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第79案 | 王建兵Case 79 | Wang Jianbing

甘肃出身的劳工公益人王建兵，十六年做农村教育、残障赋能与尘肺病工人支持，只因在自家客厅主持每周聚会、参加非暴力网课与网上发帖，2024年以煽动颠覆国家政权罪被判三年六个月；2025年3月18日刑满当日，他被警方押送回两千公里外的甘肃老家。Labour organiser Wang Jianbing, from Gansu, spent sixteen years on rural education, disability empowerment and support for workers with pneumoconiosis. For hosting weekly gatherings in his own living room, taking an online course on non-violence and posting online, he was sentenced in 2024 to three years and six months for inciting subversion of state power. On the day his sentence ended, 18 March 2025, police escorted him more than 2,000 kilometres back to his parents' home in Gansu.

Dates

Born 14 July 1983 in Tianshui, Gansu (exact day single-sourced; see Verification Note); entered public-interest work after graduating in 2005; taken away in Guangzhou on 19 September 2021; formally arrested on 27 October 2021; tried behind closed doors on 22 September 2023; sentenced at first instance on 14 June 2024; released on 18 March 2025 after completing his sentence and escorted by police back to his parents' home in Gansu

Places

Tianshui, Gansu Province (birthplace; place he was sent back to on release); Room 202, No. 149 Xingang West Road, Haizhu District, Guangzhou (Wang's rented flat, site of the weekly gatherings, listed in the indictment as a relevant location); Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court (trial court); Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre (place of detention named in the arrest notice, though the actual place of detention is in doubt; see text)

People

Wang Jianbing (born 1983, from Tianshui, Gansu; labour and public-interest activist; friends call him "Jianbing", a pun on his name that means "pancake"); co-defendant Huang Xueqin, also known as Sophia Huang Xueqin (independent journalist and feminist advocate, who has a separate page on this site)

Charge and sentence

"Inciting subversion of state power": three years and six months in prison, deprivation of political rights for three years, and confiscation of personal property (reported by many outlets as a fine) of RMB 50,000; according to verdict information disclosed by supporters, a further RMB 100,000 of his savings was confiscated (for the wording, see the text and the Verification Note)

Characterisation

Imprisoned for speech; political persecution of a labour organiser and civil-society connector; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found in 2022 that his detention was arbitrary

Current status

Released on 18 March 2025; on the day of his release he was not allowed to return to his home in Guangzhou and was escorted by police more than 2,000 kilometres to his parents' home in Gansu; deprivation of political rights for three years runs until March 2028; as of the date this page was last checked, there is no further public record of his life or activities after release

Life: From a Gansu Village to Guangzhou's Grassroots

Wang Jianbing was born on 14 July 1983 in Tianshui, Gansu Province. Only one public source, the Chinese-language Wikipedia, currently gives the exact day and month of his birth, while the year 1983 and his Tianshui origin are corroborated by multiple media outlets and human rights organisations. This site therefore treats "born in 1983, from Tianshui" as verified, and flags "14 July" as a single-sourced detail, explained in the Verification Note at the end of this page. His home village lies about half an hour from Tianshui city. It has a single main road, with houses along both sides, and on fine days people sit by the road chatting and soaking up the sun. His father, Wang Zhixue, is a farmer. The family was poor. The father later told an interviewer that however hard life was, his own view was that he would endure the hardship himself so that his children could study more. Both of his sons eventually finished university. The younger son stayed near home. Wang Jianbing took a road that led steadily further away.

Wang was admitted to Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou. Chinese Wikipedia records his field of study as pre-school education at undergraduate level. That detail, too, rests on a single public source, and this site marks it as unverified rather than presenting it as settled fact. What can be confirmed is the year he graduated: multiple sources agree that he finished university in 2005 and went straight into the non-profit sector, where he remained for nearly twenty years, until police took him away in 2021. For a young man from a poor farming family in western Gansu, this was an unusual career. Public-interest work in China pays badly, offers little security and brings almost no prestige. Most people who try it leave after a few years. Wang stayed for sixteen, working on rural education, youth development, disability empowerment and support for workers with occupational diseases: work that rarely makes the news and never makes anyone famous. A remark by one of his friends has been widely quoted since his arrest: in the NGO world, you are either very well known or completely unknown, and Jianbing belonged to the second kind. That single sentence explains why so little public information about him exists. He was never the person standing at the front of the room. His way of working was to accompany, to listen, to run errands, to connect people, and to keep himself behind the people he was helping.

Friends describe his temperament with striking consistency. He spoke slowly and softly. He rarely took the initiative to talk about himself. What he ate, where he lived and how he was getting on all seemed to matter very little to him. At gatherings he was the one who prepared the fruit and the tea, arranged the seating and passed the conversation to others, seldom becoming the centre of attention himself. Friends say he gave the impression that, with him, everything was somehow the same: he did not compete, did not grab, did not perform. Set that portrait beside the figure drawn in the indictment and the contrast is glaring. In the prosecution's telling, Wang Jianbing is an "inciter": a man who joined overseas groups, posted attacking statements and organised gatherings to stir up dissatisfaction. In his friends' telling, he is a man who seldom let even his own emotions show, and who, while suffering from severe depression, still spent his remaining energy holding a weekly community together. Which portrait is closer to the truth is a judgement this page leaves to the reader, on the evidence set out below, item by item, with the source and the strength of every claim labelled. The archive's job is to lay both accounts on the table, not to smuggle one of them past the reader unmarked.

His depression is an important thread for understanding his later work. According to friends who saw him often, for at least a year before his arrest he slept badly, managing only a few hours a night. He had little energy in the daytime, his work efficiency dropped, and he liked to go and play pool on his own. At gatherings, however, he seemed cheerful and energetic, the person holding the room together, and almost nobody guessed his condition. Only after his arrest did friends piece the details together in hindsight: a man struggling with depression had spent what little strength he had left on renting a flat close to a hospital for pneumoconiosis workers, and on maintaining a weekly community for young activists. That is not a life the language of an indictment can contain. But it is exactly what an archive exists to record, because the person who was sentenced is first of all a specific human being, and only secondarily a case number.

