第64案 | 谢阳Case 64 | Xie Yang
湖南人权律师谢阳2015年7月11日在709大抓捕中于怀化出差时被带走，在指定居所监视居住的秘密关押中遭受剥夺睡眠、吊椅、殴打和死亡威胁；2017年1月，他的律师陈建刚将酷刑会见笔记公之于众，引发欧盟声明和11国使团联名关切，当局随即以官媒抹黑、切断律师会见和逼迫庭审认罪回应，妻子陈桂秋带两个女儿经泰国在美方人员介入下于2017年3月17日抵达美国；同年5月8日庭审认罪、5月9日取保后被严密监控，12月26日被以煽动颠覆国家政权罪定罪免刑，联合国任意拘留问题工作组认定其拘留任意；2020年8月11日湖南省司法厅以该定罪为据吊销其执业证书；2021年底他声援被强制送入精神病院的怀孕教师李田田，2022年1月11日再被长沙警方拘留、关入长沙市第一看守所107监室，经历约七个月强迫失踪和13次延长羁押，2025年闭门庭审后，于2026年3月23日被长沙中院以几条微信发帖为据判处有期徒刑五年，刑期折抵后预计2027年1月10日届满，二审结果、服刑地点与最新健康状况截至2026年10月均无公开记录。Hunan human rights lawyer Xie Yang was taken in Huaihua on 11 July 2015 during the 709 crackdown and, in secret designated-location detention, subjected to sleep deprivation, the dangling chair, beatings and death threats. In January 2017 his lawyer Chen Jiangang published the torture meeting notes, prompting an EU statement and a joint letter from eleven diplomatic missions; the authorities answered with a state-media smear, cut off his lawyers, and staged a courtroom recantation, while his wife Chen Guiqiu fled with their two daughters through Thailand and, after US intervention in Bangkok, reached the United States on 17 March 2017. He pleaded guilty on 8 May 2017, was bailed under tight surveillance on 9 May, and on 26 December 2017 was convicted of inciting subversion and exempted from punishment — a detention the UN Working Group found arbitrary. On 11 August 2020 the Hunan justice department revoked his licence on the basis of that conviction. After he supported pregnant teacher Li Tiantian, who had been forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital, Changsha police detained him again on 11 January 2022, held him in Cell 107 of Changsha No. 1 Detention Centre through some seven months of enforced disappearance and thirteen detention extensions, tried him behind closed doors in 2025, and on 23 March 2026 the Changsha Intermediate Court sentenced him to five years on the basis of several WeChat posts, the term expected to expire on 10 January 2027; as of October 2026 the appeal outcome, prison of service and latest health are all matters of no public record.
Who he was: a lawyer who started practising in 2011
Xie Yang was born on 4 February 1972. That date appears in the Hunan Provincial Department of Justice's own administrative penalty notice of 2020, the document that revoked his licence; the same notice gives his practising certificate number and names his firm, Hunan Gangwei Law Firm. Human Rights Watch described him as 54 years old in March 2026, which fits that birth year. He did not come to the law young. Every public source agrees that he only began practising in 2011, when he was already 39. Over the following decade he concentrated on the cases other lawyers avoided, or took on at personal risk: land-expropriation disputes, religious-freedom cases, abuses of public power, and detained activists.
His colleagues' recollections fill in the temperament. In a piece written in December 2015 and published in April 2017, his later defence lawyer Chen Jiangang described a lawyer willing to take any case, disliked by a small clique in power, and determined to earn the respect of ordinary people. That is a friend's portrait, and this page treats it as colour rather than evidence. What multiple human rights organisations state consistently is the caseload: before the 709 crackdown he had represented activists seized in the 2011 Jasmine crackdown, participants in the New Citizens' Movement in 2013, and mainland supporters of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests in 2014. The joint statement by legal organisations in 2025 and 2026 traces the same record. When police took him in July 2015, in other words, they were not taking a bystander. They were taking a practising lawyer whose name already appeared across a list of sensitive cases.
One further trait mattered later: he did not moderate his speech. On Weibo, on WeChat and later on Twitter, now X, he criticised China's political and judicial system directly, and he did not avoid interviews with foreign media. In the second case the prosecution made those words themselves the substance of the crime, alleging that his comments attacked and denigrated state power, the socialist system and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. From the first case to the second, the logic never changed. First the cases he took made him a target. Then the words he spoke became a charge.
Sources: Hunan Provincial Department of Justice, Notice of Administrative Penal Action, 11 August 2020 (full text and translation published by China Change); Human Rights Watch statement, 23 March 2026; joint statement of Lawyers for Lawyers, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe and other legal and human rights organisations on the Xie Yang case; Chen Jiangang, "The Anecdotal Xie Yang," China Change, 24 April 2017.
Before 709: Qing'an, courtroom order and the sensitive clients
To understand the odd second charge in the first case — disrupting court order — it is necessary to go back to 2014 and the first half of 2015. The reasoning of the Changsha court's December 2017 judgment, as relayed by Xinhua, held that between 2014 and March 2015 Xie, acting in a case, gathered people to observe a hearing, banged on tables and insulted the judge; that in 2015 he hyped the Qing'an railway-station shooting, in which police shot Xu Chunhe, and accused local police; and that after he was assaulted by an opposing party in a civil case he used social media to accuse local police of organising gangs and meddling in economic disputes. The court assembled those acts of lawyering and online speech into the factual basis for inciting subversion and disrupting court order. This page records the prosecution's account in full, not because it accepts it, but because an archive must let readers see how a lawyer's courtroom posture and his accusations against police were re-narrated as evidence of subverting state power.
In the same period he represented mainland supporters of the Hong Kong protests, a fact noted repeatedly by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and international media. He also took part in anti-torture education work. Background material from Chinese Human Rights Defenders suggests that this work may have been one reason he became a 709 target. That last point is an assessment by a human rights organisation, not a police document, and this page marks it as analysis rather than an established fact.
At the beginning of July 2015 the 709 crackdown began. From 9 July, Wang Yu, Zhou Shifeng and others at Beijing's Fengrui law firm disappeared in succession, and in the end roughly three hundred lawyers, law-firm staff and activists across the country were arrested, interrogated, warned or briefly detained. Xie was not in Beijing. He was on a work trip in western Hunan. Two days later, the arrests reached him.
Sources: Xinhua report of the Changsha Intermediate People's Court verdict, 26 December 2017; Agence France-Presse report of 8 May 2017, republished by Chinese Human Rights Defenders; joint statement of international legal organisations.
