第103案 | 乔鑫鑫（杨泽伟）Case 103 | Qiao Xinxin (Yang Zewei)
他要拆一堵墙。2023年3月，旅居万象的前记者杨泽伟以乔鑫鑫之名发起「拆墙运动」，公开呼吁拆除封锁中国互联网的防火长城；5月初他站在欧盟驻老挝代表团门外举牌，5月31日，他从万象的住所里消失了。两个多月后，他出现在湖南衡阳一所未成年人看守所，罪名是煽动颠覆国家政权。再往后，世界能听到的只有他母亲在电话里的话：秘密审判，没有律师，判了五年，瘦了二十公斤——而这句话，没有任何第二个人能替这个家庭证实。He set out to tear down a wall. In March 2023 the former journalist Yang Zewei, living in Vientiane under the name Qiao Xinxin, launched BanGFW — an open campaign to dismantle the Great Firewall that seals China's internet. In early May he stood with a placard outside the EU delegation in Laos. On 31 May he vanished from his home. More than two months later he surfaced in a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang, Hunan, charged with inciting subversion. After that, the world has heard only his mother's words down a telephone line: a secret trial, no lawyer, five years, twenty kilograms lost — words no second source on earth has been able to confirm for this family.
A Guangzhou journalist and his pen name
Qiao Xinxin is a pen name. His birth name is Yang Zewei. The two names alternate across this case's thin public record: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses the birth name, Radio Free Asia (RFA) introduces him as "Qiao Xinxin, whose birth name is Yang Zewei", and Dui Hua's prisoner update files him under Qiao Xinxin. An archive must pin this down first, because the record in this case is sparse enough that a name mismatch alone could scatter it.
Of his earlier life, public sources supply only a few pieces. RSF's statement of August 2023 records that over the past years Yang Zewei had been working as a journalist in Guangzhou, in southern China, and had also served as a contributor to Radio Free Asia, the broadcaster funded by the US Congress. That sentence is this page's highest-grade source for his profession: an international press-freedom organisation recording his journalistic identity in a formal statement. When he began contributing, what he wrote, and which Guangzhou outlet he worked for are nowhere in the public record, and this page does not fill them in. His age appears once: Dui Hua's prisoner update of September 2023 describes him as "now aged 37", from which a birth year of about 1986 follows arithmetically. This page grades that as it must — a single second-hand compilation — and writes "born around 1986" as an inference; his exact date of birth is a matter of no public record.
For several years before he disappeared he lived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. RFA and fellow activists agree on that much. Why he went to Laos, when, on what immigration status, and how he lived there are likewise absent from the record. One strand of his life there can be confirmed: he worked with other overseas Chinese activists and volunteers helping people inside China circumvent the Great Firewall — Dui Hua's update says he "worked with other overseas activists and volunteers to help Chinese people circumvent the Great Firewall". He was not alone in that geography. The capitals of Southeast Asia — Bangkok, Vientiane, Phnom Penh — had become home to a scatter of Chinese dissidents, rights defenders and journalists who treated the region as the nearest safe ground to China. Qiao Xinxin's story became one of the footnotes to the collapse of that assumption.
Before he vanished, he left two messages on social media that later reporting preserved. He posted that the authorities were harassing his relatives in his hometown; and he declared publicly that he would not commit suicide in detention. Both appear in the joint statement of 11 August 2023 by Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada and partner organisations on the Gao Zhisheng case, which records this case in passing: before being taken, Yang had tweeted that authorities were harassing his relatives back home, and he had declared that he would not kill himself in custody. The "no suicide" declaration is a distinctive instrument of Chinese dissent: a pre-emptive denial of any future official account of a death in custody. This page records the two posts with their provenance and develops them no further.
The Great Firewall: a short history of a wall
To understand why Qiao Xinxin was taken, one must understand what he set out to demolish. This section is background, not case fact — but without it the case facts carry no weight.
The Great Firewall (GFW) is the collective name for China's internet censorship system. It is not a single device but a layered apparatus deployed at China's international gateways and inside its platforms: DNS poisoning, IP blocking, keyword filtering, deep packet inspection, the detection and throttling of circumvention protocols — reinforced by platform-level self-censorship and real-name registration. Its technical origins are usually traced to the Golden Shield Project launched at the end of the 1990s; Fang Binxing, former president of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, is widely regarded as one of its principal designers and is known to Chinese internet users as the "father of the Great Firewall". The list of what the wall blocks is common knowledge: Google, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, most language editions of Wikipedia, and a long roll of foreign news outlets and human rights organisations. Chinese users who want to see the world beyond it depend on VPNs and other circumvention tools whose unauthorised use is itself administratively unlawful in China, and whose developers and vendors have repeatedly been imprisoned.
The wall's deepest effect is not political in the narrow sense. It decouples a generation of Chinese internet users from the world's information: they do not know June 4 as the world knows it, they do not see the international reporting on the Xinjiang camps, they do not encounter their own leaders as foreign media portray them. Circumventers of Qiao's generation have a saying to the effect that the wall's greatest achievement is not blocking particular news items but making the people inside unaware that there is anything they do not know. Resistance to the wall has never ceased: from the early circumvention tools FreeGate and Ultrasurf, to the protests that hounded Fang Binxing — who was famously greeted with a thrown shoe at a 2011 lecture in Wuhan — to the brief surge of circumvention during the White Paper protests of late 2022. But almost all of that resistance was dispersed, technical and anonymous. Turning "tear down the Great Firewall" into a named movement with a named, publicly visible founder was something that happened only in 2023.
One further piece of background belongs here because it shows how Chinese courts already treated "wall-pushing" before Qiao's arrest. Dui Hua's prisoner updates record that five members of a Twitter group called the "Wall-Pushing Alliance" were convicted in Chongqing in March 2023, at the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court, on subversion-related charges, the principal defendant Ren Jianping receiving ten years. This page cites that case for two purposes only: first, to show that in the judicial vocabulary of the Chinese party-state "pushing the wall" was never a hobbyist's pastime but a state-security offence; and second, to mark a distinction — the Chongqing group case and Qiao Xinxin's BanGFW movement are different cases, similar in name and close in time, with no public record of any connection between them, and they must not be conflated. Qiao's distinctiveness is that he did not push the wall anonymously from inside it: from outside, under a public name, he made demolition a movement.
The BanGFW movement: March 2023
In March 2023 Yang Zewei, under the name Qiao Xinxin, launched the "Ban Great Firewall" campaign online — BanGFW for short, rendered in Chinese as the "Tear Down the Wall Movement" (拆墙运动). RSF defines it in one clause: an online campaign "advocating for the end of internet censorship in China". RFA and activist accounts add its working method: rallying volunteers to help people inside China obtain the tools and knowledge to circumvent the firewall, so that more Chinese could see uncensored information. The movement's public base was on platforms outside the wall, X among them — a structural irony in itself: BanGFW's audience lived inside the wall, while its organising centre could only sit outside it, in a city like Vientiane, not far from the Chinese border.