He wrote poetry. Friends say poetry may have been one of his few outlets for release and self-expression. His WeChat Moments used to be public, consisting mostly of reposts about public events and, now and then, a poem of his own. He liked light-blue packs of Zhongnanhai cigarettes, liked a drink, liked board games and mahjong, and kept careful score of the games he played with friends. These details are trivial, and that is precisely the point. If an archive recorded only the charge and the sentence, any summary of a verdict could do the same. To record in full where a person came from, what sort of person he was, what he did and what it cost him is what allows later readers to understand who it actually was that police took away on 19 September 2021.

On the family side, Wang was in his late thirties, unmarried. His father knew little about his work for most of those years: only that after graduating his son had worked in Beijing for a few years and then gone to Guangzhou, that the phone calls home were fairly frequent at first and then tailed off, and that when his son did come home he said little about his job. That distance between father and son is common among Chinese public-interest workers. The work is sensitive; say too much and the family worries, say too little and the family cannot understand. Only after the arrest did Wang Zhixue ride a high-speed train for eleven hours to Guangzhou for the first time, and only in a courtroom did he first hear, in full, what his son had been doing all those years. That scene is described in the trial section below. Here it is enough to record one sentence of the father's. Three months after the arrest he recorded a video appealing to the authorities to let family and lawyers meet his son. In it he said that his son had made so many contributions to society and done charity work for so many years that he could not possibly be a harm to society. Chinese human rights organisations later quoted that sentence in their statement condemning the verdict. It remains the most direct first-hand record of the family's position.

Labour Work: From Rural Education to Pneumoconiosis Workers

Wang Jianbing's public-interest career falls into three phases. Each phase can be checked against public sources. This section sets them out in turn, and states plainly, for each one, what is corroborated by multiple sources and what rests on a single account.

The first phase was rural education. After graduating in 2005 he joined the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation, working on rural development and rural education, and later served for about five years as the foundation's rural education project manager. This phase is corroborated by Chinese Wikipedia, by case introductions in the rights-defence media system and by a long account written from friends' recollections, and can be treated as multiply sourced. Western Sunshine's way of working was to embed itself in villages: living locally, doing field research, and refining concrete education projects together with teachers and children. Looking back on that period years later, Wang told friends that at the time he knew very little, had little support and had to figure out almost everything for himself, but that doing work down on the ground, in the fields, was his comfort zone, because he himself had grown up in the countryside. That experience set the tone for everything he did afterwards: no grand narratives, just specific people and specific tasks.

The second phase was in Guangzhou. According to friends' accounts, he moved south to Guangzhou around 2013 and in 2014 joined the Guangzhou Gongming Social Organization Development Center, where he worked as manager and coordinator for youth development projects and disability community empowerment projects. Gongming was a hub-type support organisation: its business was empowering grassroots groups and building their capacity, helping small teams get projects off the ground. Wang's work there included supporting and initiating community projects. In September 2015 he took part in a partnership camp for disabled youth in Shijiazhuang, performing a symbiotic dance with twenty disabled young people in the plaza of a shopping mall. Photographs of that event survive and have been published by supporters. Guangzhou in those years was in an unusually lively period for Chinese civil society. Labour organisations, feminist activists, public-interest groups and independent-minded media people were densely connected in the city. Wang was in the middle of it, and still inconspicuous: coordinating, supporting, connecting, never the name on the banner.

The turning point came around 2015. That year the Feminist Five were detained, the Beijing organisation Yirenping was raided, the 709 crackdown swept up rights lawyers across the country, and labour organisations in Guangdong were hit in a concentrated campaign. Many of Wang's friends and working partners were arrested, jailed or driven out in those successive waves. Friends recount that these events shook him deeply. He began to despair of structural change, and he developed criticisms of the non-profit sector itself, coming to feel that services alone, without touching structures, could not solve the fundamental predicament of workers and other vulnerable people. In 2018 he left Gongming and joined a rights-based social work organisation, shifting his focus onto migrant workers with occupational diseases, above all workers with pneumoconiosis.

The third phase, occupational-disease work, is the source of his reputation as a labour activist, and it is the best documented of the three. Records kept by the Weiquanwang rights-defence network and by Chinese Human Rights Defenders agree that from 2018 he supported victims of occupational disease in raising their visibility and helped them gain access to social services and legal aid. Amnesty International records that he provided legal support for people with disabilities and workers with occupational diseases. The summary in the political prisoner database of the United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China likewise describes his work in rural development, youth education, disability advocacy and labour rights. For readers unfamiliar with pneumoconiosis, a short explanation is necessary. It is an occupational disease caused by long-term inhalation of industrial dust. Its victims are overwhelmingly migrant workers from mining, construction and grinding trades, whose lung function declines step by step until, in the late stages, climbing a flight of stairs can leave them suffocating. Diagnosis and compensation are then blocked by the question of the employment relationship: without a contract, without proof of dust exposure, and with employers refusing to cooperate, workers often die without ever obtaining a formal diagnosis. To support such people means accompanying them to assessment institutions, organising their papers, finding them lawyers, contacting media, visiting them in hospital and sitting with them when they despair. That was Wang Jianbing's main work after 2018. It had no title and no glamour. It consisted of hospital corridors and rented rooms.

The most concrete thing he did for pneumoconiosis workers was to rent a flat. A long account by friends preserves a detail that this site believes deserves to be recorded verbatim in the archive. He rented a one-bedroom flat on the second floor at No. 149 Xingang West Road in Haizhu District, Guangzhou, for 2,600 yuan a month. The location was about a ten-minute walk from the Guangdong Provincial Hospital for the Prevention and Treatment of Occupational Diseases, and the rent, relative to his income, was not good value. He chose the second floor, rather than a higher one, because pneumoconiosis workers have difficulty breathing and can barely climb stairs. He chose the location because workers in hospital could easily come over, sit down and talk. The flat's intended purpose was to be a living room for pneumoconiosis workers. It never became one. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, workers in hospital were forbidden to leave or to meet outside visitors, and most of his contact with them moved online. Later still, the same flat was written into the indictment as the place where gatherings were regularly organised: in the language of the prosecution, a crime scene. A second-floor flat chosen for workers who could not breathe ended its documented life in a judicial document of that kind. It is among the details of this case that are hardest to read without anger, and this archive records it without embellishment.

