist, Shao is seized by public security officers at a restaurant and Jiang is stopped at a toll booth.
Late September 2006: After travelling to Europe and meeting Vatican officials in Rome, Shao and Jiang are detained on their return, in Shenzhen; formally arrested on 11 October on charges of illegally crossing the border and using false documents.
April 2007 (some accounts say March): A Wenzhou court sentences Shao to nine months and Jiang to eleven months in prison. Shao is released in May 2007, a month early, because of illness contracted in detention that leaves him deaf in one ear; Jiang is released in August after serving his full term.
December 2007: Appointed coadjutor bishop of Wenzhou by Pope Benedict XVI (the appointment was not made public at the time; multiple sources give 2007 as the year of appointment and 2011 as the year of consecration).
10 November 2011: Consecrated coadjutor bishop with a papal mandate. The Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China and the Patriotic Association refuse recognition.
2013: According to a single-source account, officials take him to Sichuan to meet a government-appointed bishop and pressure him to join the Patriotic Association, without success (unverified).
28 April 2014: At the height of Zhejiang’s cross-demolition campaign, Sanjiang church in Wenzhou is demolished; by December more than 425 churches in the province have been targeted — the general setting of the diocese Shao is about to inherit.
23 August 2016: As Bishop Zhu lies dying, police take Shao and Jiang out of Zhejiang (Shao to the northwest, Jiang to Yunnan) to prevent Shao from presiding at the funeral and succeeding. This archive’s sort date.
7 September 2016: Bishop Vincent Zhu Weifang dies; Shao succeeds under canon law as diocesan bishop of Wenzhou (Yongjia) — on the day of his succession he is still on a forced “trip.” Zhu’s funeral on 13 September is limited to four hundred permit-holders, the underground community is barred, and Shao is absent. The Holy See publicly confirms the succession on 21 September. The removal ends around 8 October (ChinaAid gives the range 23 August–8 October 2016).
April 2017 (before Holy Week): Taken away and held for five days (U.S. State Department).
18 May 2017: Summoned by the religious affairs bureau and then disappeared for months; the long detention begins. 20 June: Germany’s ambassador to China publicly calls for his freedom of movement. 26 June: the Holy See issues its “grave concern” statement. 11 September: ear surgery at Beijing Tongren Hospital. October: moved to Xining, Qinghai, lodged with a Catholic family and watched by Wenzhou officials. 18 December: the Wenzhou diocese begins a monthly prayer campaign. 3 January 2018: released, after roughly seven and a half months.
1 February 2018: The revised Regulations on Religious Affairs take effect (institutional background). 22 September 2018: the Holy See and Beijing sign the provisional agreement on bishop appointments. 4 November 2018: Shao celebrates a memorial Mass for the late Bishop Lin Xili attended by more than five hundred people. 9 November: taken away by Yueqing religious affairs officials, interrogated over several days, held fourteen days, and released on 23 November.
2019–2020: No publicly reported removal (not in the public record); everyday surveillance and controls on the underground church continue, with repeated reports of minors being kept out of services.
16 March 2021: Layman Huang Ruixun is fined 200,000 yuan for hosting Shao in his private chapel and giving him lunch — the emblematic case of collective punishment.
25 October 2021: Taken away for “tourism” on the eve of All Saints’; returns about two weeks later (exact release date not in the public record). Iron barriers appear at the entrance to Wenzhou’s Catholic cemetery in the same season.
7 April 2022: Flown out of the diocese before Holy Week to prevent him celebrating the Holy Week liturgies and the Chrism Mass.
29 January 2023: Underground priest Father Leo Chen Nailiang dies. 31 January: Shao and Jiang are taken away and the underground faithful are banned from Chen’s funeral (release date not in the public record).
16 December 2023: Taken away; released after two days. 24–25 December: transferred to Taishun county and unable to preside at the Christmas Mass. In late December the official community adopts decisions on parish boundaries, priest transfers, the Lishui diocese and seminarian promotions without his consent.
31 December 2023: Shao writes to Father Ma Xianshi protesting those decisions and asking to meet; he is told a meeting is “inconvenient.”
Night of 2 January 2024: Taken away by security officers and told to bring clothing for all four seasons; place of detention undisclosed; reliable news of him then becomes scarce. The USCIRF 2025 report additionally describes a fine, a short detention and escalating pressure on clergy during 2024 (monthly details unverified).
October 2024: The Sino-Vatican provisional agreement is renewed for four years. December 2024: Shao writes to the diocese inviting the faithful to celebrate the Jubilee; on 27 December he presides at the Jubilee opening Mass at Sanjia Catholic Church in Longwan, with twenty-two priests and about two hundred faithful.
February 2025: The Longwan enforcement bureau fines Sanjia church 200,000 yuan under Article 71 of the Regulations on Religious Affairs and demands demolition of Shao’s residence and chapel on unauthorized-construction grounds; the church attends a hearing on 10 February; Shao refuses to pay. On 25 February he writes to the diocese asking prayers for Pope Francis.
6 March 2025 (some reports say 7 March): Taken away by state security / public security officers for refusing to pay the fine; officials say the detention is for his “own safety”; location undisclosed; a long detention is expected.
10 April 2025: Taken away again before Easter, whereabouts unknown, with police reportedly banning memorial Masses (ChinaAid, single source, unverified).