11 July 2015: taken on a work trip in Huaihua
On 11 July 2015 police took Xie Yang while he was on a business trip in Huaihua, Hunan. The Front Line Defenders case file is more specific: he was taken from a hotel room and placed under residential surveillance at a designated location, at an undisclosed site, with no access to family or counsel. Material published by Chinese Human Rights Defenders in August 2016 likewise records that he was taken in Huaihua. In his own later torture account and in his lawyers' meeting notes, the officers handling his case are identified as personnel of the Changsha Public Security Bureau.
From that day he entered six months of residential surveillance at a designated location — RSDL. In the text of the law it is a form of residential surveillance. In practice it is solitary secret detention outside the detention-centre system: no address given to the family, no lawyer visits, no telephone, no letters. The UN Committee against Torture and successive UN experts have stated repeatedly that this form of detention amounts in itself to enforced disappearance and sharply raises the risk of torture. The legal organisations' joint statement in Xie's second case quotes that UN assessment again.
According to the account compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders from the lawyers' meeting notes, the secret site where Xie was held was a guesthouse for officials on the campus of the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha. The detail is worth remembering: a guesthouse on the campus of a military university was used as the secret interrogation site for a lawyer. Finer details — room numbers, the names of individual guards — appear only in his own account and the lawyers' notes, with no independent official document against which to check them; the Verification Note flags them separately.
His family did not at first know where he was. Contemporary case bulletins from lawyers' rights organisations record that more than 55 days passed with no public news of him. Lawyers retained by the family asked to meet him and were refused on the ground that he was suspected of endangering national security. Disappearance first, charges later was the common method of the 709 cases. Xie's case is simply one of the longest-running, and the one whose details were later disclosed most fully.
Sources: Front Line Defenders case file on Xie Yang, updated 6 March 2017; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, call for a torture investigation, January 2017, and material of August 2016; Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada case reporting.
Six months in RSDL: the torture he later described
The period from 11 July 2015 to the beginning of January 2016 was, on his own telling, the darkest of his life. Across meetings with his lawyers in July and November 2016 and again in January 2017, he described it piece by piece. Between 4 and 13 January 2017 his lawyers Chen Jiangang and Liu Zhengqing met him repeatedly at Changsha No. 2 Detention Centre and turned his account into detailed meeting notes. Those notes were published in four parts in late January, with an English translation, and international media reported them extensively. They were the first complete torture testimony from inside the 709 crackdown to be recorded word by word by a detainee's own lawyer and made public while the detainee was still in custody.
On his account, the torture was concentrated in the first phase of the secret detention. Officers deprived him of sleep for long stretches: from the time he was taken on 11 July he went more than thirty hours without closing his eyes, and afterwards was allowed only very short periods of sleep each day. Interrogations ran through the night; the interrogators rotated, he could not. He described a slow punishment called the dangling chair: plastic stools stacked one on another, on which he was made to sit all day with both feet unable to touch the ground, allowed down only for roughly the two hours he was permitted to sleep. He told his guards that his right leg had an old injury. It made no difference. Sitting fixed in that posture for hours left his legs swollen and in pain.
He also described beatings, death threats and humiliation. Officers hit him, threatened to kill him and verbally degraded him, pressing him to confess to a prepared set of facts and to implicate other lawyers and activists. After he refused to implicate others, the abuse continued. He described a chronic constipation that became severe and extremely painful because in detention he could not get enough water or fruit; when he asked for fruit, officers treated it as a bargaining chip and demanded that he first write a confession or an implicating statement. He did not trade.
The Front Line Defenders file records further methods he reported: being suspended, being beaten by guards, and being beaten by fellow inmates acting on guards' instructions — inmates hitting him with shackles and guards hitting him with hands, feet and at times their heads. Those details are consistent in direction with the Chen Jiangang notes, but individual items come from summaries of different meetings, so this page does not present every item as independently corroborated. What can be stated firmly is narrower and still damning: his account of five categories of abuse — sleep deprivation, prolonged interrogation, beatings, death threats and humiliation — remained consistent across the meetings of July and November 2016 and January 2017, and no Chinese official investigation has ever publicly and verifiably rebutted its detail. The Hunan Provincial People's Procuratorate's so-called investigation, announced in March 2017, produced a conclusion of no torture and published neither its process nor its evidence.
In January 2016 he was formally arrested and transferred to Changsha No. 2 Detention Centre. According to Xinhua's later reporting, prosecutors twice returned the case to police for supplementary investigation during the review-for-prosecution stage, on the ground that the facts were unclear and the evidence insufficient. A case sent back twice still ended in indictment and conviction, and that sequence belongs in the archive. Sources differ on the exact date of the formal arrest within January 2016, giving the 8th, 9th and 11th; this page gives only the month, and the Verification Note records the discrepancy.
Sources: Chen Jiangang, transcripts of interviews with Xie Yang, Parts One to Four, China Change, 19–22 January 2017; Chinese Human Rights Defenders statement calling for a torture investigation, January 2017; Front Line Defenders case file; Xinhua and People's Daily Online reporting of the 8 May 2017 trial.
The handwritten statement of 13 January 2017: if I confess, it will not be my will
Around the publication of the meeting notes there is a second key document. On 13 January 2017 Xie wrote a statement by hand and sealed it with his fingerprint: he was innocent, and if one day he confessed in court, it would only be because the torture was continuing, or for the sake of his family. His wife Chen Guiqiu made the statement's existence public before the trial in May 2017, and the China Change article introducing the case also described the handwritten statement sealed with red fingerprint impressions. Four months later he did exactly what the statement had predicted: he pleaded guilty in court and denied that he had been tortured. No reader of this record can get around that earlier document. It functions as testimony left in advance, written specifically to explain the trial that followed.
The torture disclosures drew an immediate international response. The European Union's delegation in China issued a statement expressing concern at reports of serious mistreatment of Xie Yang and of lawyers Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang, stating that if verified the treatment would amount to torture, calling on the competent Chinese authorities to investigate without delay, and repeating the call for the release of lawyers still in detention. In February 2017 the diplomatic missions of eleven countries in Beijing wrote jointly to the Chinese side expressing growing concern over claims of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detained human rights lawyers and defenders, and urging China to abandon the practice of secret detention. Agence France-Presse reporting named Canada, Australia and Switzerland among the signatories. The letter itself was not published in full, so this page records it according to consistent reporting by several outlets and does not list a complete roster of signatories that cannot be verified.
China's response was not to investigate the officers. It was to silence the lawyers. From around 27 February 2017, Xie's two family-retained lawyers were refused meetings again and again. The last time they had seen him was 6 February, even though the case had entered the trial stage and Chinese law should not have restricted lawyer visits in that way. Chen Guiqiu's public account of 9 April 2017 records the change plainly: the stronger the international attention grew, the more completely his contact with the outside world was cut.