The briefing for this page mentioned work with "cleaners and domestic workers". A clear checking conclusion must be recorded in this section. This site searched the records of Weiquanwang, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China database, the long account by friends and Chinese Wikipedia, and found no public source whatsoever that records Wang Jianbing running projects for cleaners or domestic workers. The documented beneficiaries of his labour work are workers with occupational diseases, first and foremost migrant workers with pneumoconiosis, together with the disability community. Cleaners and domestic workers are likewise low-paid and vulnerable groups of working people, and the phrase may have entered the briefing through a garbled retelling. But an archive cannot turn an unsourced claim into fact. This site's handling is therefore as follows: the claim is not accepted; it is expressly recorded here as unsupported by any public record; and if a reliable source emerges in future, this page will be corrected. The point is also listed among the corrections in the Verification Note.

Beyond labour issues, Wang was also an important supporter of China's #MeToo movement. Amnesty International, Chinese human rights organisations and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China all record this consistently. His involvement did not take the form of speeches from a platform. It took the form of what supporters do: listening to survivors, standing on the survivor's side, and offering companionship inside the community. Friends recount one specific example. A woman in the public-interest circle told him about a sexual assault she had suffered within that circle. The perpetrator was someone Wang had known for many years. On hearing her account, he immediately chose to stand with her, stayed in touch about her condition afterwards, and, when she had moved to another city to recover and was in financial difficulty, supported her in unobtrusive ways, such as paying in advance for tea she was learning to sell. Nothing of this kind appears in any indictment. But it explains why Wang Jianbing and Huang Xueqin became friends and, eventually, co-defendants. They did the same kind of work: standing beside victims, and, when the community was falling apart, gathering people back together. In the authorities' narrative, that gathering has another name: organising, networking, linking up. In the common sense of any normal society, it is called mutual aid.

In 2020 Wang spent a period studying in the United Kingdom. Both the indictment and the Dui Hua Foundation's records note that between May and October 2020, while he was studying in Britain, he took an online course on "non-violent movements". Apart from the course itself, the institution, the subject and the exact length of his stay in Britain are not in the public record, and this site states that plainly. One widespread confusion must be corrected with particular care. The person who was about to leave for study in Britain on the eve of the arrests in September 2021 was Huang Xueqin, not Wang Jianbing. Huang had won a British Chevening scholarship and was due to travel on 20 September 2021, via Shenzhen and Hong Kong, to begin a master's degree in gender and development at the University of Sussex. Wang was going to see her off that day. His own period of study in Britain had taken place in 2020; he had been back in China for nearly a year. Attributing Huang's departure plan to Wang is a common mix-up in reporting on this case, and this page corrects it here and again in the Verification Note.

After returning from Britain, he kept the flat on Xingang West Road. From November 2020, a group of young activists began meeting there every week, usually on Thursdays. He named the community "Night Sailing Boat" and even designed a small logo for it. Friends explain the name's meaning: sailing at night, even when you cannot see the direction clearly, everyone holds on to each other and keeps moving forward. According to participants, the gatherings were about sharing everyday life, community companionship, mutual support around depression, and exchanges on public-interest work and art. Scholars and researchers passing through Guangzhou were invited to speak on social issues. When the topics grew too heavy, there were board games and hiking trips. At their largest, more than thirty people attended. In the gatherings Wang did what he did best: he prepared the fruit and the tea, made sure everyone had a comfortable seat, passed the floor to others and sat at the edge himself. Participants say that after 2015 everyone still lived in Guangzhou but lived in fear, and that these gatherings restored a sense of connection. The indictment describes the same events in these terms: that under the pretext of discussing social issues, the defendants incited participants' dissatisfaction with China's state power. The same living room; two narratives; a distance as wide as two different worlds. The whole dispute in this case is hidden inside that distance.

Taken Away: 19 September 2021 and Five Months of Silence

On the afternoon of 19 September 2021, at around three o'clock, officers of the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau took Wang Jianbing and Huang Xueqin away from Wang's home and seized both of their personal belongings. It was supposed to be a day of farewell. Huang was due to set out for Britain the next day, and Wang had planned to see her off. Friends preserve one last detail from that midday. Around noon, a friend messaged Wang to ask how he had been sleeping lately. At about one in the afternoon he replied that it was the same as usual, that he had only slept a few hours. The friend did not answer that message at the time. It became Wang Jianbing's last known communication before he disappeared.

What followed the arrest was not the notification the law requires, but silence. China's Criminal Procedure Law requires the family to be notified within a statutory period after a detention. The families of Wang Jianbing and Huang Xueqin never received a detention notice. The 2021 annual report of Chinese Human Rights Defenders records expressly that, in violation of the Criminal Procedure Law, the authorities did not send detention notices to either family. On 4 October 2021 Wang's family petitioned four departments, including the Xingang police station in Haizhu District and the Haizhu District public security bureau, asking the police to inform them in writing of the suspected offence and of the coercive measures taken against him. Every request was refused, and the police at the same time demanded that the family keep silent about the matter. More than a month later, on 5 November 2021, the family finally received an arrest notice from the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau, numbered Sui Gong Bu Tong Zi [2021] X2, stating that Wang had been formally arrested on 27 October on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power and was being held at Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre. Forty-seven days passed between the day he was taken away and the day his family received its first piece of paper.

The arrest notice did not end the disappearance. Around 19 November 2021, family and friends tried repeatedly, through Guangdong's government services system, to deposit money for the two detainees at the detention centre named in the notice. Each time, after entering a name and identity card number, the system replied that the application had not been approved. In other words, the notice said Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre, but the system had no such person. Lawyers could not visit. Families could not send money. Where the two actually were, and in what physical condition, could not be confirmed through any channel. In the vocabulary of international human rights records, this period is characterised as incommunicado detention carrying a risk of enforced disappearance. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China's summary records that the two were placed under residential surveillance at a designated location. A joint statement by the International Service for Human Rights, the World Organisation Against Torture and other groups uses a more precise formulation: the two were held in solitary confinement for five months, in conditions similar to those of residential surveillance at a designated location, and subjected to secret interrogation.

The sources differ on the legal form of those five months, and this site does not hide the difference; it sets the versions side by side. Version one: the two were formally placed under residential surveillance at a designated location, the form of secret detention known by its English acronym RSDL. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the summary records of several human rights organisations adopt this version. Version two: the Guangzhou police used COVID-19 prevention as a pretext to hold the two in solitary confinement in a so-called quarantine area, in conditions similar to RSDL, while avoiding the RSDL label in formal documents. The supporters' one-year statement and the statement of the International Service for Human Rights adopt this version, and point out that using epidemic prevention as the cover for secret detention was precisely a way of circumventing international criticism of RSDL. Version three: the April 2022 report of Chinese Human Rights Defenders states that Wang was held for five months in a "quarantine area", presumably an RSDL facility, and that he himself did not know its precise location. The three versions agree on the core facts: solitary confinement, secret interrogation, complete isolation from the outside world for more than five months, and no access to lawyers or family. They differ only on the legal label. This site's conclusion is that the place of that detention remains unconfirmed in any public record, that according to the accounts available Wang himself did not know where he was being held, and that any claim to know the exact location currently lacks public evidence.

