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第42案 | 杨华与贵阳活石教会Case 42 | Yang Hua & Guiyang Living Stone Church

贵阳活石教会牧师杨华（本名李国志），因被指泄露一份市里处置活石教会的内部文件，于2017年1月5日被南明区法院以故意泄露国家秘密罪判刑二年六个月。教会此前已被罚款、冻结账户，财产于2018年被拍卖，同教会牧师苏天富获缓刑。杨华2018年6月19日刑满释放后长期受监控，2021年5月又在派出所内遭自称政法委人员殴打送医。Yang Hua (birth name Li Guozhi), pastor of Guiyang's Living Stone Church, was sentenced on 5 January 2017 by the Nanming District Court to two years and six months for deliberately divulging state secrets — the alleged secret being the city's own internal plan for dismantling his church. The church had already been fined and had its accounts frozen; its property was auctioned in 2018 and co-pastor Su Tianfu received a suspended sentence. Released on 19 June 2018, Yang remained under surveillance and was beaten inside a police station in May 2021.

Time span

Living Stone Church founded in 2009; Yang Hua taken away on 9 December 2015; sentenced on 5 January 2017; released on completion of sentence on 19 June 2018; beaten inside a police station on 23 May 2021, after his release

Place

Guiyang, Guizhou Province (Nanming and Yunyan districts); the church met at the Huaguoyuan International Center

Figures

Yang Hua (birth name Li Guozhi, born 1976), pastor of Living Stone Church; his wife Wang Hongwu; co-pastor Su Tianfu; deacon board chair Zhang Xiuhong; defence lawyers Chen Jiangang and Zhao Yonglin

Charge and sentence

Deliberately divulging state secrets: two years and six months in prison, imposed by the Nanming District People's Court, Guiyang; together with Su Tianfu he was also fined more than 7.05 million yuan over what officials called illegal income

Characterisation

Religious persecution: an unregistered house church that refused to join the state-controlled Three-Self system was dismantled piece by piece, and its pastor was imprisoned under a state-secrets charge

Current status

Released in 2018 but kept under close surveillance, with forced trips away and house arrest at sensitive times; no public record of his situation since the May 2021 beating

A preacher who walked out of the mountains

Yang Hua is a name he chose for himself. Born Li Guozhi — his birth name also appears in English reporting in the spelling Li Guozi — he took a religious name whose meaning is roughly looking up to Jehovah. His birth year is often left vague in early reports. After cross-checking several independent accounts, this page uses 1976: a long biographical profile of the two Living Stone pastors records that he was born in 1976, and reporting from March 2017, when his lawyers sought medical bail, describes him as having just turned 41. The two figures agree. A birth year of 1971 circulates in some secondary material, but no reliable source consulted for this page supports it, so it is not used here.

He was the fourth of six children in a Christian family in the mountains of Guizhou, a third-generation believer. His grandparents had lived through the church campaigns of the 1950s; his father's generation, during the Cultural Revolution, could only slip away at night to worship in a mountain cave. He grew up hearing those stories. As a boy he did not share the family's faith and was even embarrassed by it. His own account is that a family crisis, and what he experienced through prayer, changed him. In 1989, at the age of 13, he left school and home and began travelling as an itinerant preacher, working his way through Yunnan, Guangxi, Henan and Zhejiang. Christians in Zhejiang wanted him to settle there, but in 1997, aged 21, he returned to Guiyang. He spent the following years preaching and pastoring within the city's house-church circles, and in 2009 he co-founded Living Stone Church with Su Tianfu and others. He was 33. Six years later, the Guizhou authorities would deploy an entire stability-maintenance apparatus against him — for no other reason, in the end, than that he would not hand his church over.

Living Stone Church: from one apartment to more than 700 people in six years

Living Stone Church was founded in Guiyang in 2009, starting with about twenty people studying the Bible in a single apartment. It belonged to the wave of urban house churches that operated openly in those years: it rented office space rather than hiding, reported its activities to the authorities, and governed itself through a board elected by the congregation. It grew quickly, roughly doubling year by year, reaching about 400 members by 2013 and more than 700 at its peak, meeting in three locations. The congregation included students, businesspeople, bankers, rights activists and lawyers. The church ran community work, supporting orphans, disabled children and elderly people living alone, and it built a real name for itself in Guiyang.