Its declared goal was vast — dismantle the Great Firewall. Its daily work was small: teach circumvention, spread tools, relay deleted information. In the party-state's vocabulary such work has a fixed charge waiting for it: collusion with foreign forces, inciting subversion. Qiao plainly knew the risk. He did not work under cover in Vientiane: a photograph of him dated 20 April 2023, published by the Ban_GFW account on X and later used by RFA, preserves his public image as an activist. By early May 2023 he had moved the protest from online to the street.
In early May 2023, Qiao held placards near the European Union delegation in Vientiane, calling for the dismantling of the firewall that blocks overseas websites. The Chinese Wikipedia entry records the episode in a sentence, with a citation. This page grades it exactly: the entry is sourced and later reporting echoes his public activity in Vientiane, but this site found no first-hand imagery and no independent media eyewitness report of the placard protest, so the text presents it as reported. The choice of location deserves a line in the archive: standing with a placard outside the EU's mission was a message addressed to the international community — the firewall, he was saying, is not China's "internal affair"; one of its victims is standing at your gate. Within weeks that man was gone, and this site has found no public statement on his case from the European Union at any point since — recorded here without embellishment.
After he vanished, the movement did not stop. It passed to Liu Dongling — the Chinese Wikipedia entry records that "the BanGFW movement was thereafter managed by Liu Dongling", sourced to Lin Shengliang's confirmation from a call with the family. Liu's own outline comes from RFA's long report of 20 June 2024: she left China in 2018 after her son was refused schooling because she had helped victims of forced demolitions pursue compensation through legal channels; in exile she wrote for overseas Chinese-language outlets such as Boxun and supported BanGFW vocally on X. After Qiao's capture she became the movement's head and one of the central figures in the later chain of news — it is she who, in the Epoch Times interviews, described the volunteers' postcards to Yang being returned, and the efforts to find him a lawyer. A movement whose founder had been seized across a border kept running on the strength of exiles who were themselves unsafe. One last date to fix: from its launch in March 2023 to the disappearance on 31 May, the movement existed in public form for less than three months.
31 May 2023: the disappearance in Vientiane
On or around 31 May 2023, Qiao Xinxin disappeared from his home in Vientiane. That date is this page's sort anchor and, evidentially, one of its most delicate. RFA's own wording is that he was "believed detained on or around May 31" — the date is not taken from any document but inferred by fellow activists from the cessation of contact and the state of his home. Its timing sat days before the 34th anniversary of June 4. Every year, the approach of that anniversary brings a preventive sweep against dissidents; a BanGFW founder who had just placarded the EU mission vanishing at exactly that moment is a fit in timing that the record shows — this page records the fit and asserts no causation in place of an absent file.
How did he disappear? No public source has ever described the scene: no witness, no camera footage, no Lao police record, no Chinese notice. The shared judgment of fellow activists is that Chinese police detained him in Vientiane and forcibly repatriated him to China. Netherlands-based activist Lin Shengliang put it most bluntly to RFA: "This was 100% a cross-border arrest." In the same breath he added the heavier sentence: "Unfortunately it didn't receive enough attention from the international community to help." The LRWC joint statement gives the judgment its most formal dress: Yang was "presumably taken away in Laos on May 31 by what is believed to have been a joint Chinese and Laotian policing effort". Note what every source shares: the word "believed". This page accordingly grades the manner of his seizure as follows — that Chinese officers (possibly with Lao cooperation) took him in Vientiane and delivered him to China is the consistent judgment of the activist circle and of several human rights organisations' statements, but no first-hand evidence of it exists in the public world: no document, no image, no admission by either state. Where this page writes "taken" or "repatriated", the reference is to that attributed judgment; where it writes "disappeared", it writes the indisputable fact itself.
From 31 May until early August — more than two months — Qiao Xinxin was simply missing. How and when his family learned where he was is taken up in the next section. The character of that blank deserves fixing here: a man vanishes from his home in one country's capital and surfaces in a detention centre in another country, with no public procedure of any kind in between — no extradition hearing, no deportation order, no repatriation announcement, no consular record in public view. If that is "law enforcement", it is law enforcement in the form that leaves no traces. In RSF's vocabulary, it is kidnapping.
"Some 200 Chinese police": a claim that must be carried with its attribution
This section exists for the single most repeated and most easily distorted figure in the case. In its report of 9 August 2023, RFA carried this passage: Li Jianfeng, a former Chinese judge living in Canada, had told the station earlier that month that some 200 Chinese police officers were billeted in a Vientiane hotel — at a moment when concern was mounting that rights lawyer Lu Siwei, detained by Lao immigration police, would also be repatriated to China. The chain of that claim must be dismantled link by link: the speaker is Li Jianfeng, an exiled former judge; the occasion is his account to RFA; the content is that about 200 Chinese police were staying in a Vientiane hotel. It has no second source: no hotel record, no photograph, no independent media corroboration, no confirmation or denial from any institution involved. This site's ruling is that the sentence may appear only in its full attributed form — "a claim made by Li Jianfeng as reported by RFA" — and never as a factual sentence ("200 Chinese police were in Vientiane at the time"), still less as a premise for inferences about those officers' connection to Qiao's case. Its reason for being on this page is that it documents the atmosphere perceived in the summer of 2023 by Vientiane's Chinese exile circle — a former judge saying such a number aloud is itself evidence of that atmosphere. Atmosphere, however, is not an establishment table. Any later writer who reads the claim as established fact betrays the archive, and this page says so in advance.
A juvenile detention centre in Hengyang: 7 July 2023, 3:10 p.m.
In early August 2023 Qiao Xinxin's whereabouts surfaced for the first time. RFA reported on 9 August that overseas activists had learned he was being held in a detention centre in Hengyang, Hunan. Lin Shengliang relayed to the station what the family had been told: he was being held in a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang; and, in Lin's quoted words, "They issued legal documentation at 3.10 p.m. on July 7, saying where he was being held." The minute-precise timestamp is the most textured element in the whole message: it indicates that the family genuinely held a formal legal document of the kind an arrest notice is. Yet in the same report Lin said the family had been unwilling to share the specific charge with him, "perhaps because they felt it wasn't a good idea to speak out — they have a lot of fear and doubt." That sentence is the key to this case's entire subsequent information famine, and the reader should hold it: from the very beginning this family lived in fear, and almost every later scrap of news about Qiao Xinxin had to pass through that fear to reach the outside world.
The arrest itself was later corroborated across sources. The Chinese Wikipedia entry records that on 7 July 2023 the direct branch of the Hengyang Public Security Bureau formally arrested Qiao Xinxin on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power. Dui Hua's prisoner update of 6 September 2023 states it more fully: Qiao "was formally arrested for inciting subversion on July 7", was "now aged 37", and was "currently held in a juvenile detention center in Hunan's Hengyang City". RSF's statement of mid-August 2023 is titled with his being "charged with 'subversion of state power'". Four sources — the family via Lin (RFA), the sourced Wikipedia entry, Dui Hua's compilation, RSF's statement — converge on the frame "arrested 7 July, inciting subversion, held in Hengyang". This page accordingly grades the arrest date, the executing organ and the charge among the case's highest-grade facts, with two footnotes retained: the 3:10 p.m. timestamp rests on Lin's single relayed chain; and the arrest document itself has never been published — no outsider has seen its full text.