What happened inside those five months is known only in fragments, relayed by others. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the supporters' statements, during his solitary confinement Wang was subjected to dozens of gruelling interrogations and suffered physically and mentally: an irregular diet, gastrointestinal disorders, mental exhaustion and a worsening of his depression. He had serious heart and gastrointestinal problems. During detention he repeatedly asked the management for examination and treatment and did not receive timely or appropriate care. Amnesty International later learned that his health problems originated in the early solitary confinement, were exacerbated by fatigue from interrogations, and had recently worsened again before his release, while the detention centre took no action to treat his condition and refused to accept medicine sent in by his family and friends. These accounts come from human rights organisations and supporters and cannot be independently verified by this site. But they are consistent with one another, and they point in the same direction as the concerns raised by United Nations experts in February 2022. They are recorded here with their evidential status labelled.

On 27 March 2022 the public security authorities transferred the case to the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate for review and prosecution. On 1 April 2022 Wang was permitted to meet his lawyer for the first time, by video link. It was only after that meeting that the outside world learned for certain that he had been transferred into a collective detention facility, that his solitary incommunicado detention had ended in the sixth month after his arrest, and that friends could thereafter find his name in the detention centre system and deposit money into his account, although they were unsure whether he could actually use the funds. At this point the record contains a second discrepancy about dates. A joint statement issued by many international organisations in 2023 states that the two were transferred to Guangzhou City No. 1 Detention Centre in January 2023 to await trial. The two records differ by nearly ten months. Possible explanations include the merger or renaming of detention centres, a further transfer, or different sources recording different transfer points. Supporters' statements have mentioned a merger involving Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre and No. 3 Detention Centre. This site cannot determine which version is correct. Its approach is to enter both dates in the timeline, note the difference between the sources, and refuse to smooth the discrepancy away. That refusal is the difference between an archive and a publicity handout: where there is a divergence, the divergence itself gets recorded.

The reach of the arrests extended far beyond two people. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in the weeks after the arrests Guangzhou police interrogated more than seventy of the pair's friends and colleagues in a nationwide campaign. Amnesty International records that dozens of their friends were summoned, had their homes searched and had their electronic devices confiscated. Supporters say that most of the summonses lasted more than twenty-four hours, and that at least two or three people were forced to sign false statements the police had prepared in advance. Everyone who had ever gathered at Wang's home was required, one by one, to identify the political content of those gatherings. Some were later forced to leave Guangzhou. A living-room community was dismantled, mined for evidence and intimidated, all within a few weeks. The chilling effect of that operation is the second punishment beyond the case itself: it told everyone who knew them that standing close to people like this carries a price.

The Charges and the Trial: What the Indictment Actually Said

The indictment in this case was issued by the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate, document number Sui Jian Xing Su [2022] Z11. That number comes from Chinese Wikipedia's citation of screenshots of the indictment. The court has never formally published the full text of the indictment, and Agence France-Presse stated expressly in its reporting that it was unable to independently verify the screenshots of the purported indictment published by supporters. Whenever this page cites the indictment's contents, it does so within those limits: "according to the indictment screenshots published by supporters and relayed by multiple media outlets", with the evidential position stated here in advance. That said, the indictment's core allegations have been relayed by Reuters, Agence France-Presse, the Dui Hua Foundation, friends' accounts and others, and the versions agree with one another, so its main points can be treated as established in outline.

The allegations against Wang Jianbing personally fall into three groups. First, joining overseas online groups: the indictment alleged that after graduating from university he successively joined overseas online groups whose aim was to subvert China's state power, naming among them a so-called "Chinese Jasmine Revolution Volunteer Corps" and a "June 4 Massacre Memorial Museum" group. Second, publishing and reposting statements: it alleged that he repeatedly posted and reposted, on overseas social media and online platforms, false statements and articles attacking China's political system and government. Third, attending training: it alleged that between May and October 2020, while studying in the United Kingdom, he took an online course on "non-violent movements". The objects of all three allegations are speech, reading, association and study. Not one of them involves violence. Not one of them involves any actual act of organised overthrow. The supporters' rebuttal of the first allegation deserves particular record. They argue that after interrogating more than seventy people the police still could not assemble presentable evidence, and so had to reinterpret the public pages and online groups that Wang had merely followed as groups he had "joined". Following became joining; reading became participation. That is the evidential logic of this case in miniature.

The joint allegation against both defendants concerned the gatherings. The indictment alleged that from November 2020 the defendants Wang Jianbing and Huang Xueqin used overseas communication software to post information about gatherings, regularly assembled many people for organised gatherings at Wang's rented residence, and used the opportunity to discuss social topics and incite participants' dissatisfaction with China's state power. The allegations against Huang additionally included publishing articles and speeches said to distort and attack the government on social media, and gathering overseas organisers to participate in online training in non-violent action. Read as a whole, the prosecution's chain of conduct is this: posting online, joining groups, taking an online course, and inviting friends home for conversation. Every link in that chain, taken alone, is ordinary daily life. The prosecution's technique was to string the links together and use the name of a grave crime to recharacterise the whole string. That is why Amnesty International, after the verdict, described the so-called evidence used to convict Wang as including his role in co-organising weekly gatherings, his participation in an online course on non-violence and his online posts on issues deemed sensitive by the government. The words "so-called" carry the international community's assessment of that evidence in full.