In 2013 the church pooled its money and bought three units on the 24th floor of the Huaguoyuan International Center, about 600 square metres in total, as a permanent meeting place. The trouble began with the purchase. Before the space was even in use, officials posted notices in and around the building stating that the venue was an unauthorised religious site set up without approval, that the two pastors were unrecognised religious personnel, and urging the public not to take part in the church's so-called illegal religious activities. The church negotiated with the Religious Affairs Bureau and other departments for years, trying to settle its legal status. At the negotiating table there was always only one real demand: join the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement and accept its management. Living Stone refused. In the authorities' logic, a church that would not register, would not attach itself to the official system, and kept growing was itself a risk to be dealt with. The more public and organised the church became, the more dangerous it looked to those preparing to move against it — a point the authorities' own internal documents would later put in writing.

2015: the pressure closes in, step by step

In November 2014, while the new premises were being fitted out, religious affairs officials again declared the church an unregistered, non-religious organisation. In May 2015 the Civil Affairs authorities declared Living Stone an illegal organisation. That summer the campaign moved from paper to action. In July and August, Zhang Xiuhong, the deacon who chaired the church board and managed its finances, was taken away. The initial pretext concerned a beauty business she had been involved in, but according to what she told her lawyer, the questioning soon turned to the church, its pastors and its core members. The church's account books were confiscated and the church account she managed was frozen. It held about 640,000 yuan, money set aside to service the mortgage on the new premises, at roughly 30,000 yuan a month. The moment the account was frozen, default on the loan became a live threat.

On 21 October 2015, officials issued an administrative penalty notice to Su Tianfu, Zhang Xiuhong and another church member, accusing them of changing the approved use of an office from business operations to religious activities, and ordering them to restore the original use within fifteen days or face penalties. On 18 November the Nanming District urban enforcement bureau served a Rectification Order saying the church's use of a commercial building was illegal and giving it three days to respond. The church applied to the Guiyang municipal government for reconsideration and was refused. Meanwhile a fine accumulated at 12,960 yuan per day, and was later doubled. The church was not refusing to pay out of defiance; its account had been frozen, which made payment impossible — and non-payment then became the justification for the next escalation. The sequence would be repeated against many churches after Living Stone: fine the congregation over premises paperwork, freeze its funds so the fine cannot be paid, then treat the unpaid fine as grounds for total suppression.

In early November 2015 a Hong Kong student who had visited the church was interrogated, and Su Tianfu was refused permission to travel to Hong Kong and Macau. The church's dedication gathering for its new hall went ahead under the gaze of large numbers of police, including riot police and special police. By December, the city had set up a dedicated structure to handle the church. According to the leaked document and the accounts of several organisations, Guiyang established a command centre for dealing with Living Stone Church according to law, directed through the office of the municipal leading group for stability maintenance. Hundreds of church members were afterwards called in one by one and pressed to leave the church, with jobs, children's schooling and business licences held over them, according to members' accounts corroborated by the leaked planning document. The authorities have never publicly answered these accounts.

9 December 2015: the raid and the arrest

9 December 2015 was a Sunday, with a prayer service scheduled for 9:30 in the morning. At about 9:00, well over one hundred enforcement personnel entered the church premises — civil affairs and religious affairs officials, public security officers and a squad of armed special police; some reports put the total mobilised that day at three hundred, and this page follows the lower figure on which multiple sources agree. The officers ordered Yang Hua to open every door. When he refused, they called a locksmith. As officers tried to enter the office and the sound control room to seize the computer hard drives, Yang stood in the doorway and demanded that the technicians show their work identification. They said they had none, and he told them they would not be allowed in. The operation's commander then called the special police forward, and several officers lifted him off his feet and pinned him in a corner by the lift.

The officers then carried away the church's computers, equipment and other property. They said an inventory of seized items would be provided; according to the church, more than a year later no inventory had ever been handed over. The mobile phones of Yang Hua, his wife, Su Tianfu and several couples who had arrived for the service were confiscated and the photographs on them deleted. When the raid ended, two notices were posted sealing the church: one declaring it an illegal civil organisation, the other saying it had set up a religious activity site without authorisation. Living Stone's two other meeting points were dealt with the same way. Yang Hua and his wife were taken to a police station.