Sources: Chen Guiqiu, public articles of 9 April and 8 May 2017, China Change; EU Delegation to China statement, republished by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre; China Change reporting of 28 March 2017 on the eleven-country letter; Agence France-Presse, 25 April 2017.
March 2017: the state-media smear, Jiang Tianyong on camera, and a conclusion without a process
On 1 March 2017 Xinhua, the Global Times and other state media published synchronised reports claiming that the story of Xie Yang's torture was fabricated fake news. The reports aimed their fire at another lawyer then himself held incommunicado, Jiang Tianyong: they said Jiang had admitted directing Xie's wife to invent torture details in order to attract Western media attention. The reports carried a photograph of Xie with a shaved head, smiling behind bars, and cited an investigation by a team set up by the Hunan Provincial People's Procuratorate concluding that no torture had taken place, that Xie slept nine hours a day and that medical checks showed him in good health.
That version has a hole in it that cannot be closed. Jiang Tianyong was at that moment held completely incommunicado. His family had been unable to reach him since he disappeared in November 2016 after visiting relatives of Xie Yang in Changsha. He was in no position to give a free interview, let alone to verify admissions attributed to him. His wife Jin Bianling told Reuters that the authorities were simply trying to discredit him because his case had received international media attention. An Amnesty International researcher noted at the time that this was the first occasion on which Chinese state media had directly borrowed the term fake news to attack human rights reporting. Around 2 March Xie himself was also produced for a state-media interview repeating the denial of torture — while still in a detention centre, less than two months after he had written by hand that a confession from him would be coerced.
This page's position on this episode is set out in the Verification Note. The state-media reports are retained as primary material for the prosecution's position, but the admission attributed to Jiang Tianyong was published unilaterally by state media while Jiang was forcibly disappeared and unable to speak freely, and it cannot be used as evidence overturning the torture allegations. On the other side stand Xie's own detailed and mutually consistent accounts given at different times to different lawyers, the handwritten statement left in advance, and the repetition of similar allegations in his second detention. The two bodies of material do not carry equal evidentiary weight.
Sources: Xinhua and Global Times reports of 1–2 March 2017, republished by People's Daily Online; Reuters reporting, March 2017; Front Line Defenders update, 6 March 2017; China Change analysis, 28 March 2017.
A wife's escape with two daughters: a Bangkok detention cell, US diplomats, and 17 March 2017
In the very weeks when the torture dispute was at its height, Xie's wife made her decision. Chen Guiqiu was a professor of environmental science at Hunan University. She later wrote that while her husband was detained the authorities put the whole family under immense pressure: threats that a car accident would be staged to injure them, obstruction of their elder daughter's travel to Hong Kong, interference with the family bank account, confiscation of her father's and her sister's passports, and seizure of her mobile phone. She began to fear that she and her daughters would be used as hostages to force a confession. In February 2017 she left China with her two daughters and reached Thailand, where they stayed in a safe house.
On 2 March 2017 Thai authorities raided the safe house. Chen Guiqiu and her daughters were held in Bangkok's immigration detention centre. She later recalled being unable to communicate with the outside world and close to despair. At the same time, according to the account given to US media by Bob Fu of ChinaAid, Chinese agents were waiting outside the detention centre's front gate for the three to be deported back to China. Fu reported the exact location of their cell to the US State Department and other agencies. Within hours US officials were on their way; they persuaded the Thai authorities to escort the three out by a back door and take them to the airport, where Chinese agents again appeared and pressed the Thai side not to let them board. In the end the three were allowed to depart. The US embassy spokesperson in Beijing said only, citing privacy, that the Department of State takes seriously its obligations to assist US citizens abroad and had no further comment. Public reporting does not make clear whether any of the family held US status, and this page does not speculate.
On 17 March 2017 Chen Guiqiu and her two daughters arrived in the United States. Photographs and ChinaAid's bulletin confirm that date. She settled in the United States and became the principal public voice for her husband's case. On 30 June 2017 she published an open letter to him saying that she would not return to China and that she planned to hire lawyers to sue the Chinese government and everyone who had taken part in persecuting her family. She also disclosed that after his release on bail Xie had telephoned urging her to bring the children home and saying the government would guarantee their safety, but that on the call he had sounded strange and, uncharacteristically, had not asked about his daughters — from which she concluded that he was speaking under surveillance and at official direction, and refused to return. That conclusion is the wife's own stated perception, and this page records it as her account, not as a proven finding that the call was monitored.
Sources: ChinaAid bulletin of 30 June 2017 and Chen Guiqiu's open letter; National Public Radio reporting, May 2017; Amnesty International urgent-action update, 2017.
The trial of 8 May 2017 and bail the next day: a confession its author had predicted
The trial was postponed first. It had been scheduled for 25 April 2017 in Changsha. Dozens of supporters and several foreign diplomats travelled to the Changsha Intermediate People's Court, only to be told that the hearing was postponed indefinitely, with no new date and without the advance notice to family and lawyers that the rules require. By then the court had already stripped Xie of his choice of counsel: Chen Jiangang said the court had designated a defence lawyer, He Xiaodian, and that everything was being done according to the will of the judiciary, not the interests of Xie and his family. After 28 February he never saw the lawyers his family had retained again.
On the morning of 8 May 2017 the court announced on Weibo, roughly twenty minutes in advance, that the trial would be carried on the platform. The hearing lasted about three hours and ended by noon. No witnesses were called. Xie read from a prepared statement pleading guilty, saying that he had received training in Hong Kong and South Korea and been brainwashed, and asking the court for leniency. In court he denied that he had been tortured and said his rights had been fully protected. Official reporting said more than forty people attended, including relatives, two defenders, legislators, political advisers and Chinese and foreign journalists. None of that changes the hearing's basic shape: a man who four months earlier had written by hand that a confession from him would be coerced, and who had been cut off from his own lawyers for more than two months, stood in court and retracted his torture account in full. His wife, in the United States, wrote that the play had been performed beautifully and that history would remember the trial.
On 9 May 2017, as Amnesty International's urgent-action update confirms, he was released on bail with no verdict yet delivered. Bail did not mean freedom. According to Chen Guiqiu, a few hours after he had been allowed to celebrate his mother's eightieth birthday, he and his parents were taken to a remote mountain village in Hunan and their whereabouts became unknown. On the 10 May telephone call he sounded strange. On 20 May national-security officers accompanied him throughout a visit to his father-in-law, after which he was taken away again to an unknown location. In August 2017 Chen Guiqiu released a video disclosing that the authorities had installed a large metal gate with a fingerprint reader — effectively a cell door — outside the family apartment in Yuelu District, Changsha, and that the special task group handling his case had rented the adjacent apartment for a permanent watch. The building was a residence for Hunan University professors and title to the apartment was in Chen Guiqiu's name. A man on bail, living in his own home, who had to pass through a police-installed gate to come and go, with his watchers living next door: the phrase non-release release exists for exactly this.