The procedure dragged on for an extraordinary length of time. In early August 2022 the case was transferred to the court for the first time. Then, for more than a year, there was no news of a hearing. On 22 September 2023, just after the second anniversary of the arrests, the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court heard the case behind closed doors. Two sets of records of that day need to be placed side by side. The first set is from outside the courtroom: roads around the court were closed, security was heavy, supporters were kept away, and diplomatic representatives of the United States, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom who tried to attend or observe were refused entry. The second set is from inside, from the first-hand account of Wang's father, Wang Zhixue. He had ridden a high-speed train for eleven hours from Gansu to Guangzhou, carrying a backpack and a box of local mooncakes he had bought, and on the day of the hearing he was allowed to sit in the gallery, only about a metre from his son. When Wang Jianbing was brought into the courtroom he was handcuffed, wearing a grey short-sleeved shirt and trousers, and as he left he glanced at his father. The hearing ran from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. The father sat in the gallery and listened to the entire proceedings, and for the first time learned what his son had been doing all these years. His son admitted that he had written those articles and expressed those views, but said he had done so hoping to foster a better and more harmonious society, that he had not intended to incite subversion of state power, and that being anti-party or anti-government had never been in his mind. The father saw that his son had lost more than ten pounds, and his only thought was to ask the lawyer to send in some clothes, murmuring to himself that the clothes probably could not be sent in and he would wait until his son was transferred to prison.

The two sets of records do not contradict each other. Together they form the complete picture. The hearing was closed to the public, to the media and to foreign observers, yet a narrow door was opened for the defendant's father. That a father could look at his son in a courtroom is the bare minimum of family feeling; it is not evidence of open justice. Whether the defence lawyers were allowed to present their case in full, and how the prosecution's evidence was tested, remain unknown to the outside world. Wang argued in court, in substance, that he was not guilty. Huang likewise denied the charges. Supporters relay that both pleaded not guilty. The hearing lasted a single day. Then came another wait of nearly nine months, until the verdict on 14 June 2024. Under the ordinary time limits of China's Criminal Procedure Law, judgment should have come far sooner. The Dui Hua Foundation and China Digital Times both noted the overrun: almost ten months separated the hearing from the verdict, beyond the statutory limit. One day of hearing, nine months of silence: that is the whole of what this case's judicial process left for the public to see.

Verdict and Appeal: Three and a Half Years, and an Appeal Dismissed Without Papers

On the morning of 14 June 2024 the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court delivered its verdict, nearly one thousand days after the two were taken away. Outside the court, stainless steel guardrails had been put up, large numbers of police officers, plainclothes personnel and "community volunteers" were on duty, and reporters and bystanders were kept away. Wang Jianbing was convicted of inciting subversion of state power and sentenced to three years and six months in prison, deprivation of political rights for three years, and confiscation of personal property of RMB 50,000. According to the verdict information cited by Chinese human rights organisations, a further RMB 100,000 of his savings was confiscated. A point of wording needs to be explained here. Sources differ on the RMB 50,000: Chinese Wikipedia and some reports write "confiscation of personal property of RMB 50,000", while Human Rights in China and many English-language reports write "a fine of RMB 50,000". The two formulations point to the same monetary penalty in the judgment. This page records it as "confiscation of personal property (reported by many outlets as a fine) of RMB 50,000", and marks the confiscation of the RMB 100,000 in savings as verdict content disclosed by supporters and human rights organisations. Huang Xueqin was sentenced on the same day to five years in prison, deprivation of political rights for four years and a fine of RMB 100,000, with a further confiscation of savings of 10,000 Philippine pesos. This site's existing page on Huang Xueqin recorded only Wang's prison term and deprivation of political rights, omitting his RMB 50,000 monetary penalty and the confiscation of RMB 100,000 in savings. This page corrects that omission, and lists it in the Verification Note.

Wang's position at sentencing, according to Reuters and supporters' records, was as follows. Huang told the court she intended to appeal. Wang said at the time that he would decide after consulting his lawyer. His decision then followed: he appealed against parts of the judgment. Amnesty International's record of the two appeals is fuller: both formally appealed to the Guangdong High People's Court, and their appeals were dismissed without proper notification or documentation. This site's Huang Xueqin page records that the appeals were dismissed by the Guangdong High Court in September 2024 and the original judgments upheld. This page retains that timing but states expressly that the exact date of the dismissal and the text of the ruling were never made public, and that the September 2024 point in time comes from supporters' and media reports, with no official document available for verification. The outcome of the appeal held no suspense. But the process left not even a piece of paper for the outside world. In that, it was of a piece with the secret trial: from beginning to end, the judicial system's account to the public in this case consisted of results only, never process.

His father, Wang Zhixue, never placed much hope in the appeal. His thinking was practical. His son was already forty, unmarried, and in prison. What he wanted most was for his son to come out early and to have a life afterwards. He said that if his son wanted to stay outside, he could stay outside, and if he wanted to come home, the father would simply farm an extra two acres, enough to feed him. That is the whole of what a farmer father could offer. Wang Jianbing's own position in court, meanwhile, never changed: he admitted what he had written and said, and he did not admit inciting subversion. The judgment took expression that he understood as meant "for a better society" and characterised it as inciting subversion of state power, stacking three punishments on top of three and a half years of imprisonment: loss of liberty for three and a half years; then, for three years after release, deprivation of political rights including freedom of speech, publication, assembly and association; and, at the same time, confiscation of property. This page lists that combination item by item precisely so that later users of the archive can see clearly that the judgment punished far more than a period of time.

The measure of the sentence also deserves record. For inciting subversion of state power, the ordinary statutory range is up to five years, with five years or more reserved for ringleaders or grave cases. Huang's five years applied the top of the ordinary range. Wang's three years and six months sits in the upper middle. Human Rights in China stated in its condemnation that the pair of sentences was particularly harsh even in the context of similar political cases, and that the judgments made clear the government's intention to punish the two not for any real crime but for their influence in organising a socially engaged and vibrant civil society. That assessment is the position of a human rights organisation and is cited here with its source attached. A spokesperson for the supporters' campaign put it more bluntly to Reuters: the authorities were using national security as a pretext to suppress social welfare activists, which was a denial and obliteration of the value of social justice and a denial of the moderate voices of civil society. Whether this case punished conduct or influence is a question the unpublished judgment does not answer. The answer can only be read from the proportion between the sentence and the content of the charges: one living room, a few online courses and some posts, in exchange for three years and six months.