The place of custody requires its own pause. A juvenile detention centre in Hengyang: as reported, a 37-year-old adult man was held in a facility for minors. The detail is anomalous enough that no archivist may slide past it. In China, juvenile detention centres are reserved for under-age detainees; holding an adult in one breaks the ordinary classification of custody. Several explanations are conceivable — an error in relay (a section of the Hengyang detention centre, for instance), the use of the facility as a special holding site, or distortion along the chain. This site cannot choose among them. The English-language sources (RFA, Dui Hua) consistently write of a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang; the Chinese Wikipedia entry says only "a detention centre in Hengyang". This page's disposition is to record the higher-grade sources' wording, "juvenile detention centre", while flagging its anomaly and the divergence of sources both here and in the Verification Note — neither explaining it away nor deleting it. Anomalous details are precisely what an archive must preserve, because if a document ever surfaces, that detail will be the touchstone by which it is tested.
Between Vientiane and Hengyang his custody trail still contains a whole blank stretch: where he was taken after 31 May, how long he remained on Lao soil, through which border crossing he entered China, whether he was held elsewhere first, and when he reached Hengyang are all matters of no public record. The arrest documentation is dated 7 July, thirty-seven days after the disappearance. Those thirty-seven days are this case's first black box.
Inciting subversion of state power: Article 105, paragraph 2
This page gives the charge a section of its own, because it is the thread connecting this case to China's state-security judicial system. Inciting subversion of state power is defined in Article 105, paragraph 2, of the Criminal Law: whoever incites subversion of state power or the overthrow of the socialist system "by spreading rumours, defaming or other means" faces up to five years' imprisonment, detention, surveillance or deprivation of political rights; ringleaders and those whose offences are grave face five years or more. Two structural features must be seen clearly. First, its object is entirely speech — rumour, defamation "or other means", a phrase into which judicial practice has fitted articles, posts, placards and online movements alike. Second, its sentencing has a five-year hinge: the ordinary band caps at five years, and a finding of "ringleader or grave offence" lifts the case into the band above. Remember that hinge — the family chain's reported sentence in this case is exactly five years, pressing against the ceiling of the ordinary band. This page records that observation and draws no inference from it: it could mean a maximum sentence within the ordinary band, or it could mean nothing at all, since the sentence itself is unverified.
The charge's density of use against dissent is documented across this site's case pages: it is among the charges most routinely fitted to 709 lawyers, independent journalists and online activists. Its procedural entourage is equally patterned — secret seizure, residential surveillance at a designated location or prolonged pre-trial custody, families warned into silence, lawyers kept out, closed trials, judgments kept off the internet. Qiao Xinxin's case — if the family chain is true — matches that pattern item by item: a cross-border secret seizure, a family afraid to name the charge aloud, reportedly no lawyer, no notice of trial, a verdict delivered by post. Pattern-fit raises a report's plausibility; but the sentence this site wrote in the Ding Yuande page applies here unchanged: plausibility is not evidence. The grading of the sentence gets its own section below.
Laos's silence, and the Southeast Asian map of transnational repression
What has the Lao government said about Qiao Xinxin's case? This site's search returns a single answer: nothing. As of 31 October 2026, no statement, notice, explanation or denial by the Lao government concerning his disappearance, seizure or repatriation has been found in Lao official channels, Lao state media, or any international reporting. He was not a Lao citizen and Laos owed no one a bulletin; but when a man disappears from its capital, is said to have been taken by foreign police, and draws a public condemnation from an international press-freedom organisation, the host government's total silence is itself a posture. This page writes that absence of record into the characterisation field for exactly that reason: in the chain of transnational repression, silence is a form of cooperation — it spares the seizing state any explanation and leaves the seized person nowhere to appeal.
Zoom out, and the Qiao case is no anomaly but another run of a mechanism documented for years by Safeguard Defenders. That organisation's January 2022 report Involuntary Returns mapped the global pursuit apparatus run under Operation Fox Hunt (launched 2014) and Operation Sky Net (2015): its means are not limited to formal extradition but include officers sent abroad to persuade, pressure and coerce, and direct cooperation with local police to seize people and send them back. The organisation's other long-running record concerns the overseas police "service stations" China maintained in dozens of countries — the very background against which RFA framed Qiao's case within the CCP's "long-arm law enforcement". A 2025 joint communication by UN human rights experts widened the picture further: they documented at least 150 cases of transnational repression linked to China and several Southeast Asian states, including forced returns, harassment and intimidation, and named Laos's return of rights lawyer Lu Siwei to China expressly. This page cites those materials as the independently documented mechanism context for this case; that the mechanism exists is established by those reports — through which particular link of it Qiao Xinxin's seizure was accomplished, the public record still answers only with the word "believed".
The regional precedent list is long. RFA's own report on this case lists, almost in passing: gambling tycoon She Zhijiang, arrested in Thailand in 2022 and facing repatriation; a lone exiled dissident detained by Bangkok police in November 2022 after a street protest against Xi Jinping inspired by the Sitong Bridge banner; the ethnic Mongolian activist Adiyaa, who reported the same month that Chinese state security officers had held him in Bangkok; two Chinese refugees detained by Thai police in 2019 after helping the jailed rights-website founder Huang Qi; and in July 2018 the rights activist Dong Guangping and political cartoonist Jiang Yefei, jailed in Chongqing after Thailand sent them home while they awaited refugee resettlement. Further back, RSF itself, in speaking for Qiao, reached for the precedent of Gui Minhai, the Swedish publisher taken in Thailand in 2015 and sentenced in 2020 to ten years for "espionage". Placing Qiao on that list is not rhetoric but location: his case is one of the products, in the summer of 2023, of a seizure-and-return pipeline running across Southeast Asia — a pipeline whose signature is that no product of it carries public paperwork.
Lu Siwei: same city, same summer, a case that must be kept separate
In the Vientiane summer of 2023 a second man was taken. Keeping the two cases strictly apart is a hard obligation of this archive, because confusion between them has already demonstrably occurred: even this site's internal intake material for the present case contained a "co-activist" name that no source could verify — very plausibly a product of the two cases' memories crossing (see the Verification Note).