Sources: Amnesty International urgent-action update ASA 17/6307/2017; Agence France-Presse and Chinese Human Rights Defenders reporting, 25 April and 8 May 2017; ChinaAid bulletin, 8 May 2017; China Change report of 2 August 2017 on the gate video; Xinhua and People's Daily Online, 8 May 2017.
26 December 2017: convicted and exempted from punishment — the verdict briefs most often miss
Many secondary summaries treat May 2017 — the guilty plea and the bail — as the end of the first case. That is wrong, and this page corrects it: the verdict came more than seven months later. On 26 December 2017 the Changsha Intermediate People's Court delivered its first-instance judgment: Xie Yang was guilty of inciting subversion of state power, and was exempted from criminal punishment. Xinhua's report that day said he accepted the verdict and would not appeal. The judgment's reasoning also referred to his disruption of court order while handling cases, but the offence of conviction was inciting subversion alone. The separate indictment charge of disrupting court order did not become a separate conviction, and public reporting offers no explanation for the change; this page records that absence of explanation as a matter of record.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had already given its view of the first detention. Material filed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders in 2024 recalls that in August 2017 the Working Group issued an opinion finding Xie's detention arbitrary and asking the Chinese authorities to release him and to provide state compensation. The opinion came while he was already out on bail, but it addressed the legality of the detention as a whole. It changed nothing in his situation. The verdict followed four months later, and from then on he carried a final, effective inciting-subversion conviction. Three years later that conviction was used to revoke his licence to practise. Later still, in the second case, it formed the background narrative of a repeat offender. Exemption from punishment sounds like leniency. Its practical effect was different: the man was not imprisoned, but the conviction stayed — and a conviction on file can be used at any time to take away a livelihood.
Legal organisations have offered a characterisation of the 2017 outcome: that conviction with exemption was an arrangement reached in exchange for his retraction of the torture allegations. That is an analytical judgment by human rights organisations about the process as a whole. Set beside the handwritten statement, the timing of the trial and the bail arrangements it has explanatory force, but it is not a published transactional document, and this page marks it as analysis.
Sources: Xinhua, 26 December 2017; UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN (13.2024); Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, November 2024; joint statement of international legal organisations.
The price paid by a defence lawyer's family: Chen Jiangang seized at gunpoint in Yunnan
The radius of persecution in the Xie Yang case never stopped at Xie Yang himself. In May 2017, around the time of the trial, his defence lawyer Chen Jiangang was travelling with his family in Yunnan when state-security personnel intercepted them. In Chen's own later account, published by Human Rights in China, security agents pointed guns at him and also at his two young sons, aged six and two, and he was treated as suspected of endangering national security. The thing he had done, in the end, was one thing only: he had recorded his own client's account of torture and made it public. In any country that recognises a defence profession, that is a lawyer's job. Here it was treated as a threat to the state. Chen later went into exile in the United States with his family, and in 2020 he and Chen Guiqiu gave China Change a long joint interview reviewing the disclosure of the torture and the smear campaign that followed.
The other defence lawyer, Liu Zhengqing, likewise took part in recording the January 2017 meetings. His later professional fate lies outside the scope of this case file. This page records only his role in this case: he became one of Xie's defence lawyers in December 2016 and, with Chen Jiangang, conducted the series of meetings between 4 and 13 January 2017. As for He Xiaodian, the lawyer the court designated for the 2017 trial, Agence France-Presse reported at the time that he could not be reached for comment and that the court did not answer calls. What defence the court-appointed lawyer actually mounted is a matter only of official trial excerpts in the public record, and this page makes no assessment beyond that record.
Sources: Chen Jiangang's account, published by Human Rights in China; China Change interviews with Chen Guiqiu and Chen Jiangang, 28 July 2020; Agence France-Presse, April 2017.
11 August 2020: the practising certificate is revoked
During the three years after bail and the conviction-with-exemption, Xie continued to work as a lawyer and continued to speak for colleagues and sensitive cases. The authorities' warning reached him through his firm's director. In his August 2020 interview with China Change he said that when justice officials delivered the penalty documents they told the director very clearly that if Xie Yang continued speaking to overseas media and exposing these details, they would take the decisive step of arresting him. The director passed the words on. Xie's answer was that the risk was always there, that suppressing the truth to stay safe was not his style, and that he was prepared for all consequences, including prison. His wife and two daughters were in the United States, he said; the authorities could only come after him, and he was glad his children were growing up and being educated there. The interview was given after the penalty was delivered, and he said it could be published in full and that he took responsibility for its truth.
On 11 August 2020 the Hunan Provincial Department of Justice issued its Notice of Administrative Penal Action revoking Xie Yang's licence to practise law. The factual basis stated in the notice is explicit: the Changsha Intermediate People's Court's first-instance criminal judgment of 26 December 2017 — the penalty materials cite the judgment as (2016) Hunan 01 Criminal First Instance No. 116 — had convicted him of inciting subversion and exempted him from punishment, and had found that while handling a case he had organised people to surround and support, banged on tables, insulted a judge and committed other acts disrupting court order, falling within the situations listed in items 6, 7 and 8 of Article 49(1) of the Lawyers Law. The notice states that he had been informed in advance, that his statement and appeal had been heard, and that he had not applied for a hearing within the allotted time; it designated the Changsha Railway Transportation Court as the court for an administrative lawsuit. The parts of the original commissioning brief for this page that left the date and mechanism of the disbarment open can therefore be settled: the date was 11 August 2020, and the mechanism was administrative revocation of the practising certificate premised on the 2017 conviction — not a professional-association sanction and not a fresh court judgment.
For a rights lawyer, revocation means more than the loss of a certificate. He could no longer meet clients, read case files or appear in court as a lawyer. He kept speaking for others afterwards, but his status had been reduced from defender to a citizen stripped of his qualification. When he was seized again in 2022, the indictment's description of him was a citizen and nothing more. The authorities first kept the conviction and waived the punishment, then used the conviction to revoke the licence, and finally used speech offences to put the man back in a cell. At each of the three steps, the outcome of the previous step was cited as the legal basis for the next.
Sources: Hunan Provincial Department of Justice, Notice of Administrative Penal Action, full text with China Change interviews and documents, 28–29 August 2020; UN Special Procedures communication summarising the revocation date.