July 2025: A number of Wenzhou priests, sisters and laypeople who travelled abroad in 2024 are arrested on “illegal border crossing” charges; a sister who organized a pilgrimage has been held in solitary detention for over three months — collective pressure on the bishop’s circle escalates.
April 2026: Human Rights Watch still lists Shao Zhumin as a bishop under house arrest. As of October 2026: there is no public report of his release or of any return to the open exercise of his ministry in the diocese; there is no record of any formal trial or sentence; his exact place of detention or residence is not in the public record.
Verification Note
The factual spine of this page is AsiaNews’ reporting across the years, cross-checked against UCA News, the text of the Holy See Press Office statement of 26 June 2017, the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Reports, the annual reports and case records of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and of USCIRF, and ChinaAid’s case tracking. Evidence grading: dates carried in the Vatican statement and in State Department and CECC records are treated as first-grade official records; AsiaNews and UCA News reporting from diocesan sources is treated as second-grade reliable reporting and is used in the main text only where it does not conflict with another source; anything resting on a single source chain is marked unverified — including the 2013 Sichuan trip, the removal of 10 April 2025, and the monthly details of the fine and short detention in 2024 as summarized from the USCIRF report.
Four corrections are owed to the reader. First, Shao’s succession took effect on 7 September 2016, the day Bishop Zhu died (confirmed publicly by the Holy See on 21 September), not in November or December 2016 as occasionally stated elsewhere: under canon law a coadjutor succeeds at the moment the see falls vacant. Second, the arrest in which he was told to bring clothing for all four seasons occurred on 2 January 2024, not in January 2025; many secondary pages lost the year in republication, and this archive relies on CNA’s original publication date of 13 January 2024. Third, this archive found no report of any detention in November 2024; that claim appears to conflate the January 2024 arrest with the Jubilee Mass of December 2024. Fourth, the diocesan population figures of 120,000, 150,000 and 180,000–200,000 are estimates from different sources in different years and are presented side by side rather than resolved into one number. Bishop Zhu’s age at death is given as ninety and as eighty-eight in different reports; only the date of death is relied on here. No directory gives Shao’s birthplace, and this archive does not adopt the common claim that he was born in Wenzhou. His family’s circumstances are not in the public record and are not speculated upon.
All quotations on this page are paraphrase and summary; direct quotation from any single source is kept under fifty words. Matters for which no public record exists are flagged as such in the text and in the timeline.
Our Take
What most deserves recording in the case of Peter Shao Zhumin is not the roughness of any single removal, but the way “removal” itself was turned into a routine administration that needs no law. The trial that gave him nine months at least left behind a charge, a term and a release date. Everything after 2016 left none of those: with no document there is nothing to appeal; with no term, a “trip” can last forty-six days or seven and a half months; with no disclosed place, a family cannot even know where to send clothes. If a regime truly believed this bishop had broken the law, it could have sent him to court as it did in 2007. It chose not to charge, not to try, not to release and not to sentence — which shows that what it wants was never punishment. It is “transformation”: exchanging unlimited disappearances for a single nod, one nod for a lifetime of quiet. He has refused that bargain for nearly a decade, and the price has been the better part of his episcopate.
Watch, too, the widening radius. In 2016 the method dealt with the bishop alone. In 2021 it fined a layman 200,000 yuan for giving him lunch. In 2025 it fined the parish where he had celebrated Mass another 200,000 yuan, moved to demolish his house, and arrested the priests and sisters around him one by one for the foreign travel of the year before. The radius grows every year because the object was never only Shao Zhumin: it is to teach an entire diocese that closeness to this man carries a price, and that the price will keep rising. The Sino-Vatican agreement has been signed once and renewed three times across eight years, and this pope-appointed bishop has been taken away more often during the agreement’s life than before it — not because a footnote failed, but because on the ground, in the religious affairs office of Yueqing and the enforcement bureau of Longwan, the paper arrangement never arrived. When Shao, held in Taishun at Christmas 2023, said it was one of the most peaceful Christmases of his life, this archive records the sentence not because it is moving but because it marks the real balance of the contest: when a man’s freedom can be taken and his understanding of his own office cannot, the people who took him have already lost — what remains is only the time they spend refusing to admit it.
Sources
Holy See Press Office: statement of the Director, 26 June 2017 (press.vatican.va). AsiaNews: reports of 8 September 2016, 20 December 2017, October–November 2021, 31 January 2023, January 2024, and February–March 2025. UCA News: reports of October 2005, November 2018 and October–November 2021. Catholic News Agency: 26 June 2017, 27 October 2021 and 13 January 2024. Catholic News Service: 8 September 2016. U.S. Department of State: 2018 International Religious Freedom Report, China section. USCIRF: 2025 Annual Report. Congressional-Executive Commission on China: 2024 and 2025 annual reports and Political Prisoner Database records. ChinaAid: case page of February 2023; reporting of January 2024; reports of 15 February, 11 March, April and 4 July 2025. Human Rights Watch: “China: Pressure on Catholics Escalates,” 15 April 2026. Catholic-Hierarchy and Bishops in China directories (dates of birth, ordination and consecration). Herald Malaysia, LiCAS News, National Catholic Reporter, ZENIT and Voice of the Martyrs Canada, various reports as cited in the text.