Lu Siwei is a Sichuan human rights lawyer who represented clients in sensitive cases including the twelve Hong Kong activists case, and whose licence was revoked in 2021. On 28 July 2023, as he was about to board a train in Vientiane for Thailand on his way to join his family in the United States, Lao police detained him — he held a valid passport and a US visa. Laos held him for over a month, during which eight UN human rights experts publicly called on 11 August for his release and against his deportation; on 23 September 2023 Laos deported him to China anyway. Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, warned publicly on 27 October 2023 that Laos must not deport defenders to countries where they face grave risks including enforced disappearance and torture. On return Lu was held in Chengdu's Xindu Detention Center, released on bail that October, re-arrested in October 2024 and prosecuted for "illegally crossing the state border"; on 18 April 2025 the Chenghua District Court in Chengdu sentenced him behind closed doors to eleven months' imprisonment and a fine of CNY 10,000 (confirmed to RFA by his wife Zhang Chunxiao), and Dui Hua records his release on 5 August 2025. In October 2025 he instructed a Chinese lawyer to deliver a letter to the Lao ambassador in Beijing accusing Laos of breaching the principle of non-refoulement and of torture in the deportation, and demanding an independent investigation (reported by ChinaAid).
The two cases can be told apart in one sentence: same city (Vientiane), same summer (2023), same fate (returned to China and imprisoned) — but different dates (Qiao vanished 31 May; Lu was detained 28 July), different causes (Qiao's BanGFW movement; Lu's journey to the United States), and different procedural surfaces (Lu's case had the public form of Lao immigration enforcement and real-time intervention by UN experts; Qiao's had no public Lao action of any kind from first to last). This page spends a section on Lu for two reasons: he is the unavoidable comparator in reporting on Qiao — Li Jianfeng's "200 police" claim was uttered precisely in the context of fears for Lu — and the two men's details cross with notorious ease in second-hand transmission, so that any account attaching Lu's dates, charge or procedure to Qiao commits an archival accident. The unverifiable name in this site's own intake material was handled under exactly that discipline: unverifiable, deleted in full, recorded in the Verification Note.
The international response: RSF's word "kidnapped", and an echo that stayed small
The international response to this case must be recorded at its true size — small, but containing one document whose wording outweighs the rest. On or about 16 August 2023, Reporters Without Borders issued a statement titled "China: RSF calls for release of journalist kidnapped in Laos and charged with 'subversion of state power'". The statement describes Yang Zewei as having been kidnapped in Laos three months earlier. It records his journalistic record (Guangzhou; contributor to Radio Free Asia) and the BanGFW campaign, places his case directly after the precedent of Gui Minhai's 2015 kidnapping in Thailand, and notes that China ranked 179th of 180 in RSF's 2023 World Press Freedom Index and was the world's largest jailer of journalists and press-freedom defenders, with at least 113 detained. This page grades the statement as follows: it is the formal position document of an international press-freedom organisation; its factual layer draws on the same reporting as RFA's, but its characterisation — kidnapping — is a judgment RSF issued in its own name and carries independent weight. When an organisation known for precision puts the word "kidnapped" in the title of a formal statement about a government's conduct abroad, that is not a slip of the pen. It is a finding.
The rest of the echo must be written as small as it is. On 11 August 2023 the joint statement by Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada and partner organisations on the sixth anniversary of Gao Zhisheng's disappearance recorded Yang's case in one passage: presumably taken in Laos on 31 May in a joint Chinese–Lao policing operation, and confirmed by 8 August to have been returned to China and held in Hengyang. That passage carried this case into a multi-organisation formal document — as an illustration, not as its subject. US-based rights lawyer Wang Qingpeng told RFA that Qiao's anti-censorship campaign was brave and highly representative of genuine public opinion in China, and that anyone who tells the truth faces greater risks "whether at home or abroad, and particularly in Southeast Asian countries". Beyond that, this site has found no public statement on Qiao Xinxin's case from any government, parliament or UN body — in pointed contrast to the eight UN experts who spoke in real time for Lu Siwei, institutional attention to Qiao at the moment it happened stops, in substance, at one RSF statement and a passing paragraph in human rights documents. Set against that list, Lin Shengliang's "it didn't receive enough attention from the international community" is not a sentiment. It is a measurement.
In June 2024 RFA returned to the case in a long report on the plight of China's political refugees, retelling the Vientiane seizure and the Hengyang custody under the heading "Captured in Laos" and turning its lens to Liu Dongling's asylum predicament in Denmark. That is the last feature-length mainstream follow-up this site has found. After it, the public world produced exactly one further chain of news about Qiao Xinxin — the subject of the next section.
Five years: the full weight of a single-chain family report
This is the most important section of this page, and it must be written the slowest. The question it handles is: was Qiao Xinxin tried, and sentenced to what? The shape of the answer is this — there is a report, saying five years; and every link of that report must now be dismantled in front of the reader.
The report's form: Epoch Times journalists interviewed BanGFW head Liu Dongling and activist Lin Shengliang; the material was later republished in English by Red Censor (checked by this site in October 2026; its publication appears to date from the second half of 2024, consistent with the mother's "more than a year" without seeing her son — see the Verification Note). Its trigger was a small detail: postcards that volunteers had been sending Yang Zewei began to be returned, whereas earlier mail had never come back — Liu Dongling suspected from this that something had changed. Lin Shengliang then telephoned Yang's mother to verify. Between that call and subsequent contacts, the mother and the younger brother supplied the following whole cluster of claims. First, the trial: Yang had been secretly tried and sentenced at first instance to five years for inciting subversion of state power. There had been no notice of the hearing; the family had not known he was tried at all; there was no lawyer anywhere in the process — the brother said the family had approached lawyers, who would not take the case once they heard what it was; the family received only a verdict by post. Second, the custodial path: after sentencing he spent a month in "educational learning" in Changsha, and was then transferred to Chishan Prison in Hunan. Third, visits and body: the mother said she had not seen her son for over a year and had seen him only recently, for some twenty days past; the prison is far, and the journey takes two days; he had lost about twenty kilograms — in one passage the mother says twenty, in another "more than ten"; asked whether he had been beaten, she said she had asked him and he said no. Fourth, the restrictions on contact: only the mother could deposit money into his account and only the mother could visit; the brother said that when he went to visit, not one member of the family party was allowed to see him. Fifth, the family's position before the trial: the brother said police had monitored the family throughout, their phones were listened to, and Hunan state security officers had come to his door displaying extensive "evidence", including photographs of Qiao near the Lao embassy, saying he "wants to break through this firewall and let foreign people see some of the bad things in China". Sixth, one sentence of the mother's was preserved in a recording: she had said to her son — your father is over seventy, your mother over sixty, can you wait for that day? He said he could.
Now the chain. The source is the family — mother and brother. The conduit is Lin Shengliang, who made the verification call and supplied a fifteen-minute recording. The publishing interviewer is the Epoch Times; the English republication is Red Censor. Between fact and reader there is thus a single activist relay — and beyond that chain there is no second chain at all. No judgment, no court announcement, no follow-up confirmation by any independent outlet (not RFA, not VOA, not Reuters, not AFP), no entry of the sentence in the prisoner updates of Dui Hua or CHRD, organisations whose trade is exactly such verification, and no public statement from the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China. This site's October 2026 recheck is set out in the next section; the ruling belongs here: this cluster of trial and imprisonment claims is graded, as a whole, UNVERIFIED — single-source (the family through a single activist), single-carrier (an Epoch Times interview and one English republication site), corroborated by nothing independent. Wherever this page uses it, it appears only in the full attributed form, "reported by the family through Lin Shengliang".