December 2021: to Yongshun for Li Tiantian — the trigger of the second arrest
On 14 December 2021 Song Gengyi, a lecturer at Shanghai Aurora College, questioned in a class whether the official figure of 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre had statistical support. A student recorded and uploaded the remarks, and she was dismissed two days later. On 17 December Li Tiantian, a village schoolteacher in Yongshun County, Hunan, posted online in support of Song. Li was pregnant at the time. On the night of 19 December local education officials and her family took her to a psychiatric institution. Before she was taken she had sent out a plea for help saying officials wanted to give her injections for a mental problem, and that if she died it would be two lives. Several outlets accordingly reported that she had been forcibly committed; local officials said she had been admitted voluntarily. Radio Free Asia and Agence France-Presse both recorded that dispute, and this page records it both ways as well.
Xie Yang stepped forward. He went to Li Tiantian's school in Shaba Town and to the Yongshun County Public Security Bureau, displaying a banner calling for Teacher Li and her unborn child to be brought home, and he went to the Shaba police station to ask about her situation; the station said it had not taken part in the seizure on the night of 19 December. On 25 December photographs of him holding a placard outside the Yongshun county police department were published by media. Afterwards he and Ouyang Jinghua, Cheng Xiaofeng and others went to Li's home to visit and deliver more than three thousand yuan in donations; in the village they were beaten by local personnel and their phones were seized or smashed. Li Tiantian returned home around 26 December and posted thanks to her supporters on WeChat, but she and her family were afterwards told not to speak publicly, and her teaching qualification was reportedly at risk of revocation. That last point comes from an anonymous source quoted by Radio Free Asia, and this page marks it unverified.
The chronology matters. Li Tiantian was already home by the end of December 2021. Xie was arrested on 11 January 2022, about two weeks later. The stated ground on the police notice was suspicion of inciting subversion of state power and picking quarrels and provoking trouble. But his wife's account to Agence France-Presse, and the later statements of Human Rights Watch, Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the international legal organisations, all connect this detention directly with his support for Li Tiantian. He had just stood outside a public security bureau holding a placard for a pregnant teacher who had been put in a psychiatric hospital. Two weeks later he himself was put into Cell 107 of Changsha No. 1 Detention Centre — and he stayed there for more than four years.
Sources: Radio Free Asia, 20 and 27 December 2021; Agence France-Presse reporting, January 2022, widely republished; ChinaAid reporting on lawyers and local people searching for Li Tiantian; Human Rights Watch statement, March 2026.
The second arrest, 11 January 2022: a ransacked home, Cell 107, and seven months of disappearance
On 11 January 2022 the Changsha Public Security Bureau detained Xie Yang. He was initially held in Cell 107 of Changsha No. 1 Detention Centre. The suspected offences at the outset were inciting subversion, with picking quarrels and provoking trouble listed alongside it on the detention notice. His home was searched. From the United States, Chen Guiqiu described the search to Agence France-Presse: anything that could be opened had been opened or torn open, even his pillows had been ripped apart, and two computers and his safe were missing. The detailed inventory of seized property rests on the family's account alone; no police seizure list has been published, and this page records it as a single-source family account.
The notification chronology has several distinct points, and they must be written separately if the record is not to become confused. The international legal organisations' joint statement says his family was not notified until six days later, and that his whereabouts were unknown in the meantime. The UN Special Procedures communication says that on 17 February 2022 his father received the detention notice and Xie was formally arrested. The two documents most likely refer to different instruments: the first to the family's initial notification of detention, the second to delivery of the formal arrest notice to his father. From January to August 2022 he was refused access to a lawyer, and detention-centre guards refused even to confirm to his family that he was held there. In the words of the lawyers' organisations, this was his second enforced disappearance, lasting about seven months. From October 2022 to May 2023 he was again refused access to a lawyer of his choice, while the authorities tried to impose a state-appointed lawyer on him.
In August 2022 the Changsha People's Procuratorate indicted him on a single charge: inciting subversion of state power under Article 105(2) of the Criminal Law. Picking quarrels had disappeared from the indictment, and the public record gives no reason for its removal. The core of the indictment was speech: his posts on X and WeChat and his interviews with foreign media, alleged to attack and denigrate state power, the socialist system and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, the second case contained no allegation of violence, no allegation of organisation, and not even an allegation built on a particular case he had handled. It contained only words he had spoken.
Sources: UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN (13.2024); joint statements of Lawyers for Lawyers and other legal organisations, 2025 and March 2026 versions; Agence France-Presse, January 2022; Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission, November 2024.
Four years in Changsha No. 1: abuse allegations and an unanswered complaint
The record of his treatment in the second detention comes from three levels of sources. The first is the summary by lawyers' organisations: he reported beatings at Changsha No. 1 Detention Centre, being chained for days on end, sexual harassment and denial of food. The second is the specific detail relayed in the UN Special Procedures communication: in January 2024 he described being held in a cell designed for eighteen people but holding twenty, the crowding causing severe swelling and pain in his calves that woke him in pain every day. The third is in the same UN communication: on 12 March 2024 detention-centre police allegedly demanded that he expose his genitals, perform a lewd dance and pay a bribe of 20,000 yuan in order to be allowed the meeting with officials that he wanted in order to make a complaint. That third allegation is grave. In public sources it rests on the single chain of the UN communication's relay, and this page marks it expressly as relayed by the UN Special Procedures communication and not independently verified — unverified — while noting that it points in the same direction as the lawyers' organisations' summary allegation of sexual harassment, and that China's reply to the UN communication has never publicly rebutted its detail. This page neither deletes it nor inflates its evidential grade.
He tried to complain through the system. Material filed with the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention by Chinese Human Rights Defenders records that on 23 May 2023 he told his lawyer that in March of that year he had submitted a written opinion about his prolonged detention to the detention centre and heard nothing back, and that in April he had applied in writing to the Changsha Intermediate People's Court for a change of compulsory measures — release on bail pending trial — asking the court to answer within three days as the law provides; according to the family, the court never replied. Both items come from defence-side material filed by a human rights organisation, with no public response from the court, and this page records them as such.
At a pre-trial meeting on 2 September 2024 his defence lawyers concentrated their fire on procedure: they had not had access to the indictment and case files before the meeting, and the judge insisted on proceeding knowing the defence could not prepare. They also sought the recusal of several members of the judicial committee who had been involved in Xie's 2015–17 proceedings, including Lan Zhilong, head of the Second Criminal Division, and of the former presiding judge Liang Feng and the current judge Yu Dan, to prevent retaliatory adjudication. Judge Yu had refused a bail application without issuing a written decision. The meeting broke down when Yu tried to move the agenda forward without addressing those applications and the defence objected forcefully. That is the last occasion in the public record on which his defence fought at scale inside the procedure. After it, the case went silent for more than a year, until the secret hearing.
Sources: joint statement of international legal organisations; UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN (13.2024); Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, November 2024.