Release and Current Status: 18 March 2025, Sent Home Two Thousand Kilometres Away

The sentence arithmetic should first be made clear. Wang Jianbing was taken away on 19 September 2021. Time in custody before sentencing counts against the sentence by law. A term of three years and six months counted from 19 September 2021 expires on 18 March 2025. The briefing for this page asked whether the release date was 18 or 19 March 2025. A definite answer can now be given: the actual release date was 18 March 2025. Amnesty International's statement of 18 March 2025 is headlined as a call to ensure Wang Jianbing's full freedom after his unjust imprisonment, and its text states expressly that the labour activist Wang Jianbing was released that day after completing his three-and-a-half-year sentence, with its China director responding on the day to "today's release". That date coincides exactly with the sentence calculation, and the fact is corroborated by multiple sources. The ev-meta box and the timeline on this page therefore both use 18 March 2025.

Amnesty International's statement records one key detail of the release day, which this site considers it essential to preserve in the archive in full. On the morning of his release, Wang was not permitted to return to his residence in Guangzhou. Instead, he was escorted by police more than 2,000 kilometres to his parents' home in a remote part of northwestern Gansu province. Amnesty International's China director, Sarah Brooks, said that his release that day should have marked the end of his unjust treatment and deprivation of liberty, but that Amnesty remained concerned that, despite having completed his sentence, he might face continued unlawful restrictions on his freedoms and the risk of re-detention, and that the authorities must ensure all arbitrary restrictions on him were immediately lifted and guarantee the full enjoyment of his human rights, including freedom of expression and association. The statement also pointed, by way of warning, to the case of citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who after her release in May 2024 faced months of harassment by local police and was ultimately re-detained on trumped-up charges. With that precedent on the record, the concern was not superfluous.

Release did not mean the restoration of freedom, and in this case that point has a precise legal structure. Wang's deprivation of political rights for three years is a supplementary punishment, counted from the completion of the main sentence: from 18 March 2025 until March 2028. Under China's Criminal Law, deprivation of political rights covers the rights to vote and to stand for election, together with freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration. In plain language, until March 2028 his rights to speak publicly, and to organise or join assemblies, are in law in a state of deprivation. Add to that the fact that he was escorted straight back to his place of origin on the day of his release, far from the work and the community networks he had built over some sixteen years in Guangzhou, and his actual radius of life has been compressed into a village in Gansu. His father's remark about farming an extra two acres to feed him stopped, after 18 March 2025, being a courtroom-day sentiment and became the practical arrangement.

The place where he served his sentence requires a separate statement: there is no public record. Unlike his co-defendant Huang Xueqin, whose imprisonment in Guangdong Women's Prison is expressly recorded by the Dui Hua Foundation, no reliable public source states which prison Wang Jianbing was sent to after sentencing. Before sentencing he was held in the Guangzhou detention centre system. Whether he served his sentence in Guangdong, and if so when he was transferred between facilities, is unknown to the outside world. This site states it expressly: the prison where he served his sentence is not in the public record, and no speculation is offered.

His health is the most worrying thread after release. According to Amnesty International, the health problems he acquired during his early solitary confinement were exacerbated by the fatigue of interrogations, were worsening again shortly before his release, and went untreated by the detention centre, which also refused the medicine his family and friends sent in. He had pre-existing serious heart and gastrointestinal problems, and a history of depression. Whether his health has recovered since release, and whether he has received treatment, is, as of the date this page was checked, not in the public record.

The public record of his life after release stops on 18 March 2025. From then until this page was checked in October 2026, Wang Jianbing's name has not appeared again in public reporting. There is no record of him returning to Guangzhou, no record of him resuming public-interest work, and no record of him being detained again. In the context of reporting on prisoners of conscience, silence usually means one of two things: that a person has been effectively silenced, or that a person is living quietly. Whichever it is, writing down honestly that there has been "no public progress" is the last duty an archive owes him for now. This page will keep following the questions that remain open: whether he returns to Guangzhou, what restrictions he in fact lives under during the deprivation of political rights, and what his position is when that supplementary punishment expires in March 2028. Each item will be added when, and only when, it can be verified.

International Response: From an Arbitrary-Detention Finding to the Release Statement

The density of the international response to this case is among the highest for cases of its kind, and it runs through every stage: arrest, detention, trial, verdict, appeal and release. This section sets it out in chronological order.

In February 2022, six United Nations independent experts, including the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, wrote jointly to the Chinese government expressing serious concern about Wang Jianbing's disappearance and deprivation of liberty. They asserted that his activities were protected and lawful, and that the Chinese authorities were using an over-broad definition of endangering national security that runs counter to international human rights law. In May 2022 the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention went a step further and formally determined that Wang Jianbing's detention was arbitrary, urging the authorities to ensure his immediate release and access to remedy, and requesting a comprehensive independent investigation into the case, with measures to hold those responsible for the violations to account. The Working Group has also repeatedly called on China to repeal the crime of inciting subversion, or to bring it into line with international standards. That determination is the weightiest record in this case at the level of international law: a United Nations mechanism had ruled, more than a year before the trial even began, that the detention itself was unlawful. Everything that followed, more than two further years of interrogation, trial and imprisonment, took place with that determination ignored.

Organisational support ran throughout. Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented the case continuously from 2021, preserving in its April 2022 detention report and its 2021 annual report on human rights defenders such key facts as the missing detention notices, the incommunicado confinement and the interrogation of more than seventy friends. In September 2022, at the first anniversary of the arrests, the International Service for Human Rights, the World Organisation Against Torture, the International Federation for Human Rights and other groups issued a joint statement demanding protection of the pair's rights and their immediate release. In September 2023, on the eve of the trial, dozens of civil-society organisations signed a further joint call for their immediate and unconditional release, and for guarantees, pending release, of access to family and to lawyers of their own choice, of medical treatment, and of freedom from torture and ill-treatment. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China entered Wang Jianbing in its political prisoner database under record number 2021-00517, updated his status year by year, and cited the United Nations arbitrary-detention determination in the executive summary of its annual report.

On the media side, Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Guardian and The New York Times all reported at the trial and verdict stages. Reuters' verdict report of 14 June 2024 confirmed the sentences and the pair's not-guilty position, and recorded that diplomatic representatives of six countries had tried to attend and been refused. The Guardian's trial report of 22 September 2023, republished by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, recorded the closure of roads around the court and the interrogation of nearly seventy acquaintances. The Dui Hua Foundation's prisoner update for 2024 recorded item by item the prosecution's allegations about organising gatherings through overseas communication applications and taking part in non-violence training run by foreign non-governmental organisations, providing a second source for the indictment's contents independent of the supporters.