"Unverified" does not mean "not to be printed", and it does not mean "incredible" — this page must spell out that discipline too. The factors supporting the report's credibility are substantial: its detail is dense and internally consistent (a month of "learning" in Changsha before the prison transfer; only the mother permitted to visit; the returned postcards as the triggering anomaly; a weight loss given by the mother in two figures that do not quite agree — twenty kilograms and "more than ten" — where relay distortion usually makes numbers tidier, not rougher); Chishan Prison is a known place of imprisonment for Hunan political prisoners, where activist Ou Biaofeng and Taiwanese rights worker Lee Ming-cheh both served sentences and from which accounts of forced labour have emerged; five years fits Article 105(2)'s ordinary ceiling exactly; and the mother's inclusion of a detail unfavourable to an accusation narrative — she asked whether he had been beaten, and he said no — strengthens the family's testimony. The opposing factors are equally substantial: the family speaks from inside surveillance and warning (the brother himself describes monitored phones and state security at his door), and their words cannot be independently re-checked; Lin Shengliang is at once the report's verifier and its publisher; and the Epoch Times is an outlet with a declared stance, whose interview has not been published as a full third-party-auditable transcript (the fifteen-minute recording was supplied by Lin and cannot be heard in full by outsiders). The archive's disposition can only be two sentences standing side by side: this report is very likely true; this report is unconfirmed. In this page's system of proof it remains UNVERIFIED until a judgment, an independent organisation's confirmation, or the man's own emergence from prison — around 2028, if the report is true — settles it.
This section closes with the element of the report least suited to be drowned in data. A mother in her sixties waited more than a year, travelled two days, and asked her son through the rules of a prison visit: your father is over seventy, I am over sixty — can you wait for that day? What she was asking was whether they would live long enough to see him come out. He said he could. This page archives that exchange exactly as the family chain carries it, because all of this page's cold gradings and checkings finally measure one family's time.
The 2025–2026 recheck: no confirmation, and no contradiction
This section sets out what this site searched, in order to answer the question whether the five-year sentence has any second source, and what it found. This is not procedural boilerplate; it is part of the case's current state.
The scope and results are these. Dui Hua: its 2025 prisoner updates (checked through issue No. 10 of 2025) contain no entry recording Qiao Xinxin's sentencing; its Political Prisoner Database holds over fifty thousand names but ceased updating on 31 December 2025 and now stands as an archival resource, and this site could not retrieve any sentence field for Qiao from its publicly searchable layer. Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD): its International Human Rights Day list of 9 December 2025 of long-term imprisonment cases does not include Qiao (that list's threshold is sentences of ten years or more, a five-year term falls outside it by design — recorded here in fairness, and no adverse inference is drawn); this site found no CHRD record of the sentence. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC): its Political Prisoner Database is a public resource; this site found no public CECC confirmation of a sentence in this case. RFA and VOA: after June 2024 this site found no new reporting on Qiao Xinxin from either broadcaster — the June 2024 feature predates the sentence report and mentions no trial. The UN system: the 2025 joint communication of UN experts on transnational repression in Southeast Asia names Lu Siwei's return; this site found no mention of Qiao in it.
The conclusion is written in its most restrained form: as of 31 October 2026, the proposition "Qiao Xinxin was sentenced to five years" still rests, in the public world, on the single chain of family — Lin Shengliang — Epoch Times. No second source confirms it; no source contradicts it or offers a different term. In several databases his name stands frozen at its 2023 state of arrest, like a file no one continued. This page writes that result into its status field as it stands — not because the effort was lacking, but because that is where this case's public record ends: a man taken in Vientiane and arrested in Hengyang, the whole of whose judicial afterlife reaches the world along one thin line running through fear and relay.
Timeline
Around 1986 (inferred): Yang Zewei is born — inferred solely from Dui Hua's description of him as aged 37 in 2023; his exact date of birth is a matter of no public record.
Years before his disappearance: Yang works as a journalist in Guangzhou and contributes to Radio Free Asia (RSF statement, August 2023); he then lives for several years in Vientiane, working with overseas activists and volunteers to help people in China circumvent the Great Firewall (Dui Hua prisoner update; RFA).
March 2023: Yang, as Qiao Xinxin, launches the online "Ban Great Firewall" campaign (BanGFW), calling for an end to internet censorship in China and the dismantling of the Great Firewall (RSF statement; RFA).
20 April 2023: A photograph of Qiao is published by the Ban_GFW account on X, later used by RFA — the archival date of his public activist image.
Early May 2023: Qiao protests with placards near the EU delegation in Vientiane, calling for the firewall to be dismantled (as reported; the Chinese Wikipedia entry carries a citation; no first-hand record of the scene).
On or around 31 May 2023: Qiao disappears from his Vientiane home, on the eve of the 34th anniversary of June 4. Fellow activists believe Chinese police detained him in Vientiane and forcibly repatriated him (a consistent activist judgment, without first-hand evidence; Laos has never commented). Before vanishing he had posted that the authorities were harassing his relatives in his hometown, and had publicly declared he would not commit suicide in detention (recorded in passing in the LRWC-led joint statement).
June–July 2023: Qiao's whereabouts unknown; a state of disappearance with no public procedural record of any kind.
7 July 2023, 3:10 p.m.: Arrest documentation is issued stating his place of custody (Lin Shengliang relaying the family, reported by RFA; the minute-precise timestamp is a single-chain detail).
7 July 2023: The direct branch of the Hengyang Public Security Bureau formally arrests Qiao Xinxin on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power (Chinese Wikipedia entry and Dui Hua prisoner update in agreement; place of custody reported as a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang).
28 July 2023 (parallel case): Rights lawyer Lu Siwei is detained by Lao police in Vientiane — a separate case, unconnected to this one, distinguished in a dedicated section because the two appear together in much reporting.
Early August 2023: Qiao's detention in Hengyang is confirmed to RFA by Lin Shengliang (published 9 August); in the same period, former judge Li Jianfeng tells RFA that some 200 Chinese police were billeted in a Vientiane hotel (single-source claim, recorded with its attribution).
11 August 2023: The LRWC-led joint statement on Gao Zhisheng records this case in passing, describing Yang as presumably taken in a joint Chinese–Lao policing operation and confirmed by 8 August to have been returned to China and held in Hengyang.
On or about 16 August 2023: RSF issues its statement, its title characterising the case as that of a "journalist kidnapped in Laos", and demands Yang Zewei's release (republished by The Lao Times on 16 August 2023).
6 September 2023: Dui Hua's Prisoner Updates 2023 #9 carries the Qiao Xinxin entry: formally arrested on 7 July for inciting subversion, aged 37, held in a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang.