Thirteen extensions, a secret trial, and five years on 23 March 2026
From 11 January 2022 until sentencing on 23 March 2026, Xie Yang was held in an undecided case for four years and more than two months. Human Rights Watch, citing information published by Chen Guiqiu, says the authorities extended his pre-trial detention thirteen times. A judgment that takes thirteen extensions to arrive has, in substance, already served most of itself before it is pronounced: with the five-year term credited for time held, he is expected to complete the sentence on 10 January 2027, which means that at sentencing less than ten months remained. The Dui Hua Foundation's 2026 prisoner update gives exactly that expiry date, 10 January 2027.
The hearing was not public. The joint statement of international legal organisations says closed-door trial hearings were held in July and October 2025. Human Rights Watch's statement concentrates on a secret trial in October 2025, saying police told his family only afterwards. The two accounts can coexist — there may have been two closed hearings, of which Human Rights Watch confirmed one — and this page records the trial months as July and October 2025 on the legal organisations' account, noting the Human Rights Watch account of October 2025 alongside it. The common confirmed points are these: no public hearing, no participation by the defence lawyer of his choice, and no advance knowledge on the family's part.
On 23 March 2026 the Changsha Intermediate People's Court pronounced judgment: guilty of inciting subversion of state power, five years in prison, and a property measure of 100,000 yuan. The basis of the conviction, according to information posted by Chen Guiqiu on social media and cited by Human Rights Watch, was several of his WeChat posts. Security outside the court that morning was tight. His elder brother, sister-in-law and niece were allowed into the courtroom to observe. The Dui Hua Foundation reports that apart from family members the benches were filled with attendees arranged by the authorities, and that no defence lawyer was permitted to take part. Xie stated in court on the spot that he did not accept the judgment and would appeal; ChinaAid, quoting a person present with knowledge of the hearing, likewise reports that he appealed immediately.
On the 100,000 yuan, Human Rights Watch and the Dui Hua Foundation both describe confiscation of 100,000 yuan in property, while the joint statement of international legal organisations describes a fine of 100,000 yuan. That is not a trivial difference: confiscation and a fine differ in legal character and in what they attach to. But no full text of the judgment has been published, so this page cannot determine which rendering corresponds to the judgment's own words, and sets both side by side with the discrepancy flagged. Full text of the judgment: no public record. His retained lawyers were excluded from the sentencing procedure and the family had no public channel for obtaining the complete judgment text in advance — and that is itself the reason the judgment cannot be checked.
There is one later item. A compilation of Chinese lawyers' rights documentation for January to April 2026 by Human Rights in China contains this entry: on 16 April, lawyer Zhang Lei met Xie Yang, and Xie decided to waive his right to appeal. That record comes from a compilation drawing on Chinese public information, a single source chain, and this page marks it unverified. If it is accurate, it means the appeal he announced in court never entered a second-instance procedure. As of October 2026 this site has searched the published material of Human Rights Watch, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the Dui Hua Foundation, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and the international legal organisations and has found no second-instance judgment from the Hunan Provincial High People's Court, no information that he has been transferred to a named prison to serve the sentence, and no recent bulletin on his health. Item by item: outcome of any appeal, no public record; prison of service, no public record; family visits after April 2026, no public record; latest state of health, no public record.
Sources: Human Rights Watch statement, 23 March 2026; Dui Hua Foundation, Prisoner Updates 2026 #3; joint statement of international legal organisations, March 2026; ChinaAid report, 24 March 2026; Human Rights in China, Documenting Chinese Lawyers' Rights and Interests: January–April 2026.
The impact on the family: a household split in two
Only when Xie's timeline is laid over his family's does the shape of the persecution become whole. After he disappeared in 2015 his wife endured threats, interference with the family bank account, confiscation of relatives' passports, seizure of her phone, and obstruction of her daughter's travel. In 2017 she fled with her two daughters through Thailand, sat in a Bangkok immigration cell with Chinese personnel waiting at the gate for their deportation, and reached the United States under the escort of US officials. The elder daughter was fifteen at the time — that age is stated in ChinaAid's 2017 bulletin. The younger daughter's age is a matter of no public record, and this page does not estimate it.
For the nine years since, the family has existed across the Pacific. In the United States the wife raised two daughters while acting as the public voice of her husband's case: she published the detail behind the official smear after the torture disclosure, she published the fact that the 2026 verdict rested on WeChat posts, and she published the figure of thirteen detention extensions. The Human Rights Watch statement of 2026 calls her Xie Yang's former wife, and documents of the international legal organisations use a similar formulation. When the couple's marital status changed, and whether a divorce was formalised, are matters on which the public material gives no date and no document. Item by item: date of any divorce, no public record; reasons for any divorce, no public statement. This page therefore confirms only this: in several authoritative English-language documents of 2026 Chen Guiqiu is described as former wife or ex-wife, while in material from 2017 to 2022 she is described as his wife. The narrative accordingly calls her his wife in the events of 2017 and notes the change of description in the events of 2026, without drawing a conclusion the record does not support.
On the side of the family inside China, his parents and elder brother bore the other half of the pressure. On the day of his bail release in 2017 he and his parents were taken together to a remote mountain village. In 2022 the formal arrest notice was delivered into his father's hands. At the sentencing in 2026 it was his elder brother, sister-in-law and niece who walked into the courtroom and heard the five-year term read out. His mother's eightieth birthday and her son's release on bail fell on the same day, after which the family was taken away and resettled — a detail relayed by Amnesty International from the family's account. Beyond that, the ages, health and addresses of his parents are matters of no public record, and this page does not publish them, in line with its principle of restraint toward ordinary family members inside China.
The two daughters grew up in the United States. In his 2020 interview Xie said he was glad the children could be educated and grow up there, and that the authorities could only come after him alone. He said that after his licence was revoked and before he was seized the second time. A little more than a year later he was indeed seized again — and his daughters did not live through another night like the one in the Bangkok detention centre in 2017. In that sense his wife's escape in 2017 shielded the family from the most dangerous part of the second round of persecution.
Sources: ChinaAid bulletins, 2017, and Chen Guiqiu's open letter; Amnesty International file, 2017; Human Rights Watch statement, 2026; China Change interview, 2020.
The international response, in full: from the eleven-country letter to the arbitrary-detention finding
The Xie Yang case drew one of the densest international responses of any 709 case. In chronological order: after the torture notes were published in January 2017, the European Union issued a statement calling for an investigation and for the release of detained lawyers. On 27 February 2017 the diplomatic missions of eleven countries in Beijing wrote jointly expressing concern at the torture allegations and urging an end to secret detention. In August 2017 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued its opinion on the first detention, finding it arbitrary and asking for release and compensation. After the December 2017 conviction, the EU Delegation's International Human Rights Day statement continued to address the situation of Chinese human rights lawyers as a whole — that statement named the situation of several lawyers collectively, and this page does not present it as a statement about Xie alone.