The condemnations after the verdict were concentrated in June 2024. Human Rights in China issued a statement strongly condemning the sentences, publishing the full sentencing structure for both defendants, including Wang's RMB 50,000 monetary penalty and the confiscation of RMB 100,000 of his savings, and arguing that the judgments were intended to punish the two for their influence. Amnesty International called the convictions malicious and said they showed Beijing's growing fear of dissent. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, publicly criticised the heavy sentences imposed on the two in June 2024, a point already recorded on this site's Huang Xueqin page and covering this case equally.

The response at the release stage is represented by Amnesty International's statement of 18 March 2025, whose contents are set out in full in the preceding section: it welcomed the release, condemned the unjust conviction, exposed the arrangement under which he was escorted back to his place of origin, warned of the risk of re-detention, and demanded the lifting of all arbitrary restrictions. Since then, international public attention to Wang Jianbing has fallen silent along with the man himself. Laying this chain of responses out in full reveals a pattern worth recording in its own right. The international mechanisms said everything they had to say. The arbitrary-detention finding was made. And none of it produced any observable change in the treatment of the individual concerned. He still served the whole of his three years and six months, not one day less. Recording these responses is therefore not only a record of solidarity. It is a record of the real limits of what international human rights machinery can do when it faces a one-party state.

Timeline

14 July 1983: Wang Jianbing is born in Tianshui, Gansu Province (the exact date is single-sourced; the year and the place of origin are corroborated by multiple sources). Around 2005: he graduates from Northwest Normal University (his field of study is single-sourced) and joins the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation, beginning his career in the non-profit sector. Around 2014: he moves south to Guangzhou and joins the Guangzhou Gongming Social Organization Development Center, working on youth development and disability empowerment projects. 2015: a succession of crackdowns, including the Feminist Five case, the 709 crackdown on lawyers and the campaign against Guangdong labour organisations, sees many of his friends and working partners arrested. 2018: he leaves Gongming and joins a rights-based social work organisation, focusing on legal and community support for workers with occupational diseases, above all migrant workers with pneumoconiosis; he rents the second-floor one-bedroom flat at No. 149 Xingang West Road in Haizhu District, Guangzhou, intending it as a meeting place for pneumoconiosis workers. May to October 2020: while studying in the United Kingdom, he takes an online course on non-violent movements (a matter alleged in the indictment). From November 2020: he hosts weekly gatherings at his rented home; the community calls itself Night Sailing Boat. Afternoon of 19 September 2021: Guangzhou public security officers take Wang Jianbing and Huang Xueqin away from his home in Guangzhou and seize their belongings; Huang had been due to leave for study in Britain the next day, and Wang was to see her off. There follow more than five months of solitary incommunicado detention, at a location that is not in the public record, with no detention notice given to the family. 27 October 2021: he is formally arrested on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power; the arrest notice reaches his family on 5 November, naming Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre as the place of detention, although the detention centre's deposit system shows no such person. 8 December 2021: the global alumni community of the British Chevening scholarship launches a worldwide petition in support of Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing. February 2022: six United Nations experts write to the Chinese government expressing concern. 27 March 2022: the case is transferred to the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate for review and prosecution. 1 April 2022: he meets his lawyer for the first time, by video link, ending his period of solitary confinement (a January 2023 date for the transfer to Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre is given by other sources; see the discrepancy discussion in the text). May 2022: the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determines that his detention is arbitrary. Early August 2022: the case is first transferred to the court. 22 September 2023: the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court hears the case behind closed doors, in a single-day hearing attended in the gallery by his father, Wang Zhixue, while diplomatic representatives of several countries who attend are refused entry. 14 June 2024: judgment at first instance; Wang Jianbing is sentenced to three years and six months in prison, deprivation of political rights for three years and confiscation of personal property of RMB 50,000, with a further confiscation of RMB 100,000 of savings according to disclosed verdict information. September 2024: according to supporters' and media reports, the appeal is dismissed by the Guangdong High People's Court and the original judgment upheld (the ruling was never published). 18 March 2025: he is released on completion of his sentence and is escorted by police the same day back to his parents' home in Gansu. March 2028: the three-year deprivation of political rights expires (calculated).

Our Take

The thing in this case that most deserves to be remembered is not the name of the crime. It is the second floor of that flat. When Wang Jianbing rented the home on Xingang West Road he paid more than he needed to, for one reason only: because pneumoconiosis workers cannot breathe and cannot climb to high floors. A man who thought about floor numbers for workers who were suffocating was later imprisoned by the state for three and a half years for inciting subversion. Put those two facts side by side and the language of the judgment collapses under its own weight. An indictment can describe a living room as the scene of a crime. It cannot explain why that living room was on the second floor.

Look next at the charges themselves. Joining a few online groups, reposting some articles, taking one online course on non-violence, and inviting friends home for tea and conversation: that is the picture of subversion the prosecution assembled for a labour activist. To build it, the police interrogated more than seventy people, and what they finally wrote into the indictment was still only this. The thinner the evidence grew, the heavier the name of the crime became. That is not justice; it is a public demonstration. What was being punished was not anything Wang Jianbing had done, but a warning addressed to everyone who might want to gather people together or walk part of the road beside the weak: look carefully at how this ends. His father, who sat through the whole case in the gallery, put the plain truth of it in one sentence. In our villages, he said, people sit together and talk about the affairs of the country too, they criticise and say whatever they want, and nobody interferes. Why, then, did the same talk, in a living room in Guangzhou, become subversion of state power? The judgment never answered that question. This archive preserves it in his place.

The procedural account must be settled with the same care. Forty-seven days without a detention notice. Five months of solitary detention at an unknown location. A trial that proceeded as usual after the United Nations had determined the detention to be arbitrary. A secret hearing that lasted one day. A wait of nine months that exceeded the legal limit. An appeal dismissed without papers. And, on the day of release, an escort of more than two thousand kilometres. Taken one by one, each of these might look like an irregularity. Taken together, they are a complete method of disposal: first make a person vanish from the world; then convict him through a process conducted entirely behind a closed door; then deliver him to a place two thousand kilometres from his life, with three more years in which he is forbidden to speak. That method was used not on a violent criminal, but on a man who rented flats for workers and made tea for his friends. What the authorities fear was never anything he had done. It was the one thing he proved: that people can connect with each other and support each other without an organisation's permission. The name Night Sailing Boat was the thing that had to be destroyed.