23 September 2023 (parallel case): Laos deports Lu Siwei to China.
20 June 2024: RFA's long report revisits the case, recounting the Laos seizure and the Hengyang custody, and reporting that BanGFW's successor Liu Dongling has been refused asylum in Denmark and faces deportation — the last feature-length mainstream follow-up this site has found.
Around the second half of 2024 (UNVERIFIED): Epoch Times interviews with Liu Dongling and Lin Shengliang are published (later republished in English by Red Censor): volunteers' postcards to Yang are being returned; Lin telephones Yang's mother, and the family reports that Yang was secretly tried and sentenced at first instance to five years, with no lawyer and no notice of trial, receiving only a mailed verdict; that after a month of "educational learning" in Changsha he was transferred to Chishan Prison in Hunan; that he lost about 20 kilograms; and that his mother first saw him more than a year after his capture. This site grades the whole cluster UNVERIFIED — see the dedicated section.
31 December 2025: Dui Hua's Political Prisoner Database ceases updating and becomes an archival resource — his record in that system is frozen as of that date.
31 October 2026 (this site's check): Rechecks of Dui Hua, CHRD, the CECC, RFA and VOA produce no independent confirmation of the five-year sentence, and no contradiction or alternative term; neither the Lao nor the Chinese authorities have made any public statement on the case. Status: reported by the family chain to be serving his sentence at Chishan Prison, Hunan (unverified); no independent source can establish his present condition.
Our Take
This site's commentary is tied to this case's facts and to the shape of its evidence. This case's factual density is low — and every thinness in it is itself the message it carries.
First: the wall he set out to tear down reached out and filtered the man himself. The Great Firewall's function is to keep information from coming in or getting out; Qiao Xinxin's fate is that logic in personal form — a man placarding and posting in Vientiane whose voice carried back inside the wall, until the system crossed a border and removed the speaker. His disappearance had no public procedure at all: no extradition, no deportation order, no Lao document — just as the firewall deletes a post without giving reasons. The highest form of censorship is not deleting an article; it is making the article's author vanish from the map without a sound, and reducing news of his fate to something his mother must say into a telephone, an activist must relay, and the world can never verify. This case is therefore the intersection of an internet-censorship case and a transnational-repression case: the wall is built not only in fibre-optic cable but in human destinies.
Second: the word "kidnapped" is the single weightiest item in this case's international record, and this site records its full value. Reporters Without Borders is not a street-protest group; its use of "kidnapped" in the title of a formal statement is an institutionally weighed characterisation — the conduct of the Chinese government outside its territory, in that organisation's judgment, does not satisfy any definition of "law enforcement": no public legal basis, no host-country procedure, no subsequent explanation. The Lao government's response was silence; the Chinese government's response was silence. Two governments maintaining simultaneous silence in the face of an international organisation's kidnapping allegation is itself the picture of how Southeast Asian transnational repression operates: the seizer does not explain, the host does not ask, and the seized person disappears between two silences. One of this page's archival purposes is to nail that silence to paper: as of this check, Laos has never explained and China has never announced — anyone who would one day defend this machinery must first answer this record.
Third: this case's evidentiary shape is itself one of its indictments, and it must be discussed. A citizen is accused, arrested and — reportedly — sentenced to five years, and the entire judicial material available to the public world consists of one relayed timestamp from an arrest document (7 July, 3:10 p.m.) and a sentence spoken by a family into a telephone. No judgment, no trial, no lawyer, not even a court's name. Let this site put it at its heaviest: if the family chain is wholly true, this was a trial whose date the family never knew; if the family chain is wrong, then a man arrested more than three years ago still has no publicly checkable sentence at all — and both possibilities point to the same conclusion, that this procedure was designed from the start to account to no public. This page insists on grading the five years UNVERIFIED not out of distrust of the family — quite the opposite. Precisely because this family spoke under surveillance, with state security at their door and their phones monitored, the archive owes it to them to place their words in the position that best withstands testing — source named, chain named, absence of a second source named — so that no one can use the words "unconfirmed report" to erase both a mother's testimony and her son's fate together. Verification discipline, here, is not an instrument of doubt. It is the instrument that protects a weak witness.
Fourth: the comparison with Lu Siwei measures the real price of attention. Same summer, same city: Lu's case drew eight UN experts speaking in real time before the deportation, sustained international media tracking, and a wife abroad speaking to the press throughout — and his ending was still deportation and a sentence. Qiao's case, at the moment it happened, drew one RSF statement and a passing paragraph in human rights documents; his family is inside the wall, silenced. This site does not presume to compare two men's suffering — Lu's eleven months and Qiao's reported five years are neither of them light — but the contrast states coldly what international attention decides even when it cannot change an ending: how much record a case leaves in the world. Qiao left so little that an archive site must spend most of a page writing "what we do not know". That is precisely this page's reason to exist: the opposite of record is not forgetting — it is never having been recorded at all. Archiving what is known and what is not known together is how this site repays a fraction of the record the world owes a man who had no lawyer, no trial record and no judgment.
Finally, back to the wall. The BanGFW movement did not bring the Great Firewall down — after 2023 the wall grew higher and smarter, and its censorship technology began to be exported as a package to other authoritarian states. But Qiao Xinxin's case left something more durable than the movement itself: an ordinary journalist was seized across a border for saying in public that the wall should fall, and the world can now confirm that he is alive only through his mother's report of his weight — "he used to be so plump; he has lost twenty kilograms". A regime's confidence in a wall can be measured by its treatment of those who would dismantle it: it dared not give him a public trial, dared not publish a judgment, dared not let a lawyer in — its confidence in that wall turns out to be too thin to withstand one journalist with a placard. This site's conclusion is therefore this: whatever the sentence is ultimately confirmed to be — five years or another figure — the case has already proved what it set out to prove. The Great Firewall is not a symbol of strength; it is a work of fear. And fear, in the end, leaves an archive.
Verification notes
This site's characterisation: a case of transnational repression and of internet freedom, meeting this site's criteria for the persecution archive. This case's evidentiary structure is among the weakest this site has handled, and the Verification Note is therefore the core of this page. The governing rules are stated first: this case has no anchor-grade primary document — no judgment, no original arrest document, no official text from either state involved. Its highest-grade sources are second-hand records by international organisations and mainstream media (the RSF statement, RFA's reporting, Dui Hua's prisoner update). Its entire second half — trial and imprisonment — rests on a single chain: the family through Lin Shengliang, published in Epoch Times interviews and republished by Red Censor, graded UNVERIFIED as a whole. Throughout the page the discipline is: every fact is presented with its chain; every single-chain item carries its attribution; every gap is written out as "no public record", never left as suggestive blank space.