The second case drew a comparable chain. UN Special Procedures mandate-holders issued a formal communication on his 2022 detention — AL CHN (13.2024) — recording Cell 107, the arrest notice, the overcrowded cell and the March 2024 humiliation allegation in detail, and asking China to explain. In November 2024 Chinese Human Rights Defenders filed an urgent submission with the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, arguing category by category that his detention was arbitrary. The Working Group subsequently found his detention since January 2022 to be arbitrary and called for his immediate and unconditional release; the Dui Hua Foundation, Human Rights Watch and CIVICUS all confirmed the existence of that finding in their March 2026 sentencing coverage. The number and adoption date of that second opinion are not given consistently in the secondary material this site was able to retrieve, and are recorded item by item as: number of the Working Group's second opinion, no public record on the basis of the secondary accounts available.
After the March 2026 sentencing, Human Rights Watch issued a statement in which its deputy Asia director Maya Wang said the prosecution and the harsh sentence reflected Beijing's utter contempt for the rule of law, and that the case aimed not only to persecute a brave human rights lawyer but to intimidate all lawyers seeking to protect the rights of people in China. Lawyers for Lawyers, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe and other legal and human rights organisations issued a joint statement condemning the conviction and identifying the closed-door hearings, the thirteen extensions and the exclusion of his lawyers. PEN America's writers-at-risk file was updated with the five-year sentence and the arbitrary-detention finding. The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China's annual-report material had already recorded his pre-trial detention. None of these responses obtained his release. What they constitute is a complete external record: every procedural step backwards has a corresponding international document on file. That is the point of archival work.
Sources: EU Delegation to China statements; UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN (13.2024); Dui Hua Foundation update, 2026; Human Rights Watch statement, March 2026; joint statement of international legal organisations; PEN America file on Xie Yang; Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual report, access-to-justice chapter.
Full Timeline
4 February 1972: Xie Yang is born, according to the Hunan Provincial Department of Justice's 2020 penalty notice. 2011: he begins practising law in Hunan, later at Hunan Gangwei Law Firm. 2011–2014: he represents activists in the Jasmine crackdown, the New Citizens' Movement and mainland supporters of the Hong Kong protests, according to the career summaries of lawyers' organisations. 2014 to March 2015: conduct in a case later characterised in the judgment as acts disrupting court order. Around May 2015: public criticism of police over the Qing'an shooting of Xu Chunhe and other matters, as relayed in the Changsha court's judgment reasoning.
9 July 2015: the 709 crackdown begins. 11 July 2015: Xie is taken from a hotel room while on a work trip in Huaihua and placed under residential surveillance at a designated location, later identified in compiled accounts as a guesthouse on the campus of the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha; no public news of him for more than 55 days. July 2015 to January 2016: in secret detention he later describes sleep deprivation, prolonged interrogation, the dangling chair stress position, beatings, death threats and humiliation, with officers pressing him to confess and to implicate others. January 2016: formal arrest and transfer to Changsha No. 2 Detention Centre, the exact date differing between sources. During review for prosecution: the procuratorate twice returns the case for supplementary investigation for unclear facts and insufficient evidence, according to Xinhua's trial reporting. July and November 2016: he describes torture in meetings with lawyers. December 2016: indictment for inciting subversion and disrupting court order, according to Agence France-Presse and Chinese Human Rights Defenders; Chen Jiangang and Liu Zhengqing act for the defence.
4–13 January 2017: Chen Jiangang and Liu Zhengqing meet him repeatedly at Changsha No. 2 and compile the torture meeting notes. 13 January 2017: Xie writes his handwritten statement that any future confession would be the product of torture or of concern for his family. 19–22 January 2017: the meeting notes are published in four parts and reported internationally; the EU issues a statement calling for an investigation. 6 February 2017: the family-retained lawyers' last normal meeting with him; thereafter meetings are repeatedly refused. 27 February 2017: eleven diplomatic missions in Beijing write jointly about the torture allegations. February–March 2017: Chen Guiqiu flees with her two daughters through Thailand. 1–2 March 2017: state media launch the smear reports claiming Jiang Tianyong directed a fabrication; the Hunan procuratorate's investigation concludes there was no torture. 2 March 2017: Chen Guiqiu and her daughters are held in Bangkok immigration detention and then leave following US intervention. 17 March 2017: they arrive in the United States. 25 April 2017: the scheduled trial is postponed indefinitely after supporters and diplomats gather; by then the court has designated He Xiaodian as his lawyer. Around 3 May 2017: Chen Jiangang and his family are intercepted at gunpoint in Yunnan, on his own account. 8 May 2017: trial lasting about three hours at the Changsha Intermediate People's Court; Xie pleads guilty and denies torture; no witnesses are called. 9 May 2017: release on bail, followed immediately by removal with his parents to a remote mountain village and tight surveillance. 20 May 2017: escorted by national-security officers on a visit to his father-in-law, then taken away again. 30 June 2017: Chen Guiqiu publishes her open letter saying she will not return to China and plans to sue. August 2017: the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issues its opinion on the first detention; in the same month the family discloses the fingerprint-lock gate installed outside the Changsha apartment and the task group's rental of the neighbouring flat. 26 December 2017: first-instance judgment of the Changsha Intermediate People's Court — guilty of inciting subversion, exempted from criminal punishment; Xinhua reports that he accepted the verdict and would not appeal.
2018–2020: he continues practising and speaking out; justice officials convey through his firm director a warning that continued statements to overseas media would lead to arrest, according to his 2020 interview. 11 August 2020: the Hunan Provincial Department of Justice revokes his practising certificate, on the basis of the 2017 conviction and the cited items of Article 49 of the Lawyers Law. 17 December 2021: Li Tiantian posts in support of Song Gengyi. Night of 19 December 2021: Li is taken to a psychiatric institution. 25 December 2021: Xie holds a placard supporting Li outside the Yongshun County Public Security Bureau; on a later visit he is beaten by local personnel and his phone is seized. Around 26 December 2021: Li Tiantian returns home. 11 January 2022: Xie is detained in Changsha and held in Cell 107 of Changsha No. 1 Detention Centre; his home is searched; his family is notified only about six days later. January to August 2022: he is refused access to lawyers and the detention centre refuses to confirm his whereabouts to the family, a second enforced disappearance of about seven months. 17 February 2022: his father receives the formal arrest notice, according to the UN communication. August 2022: the Changsha procuratorate indicts him on the sole charge of inciting subversion; picking quarrels no longer appears. October 2022 to May 2023: access to a lawyer of his choice is again refused and a state-appointed lawyer is pressed on him. March–April 2023: written opinion on prolonged detention and an application for bail, with no public reply, according to defence-side material. 23 May 2023: he tells his lawyer of those unanswered applications. January 2024: he describes the overcrowded cell and the swelling pain in his calves, according to the UN communication. 12 March 2024: detention-centre police allegedly make the genital-exposure and dance demand and seek a bribe, as relayed by the UN communication — unverified. 2 September 2024: at a pre-trial meeting the defence raises access to files, recusal and bail; the meeting breaks down. November 2024: Chinese Human Rights Defenders files its urgent submission with the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Afterwards: the Working Group finds the detention since 2022 arbitrary and calls for release; the opinion number is a matter of no public record in the secondary accounts available.