This site gives Wang Jianbing a page of his own, separate from the Huang Xueqin case in which he has usually appeared as a co-defendant, for the same reason. In most reporting on the "XueBing case" he has been the labour activist standing next to the journalist: the supporting figure. But his sixteen years of public-interest work are, in themselves, a miniature history of Chinese civil society growing and then being pulled up by the roots. From rural education to disability empowerment, from pneumoconiosis workers to a weekly living room, every step he took was something this society once permitted and later permitted no longer. He served his sentence to the last day, came out, and was sent back to a village in Gansu, to farm two extra acres. That ending is not his alone. It is the shared ending of a generation of grassroots public-interest workers. This site records it so that those who come later will know: people like this existed here, did this work, and paid this price.

Verification Note

Characterisation by this site: this case is one of imprisonment for speech, and constitutes political persecution of a labour organiser and civil-society connector. Wang Jianbing is not an ordinary criminal defendant. The people he worked for were workers with occupational diseases and the disability community, and the content of the charges against him consists entirely of speech, association and study. The case therefore meets this site's inclusion standard for the Persecution record. The evidence grading and the checking process are as follows.

Facts verified by multiple independent sources: that he was taken away in Guangzhou on 19 September 2021, on the same day and in the same operation as Huang Xueqin (Amnesty International, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Wikipedia and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China agree); that he was formally arrested on 27 October 2021 (Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the International Federation for Human Rights and the arrest notice number agree); that he was held in solitary incommunicado detention for more than five months (Amnesty International, the International Service for Human Rights and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China agree); that the substance of the charges was the weekly gatherings, the online course on non-violence and online speech (Amnesty International, the Dui Hua Foundation, Reuters and Agence France-Presse agree); that the trial was held behind closed doors on 22 September 2023 (The Guardian, Reuters and joint statements agree); that at first instance on 14 June 2024 he was sentenced to three years and six months in prison and three years' deprivation of political rights (Reuters, the Associated Press and Amnesty International agree); that the appeal was dismissed by the Guangdong High People's Court (Amnesty International: dismissed without proper notification or documentation); that he was released on 18 March 2025 on completion of his sentence and escorted by police back to his parents' home in Gansu (Amnesty International's statement of that day, including the detail of the escort of more than 2,000 kilometres); that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined in 2022 that his detention was arbitrary (United Nations records, the International Federation for Human Rights and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China agree); and that he entered the non-profit sector in 2005, worked on rural education with Western Sunshine, joined Gongming in 2014 and focused on workers with occupational diseases after 2018 (Wikipedia, the Weiquanwang system's introductions, the long account by friends and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China agree).

Matters resting on a single source or on relayed accounts, flagged as such in the text: the birth date of 14 July 1983 and pre-school education at Northwest Normal University rest on Chinese Wikipedia alone and are marked unverified; the indictment number Sui Jian Xing Su [2022] Z11 comes from Wikipedia's citation of indictment screenshots, the court has never published the full text, and Agence France-Presse stated that it could not independently verify the screenshots, so it is marked unverified; the details of his father's attendance at the trial and of the exchanges between father and son come from a single long narrative account produced from friends' recollections, vivid in detail but not independently verifiable, and are handled as relayed material; his depression, his sleep and the details of his daily life come from the same account and are cited as relayed material; health details such as the dozens of interrogations and the refusal of medicine come from relays by Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Amnesty International, consistent in direction but without an independent channel of verification; the confiscation of RMB 100,000 of savings comes from verdict information cited by Human Rights in China and disclosed by supporters, with no text of the judgment available for checking; and the wording of the RMB 50,000 monetary penalty differs between sources, between confiscation of personal property and a fine, and both forms are recorded in the text.

Matters on which the sources diverge, set side by side in the text: the legal label of the five months of solitary detention, where formal RSDL and quarantine detention under the pretext of epidemic prevention both appear in the record, and this site confirms only the three core characteristics of solitary, secret and incommunicado confinement; and the date of transfer to Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Centre, where April 2022 and January 2023 versions coexist, possibly involving a merger of detention centres or a further transfer, which this site cannot resolve. This site's existing Huang Xueqin page states that the two were placed under residential surveillance at a designated location for more than five months. That is not wholly consistent with the second version set out on this page. This page follows the fuller side-by-side presentation of sources, notes the difference in wording between the two pages here, and will revise both pages together if new evidence appears.

Record of the checking of the briefing, and corrections. First, the briefing's statements that he was taken away on 19 September 2021, tried on 22 September 2023 and sentenced on 14 June 2024 to three years and six months for inciting subversion of state power were each checked and are correct. Second, on the briefing's question about the eve of departure for study in Britain: the person leaving for Britain was Huang Xueqin, and Wang Jianbing was seeing her off; Wang's own period of study in Britain was in 2020. If the briefing attributes the departure to Wang, that is a misattribution, corrected in the text. Third, on the briefing's reference to projects for cleaners and domestic workers: a search of the whole available record found no public source supporting it; every source checked points to workers with occupational diseases, above all migrant workers with pneumoconiosis. The claim is judged to be without foundation, is not accepted, and is recorded here. Fourth, on the briefing's question whether the release date was 18 or 19 March 2025: Amnesty International's statement of the day establishes 18 March; the 19 March version does not stand. Fifth, on the briefing's question about the location of the residential surveillance at a designated location: there is no public record, and on the accounts available Wang himself did not know the exact location; any claim of a specific location is without evidence. Sixth, this site's Huang Xueqin page omitted Wang's RMB 50,000 monetary penalty and the confiscation of RMB 100,000 of savings; this page corrects the omission. That page's statement that Wang was released on completion of his sentence in March 2025 is consistent with the date established on this page, and there is no contradiction. Seventh, the prison where he served his sentence is not in the public record; the text states this expressly and offers no speculation. Eighth, from his release until October 2026 there has been no further public record, and the text reports this honestly in the form "no public progress to date".

Check against the three-requirements rule: time and place are confirmed, in that the times and places of the arrest, the trial, the verdict and the release are all recorded by multiple sources; cross-verification has been completed, across four classes of source, namely human rights organisations, United Nations mechanisms, international media and official databases; and on the requirement of video or photographic evidence, the position is stated honestly: there is no video of the trial, because the hearing was not public, while photographs of Wang Jianbing's life and of the outside of the court, published by supporters, are in circulation. This text archive rests on the mutual corroboration of documents and reporting.