Facts corroborated across sources or carried in organisational documents: Qiao Xinxin's birth name is Yang Zewei (RFA, RSF and Dui Hua in agreement); he launched the BanGFW campaign calling for an end to internet censorship in China (all three sources; RSF dates the launch to March 2023); he lived in Vientiane for several years (RFA, activist accounts in agreement); he disappeared in Vientiane on or around 31 May 2023 (RFA, Dui Hua and the LRWC joint statement in agreement, all in the wording "believed detained"); on 7 July 2023 the direct branch of the Hengyang Public Security Bureau formally arrested him on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power (the Chinese Wikipedia entry and Dui Hua's update in agreement on date, organ and charge; RSF's statement title corroborates the "subversion of state power" charge); he was held in Hengyang (RFA via Lin relaying the family, Dui Hua and the LRWC statement in agreement); RSF issued a statement demanding his release and characterising his seizure as a kidnapping (the RSF text itself, checked by this site against the ecoi.net copy and The Lao Times republication dated 16 August 2023); the BanGFW movement thereafter passed to Liu Dongling (the Wikipedia entry, sourced to Lin's call with the family, corroborated by Liu's role as the movement's head in the Epoch Times interviews and RFA's 2024 report); and the Lu Siwei timeline (detained by Lao police on 28 July 2023, deported on 23 September 2023, sentenced on 18 April 2025 by Chengdu's Chenghua District Court to eleven months and a CNY 10,000 fine, released on 5 August 2025 — RFA, Dui Hua, the OHCHR statement and joint lawyers' statements in agreement), which is kept strictly separate from this case.
Matters resting on a single organisational source, presented with attribution: that Yang worked as a journalist in Guangzhou and contributed to Radio Free Asia (the RSF statement — the only organisational source for his journalistic record); that he was aged 37 in 2023 and hence born around 1986 (Dui Hua's prisoner update alone; presented here as inference); his daily work with volunteers helping people inside the wall to circumvent it (Dui Hua's update); the early-May 2023 placard protest near the EU delegation in Vientiane (the Chinese Wikipedia entry, cited, with no first-hand imagery or independent media eyewitness account found — presented as reported); and his pre-disappearance posts that his relatives were being harassed and that he would not commit suicide in detention (recorded in passing in the LRWC-led joint statement, a single organisational document).
Matters resting on activist relay, presented with attribution: the judgment that Chinese police detained him in Vientiane and forcibly repatriated him (Lin Shengliang's "100% a cross-border arrest"; the activist circle's consensus; the LRWC statement's "believed to have been a joint Chinese and Laotian policing effort" — all of them judgments, without first-hand evidence); that the arrest documentation was issued at 3:10 p.m. on 7 July 2023 and stated his place of custody (Lin relaying the family, reported by RFA; the minute-precise timestamp is a single-chain detail); and that the family at first declined to disclose the charge out of fear and doubt (Lin's words, reported by RFA).
A single-source claim, recorded only in its full attributed form and never to be rewritten as fact: "some 200 Chinese police officers were billeted in a Vientiane hotel" — the speaker is Li Jianfeng, a former Chinese judge living in Canada, as reported by RFA in August 2023; there is no second source, no imagery, and no institutional confirmation or denial; a dedicated section of the text sets out its chain and this site's ruling.
Matters graded UNVERIFIED as a whole — this page's most important grading decision: that Qiao Xinxin was secretly tried and sentenced at first instance to five years for inciting subversion of state power; that the trial proceeded with no notice of any kind, the family unaware of the hearing, no lawyer at any stage, and only a verdict received by post; that after sentencing he spent a month in "educational learning" in Changsha before transfer to Chishan Prison in Hunan; that in prison he lost about 20 kilograms (his mother elsewhere says "more than ten"); that only his mother may visit him and deposit money, and that his brother and other family were refused a visit; that before the trial the family was monitored and their phones listened to, and Hunan state security officers came to the brother's door displaying photographs of Qiao near the Lao embassy; and that volunteers' postcards to him began to be returned. The whole cluster travels on one chain: family (mother and brother) → Lin Shengliang's verification call and supplied recording → Epoch Times interviews with Liu Dongling and Lin Shengliang → English republication by Red Censor. This site's searches (31 October 2026, covering Dui Hua's 2025 prisoner updates and Political Prisoner Database notice, CHRD's public records, the CECC's public resources, RFA and VOA follow-ups, and the UN experts' 2025 communication on transnational repression) found no independent confirmation, and equally no contradiction and no alternative version. This site's ruling: the report carries detail-based credibility (internal consistency; Chishan Prison's fit with the record of Hunan political imprisonment; a five-year term fitting Article 105(2)'s ordinary ceiling exactly; details unfavourable to the family's own narrative, such as "he said he was not beaten") — but credibility is not confirmation, and the whole cluster is presented throughout as "reported by the family through Lin Shengliang (unverified)". If a five-year term were real and counted from 31 May 2023, its nominal expiry would fall around May 2028 — an arithmetical remark under a stated condition, flagged as such in the status field.
Source divergences and this site's handling: First, the name of the custody facility. RFA and Dui Hua both write of a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang; the Chinese Wikipedia entry writes only of "a detention centre in Hengyang". This site records "juvenile detention centre" on the higher-grade sources' wording, while flagging both its anomaly (an adult held in a juvenile facility) and the divergence, offering no explanatory patch. Second, the mother's figures for weight loss: "about 20 kilograms" in one passage and "more than ten kilograms" in another; both are recorded side by side without forced unification. Third, the publication date of the sentence report: the Red Censor page bears no clear date; from the mother's "more than a year" without seeing her son and the page's own data, this site infers the second half of 2024, presents it in the timeline as "around the second half of 2024 (unverified)", and flags the inference here. Fourth, name forms: the movement's successor is "Liu Dongling" (RFA's long report and the Epoch Times interviews in agreement), and this site standardises on that form. Fifth, an intake correction: this site's intake brief gave the arrest documentation a time of 3:10 p.m. on 7 July as a spine fact — on checking, that minute-precise time derives from Lin Shengliang's relay ("they issued legal documentation at 3.10 p.m. on July 7"), and the text presents it as a single-chain relayed detail; the correction is recorded here. Sixth, a second intake correction: this site's internal intake material contained the name of an alleged BanGFW "co-activist" (surname Lu, in two variant writings). This site searched multiple Chinese- and English-language query combinations, including the name combined with BanGFW and the movement's Chinese name, across RFA, RSF, Dui Hua, the Epoch Times and general public sources, and found no record whatsoever connecting that name to the BanGFW movement; the only verifiable person surnamed Lu taken in Laos in a China-related case in 2023 is the human rights lawyer Lu Siwei, whose case is wholly separate. This site's ruling: the name is unverifiable, most plausibly a product of the two cases' memories crossing, and it is deleted in full from this page in every form; the deletion is recorded here. Seventh, the "BanGFW movement" and the Chongqing "Wall-Pushing Alliance" Twitter-group case (Dui Hua, Prisoner Updates 2025 #1; sentenced March 2023 at the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate Court) are different cases, distinguished in a dedicated passage of the text.