July and October 2025: closed-door trial hearings on the legal organisations' account; Human Rights Watch confirms a secret trial in October 2025 of which the family was told only afterwards. 23 March 2026: the Changsha Intermediate People's Court sentences him to five years in prison with a 100,000 yuan property measure — confiscation or fine, the discrepancy set out in the Verification Note; Xie states an appeal in court; with time served the term is expected to expire on 10 January 2027. 16 April 2026: the Human Rights in China lawyers' rights compilation records that after a meeting with lawyer Zhang Lei, Xie decided to waive his right to appeal — unverified. October 2026: second-instance outcome, place of imprisonment and latest state of health are all matters of no public record; on the current term calculation he remains in custody.
Verification Note
The evidence on this page is graded as follows. Tier one: the full text of the Hunan Provincial Department of Justice's 2020 administrative penalty notice (birth date, practising information, citation of the conviction, basis for revocation); the original text of Chen Jiangang's meeting transcripts; Xie's own interview of 2020. Tier two: formal documents of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Dui Hua Foundation, the UN Special Procedures communications and Front Line Defenders. Tier three: reporting by Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Radio Free Asia and National Public Radio, and bulletins of advocacy organisations such as ChinaAid. Any claim supported by a single tier-three chain is identified in the text by its source or marked unverified.
Known discrepancies are set out item by item. First, the bail date: Amnesty International's file gives 9 May 2017, while some Chinese-language reporting gives the day of the trial or the following day; this page follows Amnesty International and notes the difference here. Second, the formal arrest date: sources give the 8th, 9th and 11th within January 2016; this page gives only the month. Third, the character of the 100,000 yuan in 2026: Human Rights Watch and the Dui Hua Foundation say confiscation, the joint statement of international legal organisations says a fine, and no full judgment text is available; both renderings are presented together. Fourth, the number of 2025 hearings: the legal organisations give closed hearings in July and October, Human Rights Watch mentions October only; both are presented together. Fifth, the appeal: an in-court statement of appeal is supported by both ChinaAid and the Dui Hua Foundation; the April 2026 waiver of appeal rests on a single record chain in the Human Rights in China compilation and is marked unverified. Sixth, Chen Guiqiu's description: several authoritative English-language documents of 2026 call her his former wife, while the fact and date of any divorce are matters of no public record; this page draws no conclusion about marital status. Seventh, the humiliation and bribery allegation of 12 March 2024 appears only as relayed in the UN Special Procedures communication and is marked unverified. Eighth, the detail of US diplomatic intervention in Bangkok comes mainly from the account given to US media by the head of ChinaAid; US officials gave only an in-principle confirmation. In addition, the version in the commissioning brief for this page — that bail followed on the day of the 8 May 2017 trial and closed the case — does not withstand checking: bail came on 9 May, and judgment was not delivered until 26 December 2017, as a conviction with exemption from punishment; this page has been written according to the verified record. The defence lawyer's name in Chinese characters is Chen Jiangang, and this page uses that form throughout.
Our Take
The most striking thing about the Xie Yang case is not any single beating. It is the way an entire procedure dismantled a lawyer step by step. First he was disappeared for six months and pressed, in a guesthouse on a military university campus, with sleep deprivation and the dangling chair, to implicate his colleagues. When he spoke about the torture, the authorities' first response was not to investigate the officers but to cut his contact with his lawyers and to produce another detained lawyer on state media to carry the blame for a fabrication. His wife fled to Thailand with the children, where people were waiting at the detention-centre gate for their deportation. He was made to deny the torture in court in exchange for a conviction with no punishment — and the conviction stayed on file, ready three years later to take his licence. Stripped of the licence, he held a placard for a pregnant teacher who had been put in a psychiatric hospital, and so the placard and the posts became inciting subversion too: thirteen extensions consumed four years first, and only then did a five-year judgment arrive, resting on a handful of WeChat posts. Each step on its own has documents, file numbers and a seemingly lawful basis. Joined together, they are an assembly line built for a lawyer who would not stop talking.
This site draws attention in particular to what the 2026 judgment demonstrates: a secret trial, an absent defence, a family informed afterwards, no published full judgment, and a property measure that cannot even be verified as a fine or a confiscation. When a state's most public promise is rule of law, and everything it does to a lawyer happens on the reverse side of its own legal texts, the case stops being one man's file. It becomes the name every Chinese lawyer thinks of before taking a sensitive case: take it, and what happens is what Xie Yang has already demonstrated. That is why this page records the case item by item, discrepancies and gaps included. An assembly line's worst enemy is someone who writes down every station on it.
Sources
Hunan Provincial Department of Justice, Notice of Administrative Penal Action, 11 August 2020, full text and translation published by China Change; Chen Jiangang, Transcripts of Interviews with Lawyer Xie Yang, Parts One to Four, China Change, January 2017; Chinese Human Rights Defenders, statement calling for a torture investigation, January 2017, and submission to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, November 2024; Human Rights Watch, "China: Prominent Rights Lawyer Sentenced to 5 Years," 23 March 2026; Dui Hua Foundation, Prisoner Updates 2026 #3; Amnesty International urgent-action update ASA 17/6307/2017; UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN (13.2024); joint statements on the Xie Yang case by Lawyers for Lawyers and other legal and human rights organisations, 2025 to March 2026 versions; Front Line Defenders case file on Xie Yang; EU Delegation to China statements, 2017; ChinaAid reporting, May and June 2017 and March 2026; Radio Free Asia series on the Li Tiantian case, December 2021; Agence France-Presse reporting, April and May 2017 and January 2022; Reuters reporting, March 2017; National Public Radio reporting, May 2017; Xinhua reports of 8 May and 26 December 2017, retained as material for the prosecution's position; Human Rights in China, Documenting Chinese Lawyers' Rights and Interests: January–April 2026; PEN America file on Xie Yang; CIVICUS Monitor reporting, 2026.