Matters of no public record, flagged in the text wherever they arise: any statement, notice or denial by the Lao government on this case (this site's search of Lao official and state-media channels found nothing); any Chinese official notice, court document or diplomatic response on this case; the full texts of the arrest document and of any judgment; the prosecuting organ, the trial court, and the dates of any hearing or sentencing (the family chain says "secret trial" but gives no date); Qiao's custody and transfer trail between 31 May and 7 July 2023; his immigration status in Laos, the details of his work, and his exact date of birth; any public statement on this case by the European Union or its member states; and any institutional record of this case created in 2025 or 2026. The three-musts check: times and places have been confirmed as far as the record allows (the disappearance and the arrest are anchored by multiple sources; the trial is recorded honestly as unrecorded); cross-verification has been completed (organisational documents, mainstream media, activist relay and the family chain are labelled in four separate layers, with single-chain and unverified matters itemised); visual evidence: RFA carries a photograph of Qiao Xinxin dated 20 April 2023 (published by Ban_GFW via X) — this site records the photograph's existence and provenance only, and relays no unverified detail from imagery.
Sources
- Radio Free Asia, "Missing Laos-based activist Qiao Xinxin resurfaces in a Chinese detention center", 9 August 2023: birth name Yang Zewei; disappearance in Vientiane on or around 31 May 2023; the family's information that he was held in a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang; Lin Shengliang's relay of the arrest documentation issued at 3:10 p.m. on 7 July, the family's fear of disclosing the charge, and his "100% a cross-border arrest" judgment; Li Jianfeng's claim of some 200 Chinese police in a Vientiane hotel (single-source, recorded with attribution); lawyer Wang Qingpeng's comment; the background of the CCP's "long-arm" enforcement and Safeguard Defenders' record of overseas police stations; Southeast Asian return precedents (Dong Guangping, Jiang Yefei and others). The core source for the arrest phase of this case.
- Reporters Without Borders (RSF), statement "China: RSF calls for release of journalist kidnapped in Laos and charged with 'subversion of state power'", August 2023 (republished by The Lao Times on 16 August 2023; text checked by this site against the ecoi.net copy): Yang Zewei's work as a journalist in Guangzhou and contributor to Radio Free Asia; the March 2023 launch of the "Ban Great Firewall" (BanGFW) campaign; the characterisation of his seizure in Laos as a kidnapping; the Gui Minhai Thailand precedent of 2015; China's rank of 179th of 180 in the 2023 RSF World Press Freedom Index and at least 113 detained journalists and press-freedom defenders. The anchor source for this case's characterisation and for his journalistic record.
- Dui Hua Foundation, Prisoner Updates 2023 #9, 6 September 2023: the Qiao Xinxin entry — formally arrested on 7 July for inciting subversion; aged 37; held in a juvenile detention centre in Hengyang; his work in Vientiane with overseas activists and volunteers helping Chinese people circumvent the Great Firewall; the international concern his repatriation raised over China's cross-border law enforcement. The same issue carries the Lu Siwei detention item (parallel case).
- Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada and partner organisations, joint statement "China: Release human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng and end the practice of enforced disappearances", 11 August 2023: recording in passing that journalist Yang Zewei (pen name Qiao Xinxin) was presumably taken in Laos on 31 May in a joint Chinese–Lao policing effort; that before being taken he had tweeted that authorities were harassing his relatives in his hometown and had declared he would not commit suicide in detention; and that by 8 August he had been confirmed returned to China and held in Hengyang.
- Radio Free Asia, long report "China's political refugees remain at risk long after leaving country", 20 June 2024: Liu Dongling's exile history (leaving China in 2018, rights work for demolition victims, her son refused schooling), her support for and succession to the BanGFW movement, the "Captured in Laos" section restating this case (disappearance date; juvenile detention centre in Hengyang), and Liu's refused asylum and impending deportation in Denmark. The last feature-length mainstream follow-up this site has found.
- Epoch Times interviews with Liu Dongling and Lin Shengliang, republished in English by Red Censor (around the second half of 2024; checked by this site in October 2026): volunteers' postcards to Yang being returned; Lin's verification call to Yang's mother; the family's account of a secret trial and a five-year first-instance sentence for inciting subversion, with no lawyer, no notice of trial and only a mailed verdict; a month of "educational learning" in Changsha after sentencing, then transfer to Chishan Prison in Hunan; weight loss of about 20 kilograms (the mother elsewhere says "more than ten"); the mother's first visit after more than a year, only the mother permitted to visit and deposit money, the brother's visit refused; the family's pre-trial monitoring, listened-to phones, and Hunan state security officers displaying photographs of Qiao near the Lao embassy; background on Chishan Prison (Ou Biaofeng and Lee Ming-cheh served sentences there). A single information chain, graded UNVERIFIED as a whole — see the Verification Note.
- Chinese Wikipedia, entry "Qiao Xinxin" (with citations): the early-May 2023 placard protest near the EU delegation in Vientiane launching the BanGFW call; the disappearance from his Laos home on the eve of the 34th June 4 anniversary; the formal arrest of 7 July 2023 by the direct branch of the Hengyang Public Security Bureau for suspected inciting subversion of state power; Lin Shengliang's early-August confirmation from a call with the family that he was held in Hengyang; the movement's passage to Liu Dongling. Used only for its cited framework facts, each checked against primary sources.
- Safeguard Defenders, report "Involuntary Returns" (January 2022) and its "China's extrajudicial returns" resource pages: the mechanics of Operations Fox Hunt and Sky Net, the forced-returns toolkit as defined in the CCDI/National Supervisory Commission interpretation of Article 52 of the Supervision Law, and the record of overseas police "service stations". The mechanism background for this case.
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, statement "Lao PDR: Stop deporting human rights defenders, says UN expert", 27 October 2023 (Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor): Lu Siwei's September 2023 deportation from Laos to China, and the eight UN experts' call of 11 August 2023 for his release and against his deportation. Parallel-case source.
- Radio Free Asia, "Chinese rights lawyer Lu Siwei sentenced to 11 months in prison", 18 April 2025, and Dui Hua, Prisoner Updates 2025 #7: Lu's detention in Vientiane in July 2023 and deportation that September; his closed-trial sentence of 18 April 2025 at Chengdu's Chenghua District Court to eleven months and a CNY 10,000 fine, confirmed by his wife Zhang Chunxiao; his release on 5 August 2025. Parallel-case sources, kept strictly separate from this case.
- Dui Hua Foundation, Prisoner Updates 2025 #1: the Chongqing "Wall-Pushing Alliance" Twitter-group case — five members convicted in March 2023 at the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court on subversion-related charges (Ren Jianping, ten years, and others) — an independent case unrelated to BanGFW, cited as background on the criminalisation of "wall-pushing" and distinguished in a dedicated passage.
- UN human rights experts' joint communication on the surge in transnational repression in Southeast Asia (published by the International Service for Human Rights, 2025): at least 150 documented transnational-repression cases linked to China and Southeast Asian states, naming Laos's return of Lu Siwei; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' warnings and briefing of March and June 2025. Regional background source.
- Dui Hua Foundation, Political Prisoner Database description page (checked October 2026): the database ceased updating on 31 December 2025 and remains available as an archival resource. Part of the record of this site's recheck.