Yang was first given two consecutive five-day administrative detentions, for obstructing official business and for gathering a crowd to disturb public order. 20 December was the day his wife, Wang Hongwu, went to collect him. What she saw instead was her husband being loaded into an unlicensed vehicle with a black hood over his head. She was later told that his case had been converted to criminal detention on a new charge: illegally possessing state secrets. On 21 December 2015 Yang Hua was formally placed under criminal detention on that charge. In the same days, church members Yu Lei and Wang Yao were arrested on suspicion of deliberately divulging state secrets, and Su Tianfu was taken into custody on 14 December, briefly released, and told he would be prosecuted for leaking state secrets. The image of the hooded pastor at the detention centre gate has been carried by almost every account of this case since, because it states the case's real nature plainly: this was never an administrative matter that would proceed at its own pace once he walked out. It was handled from the first day as a political operation.

The document that was called a state secret

What was the state secret? This is the most revealing part of the case. According to the defence lawyers and several human rights organisations, the secret Yang Hua was accused of leaking was an internal document of the Guiyang command centre set up to deal with Living Stone Church. The document bore the stamp of the office of the municipal leading group for stability maintenance, and it stated in plain language that dealing with Living Stone Church according to law was a political task, that leading cadres in every work unit must personally take charge, follow the city's overall deployment, and carry the work through to completion. It also contained the names of everyone who attended the church, and made clear that each attendee and church employee was to be investigated and placed under so-called stability control — surveillance.

In other words, the document's substance was not a military deployment or a diplomatic cable. It was the government's own plan for dismantling a church. Classifying that plan as a state secret meant the people targeted by it had no right even to know how they were to be dealt with; and the pastor who let the outside world know the plan existed became, by that act, a criminal who had divulged state secrets. His lawyer Zhao Yonglin later said publicly that the supposed secret was an unlawful decision by a temporary administrative body, and that it deserved exposure, not confidentiality. Church members Yu Lei and Wang Yao were tried in October 2016 on the same charge of deliberately divulging state secrets. Zhang Xiuhong was prosecuted under a different label, illegal business operations. The structure of the charges is itself instructive: the church's core members were separated, given different criminal labels, and processed one by one — and every one of those labels traced back to a single refusal, the refusal to dissolve their own church.

The investigation: what the lawyers say happened inside

On 22 January 2016 Yang Hua was formally arrested, and the charge was upgraded to deliberately divulging state secrets. He then waited in detention for nearly a year. His family could not see him, and his lawyers' access was repeatedly obstructed. In September 2016 his two lawyers, Chen Jiangang and Zhao Yonglin, made public what he had told them in meetings. According to the lawyers' account, two prosecutors interrogated him twice, stood on his feet to apply pressure, and repeatedly threatened him with death if he did not confess — telling him, in substance, that they could make him disappear, that his wife and children would face trouble too, and boasting of knowing how to beat a man without leaving marks a doctor could find. This account comes from the defence lawyers and was carried by multiple media outlets and rights organisations; the procuratorate never publicly answered it, and this page records it as the lawyers' allegation, not as a fact established by a court.

The lawyers then filed a complaint over torture used to extort a confession and asked that the prosecutors involved be removed from the case. They were not removed, and the case proceeded unchanged. After the verdict, Chen Jiangang said bluntly that in his view this was not a judgement but persecution — a political case with nothing to do with law or truth. Yang's own letters from detention, including one to his wife dated 8 November 2016, speak mostly of faith and of his health. He reassured her that the fatty liver diagnosed in prison was bearable, and that the scabies covering his body had cleared after treatment with sulphur ointment. A man held for almost a year, writing home to tell his family not to be disturbed by the noise outside: that contrast is one reason the letters were so widely quoted afterwards.

Trial and sentence: hearing on 26 December 2016, verdict on 5 January 2017

On 26 December 2016, the Nanming District People's Court in Guiyang heard Yang Hua's case. The detailed narrative account of the case gives this hearing date; a small number of reports describe a secret hearing on 30 December, and this page notes the discrepancy while following 26 December as the better-corroborated date. Because the case carried the state-secrets label, the hearing was closed, family members could not attend, and no details of the proceedings reached the outside world. On 5 January 2017 the Nanming District court convicted Yang Hua of deliberately divulging state secrets and sentenced him to two years and six months in prison. A few English-language reports, working across time zones, dated the sentencing 6 January; this page follows 5 January, the date given consistently by his lawyers and by the organisations monitoring the case. Yang indicated he would appeal, but the sentence stood, with the two and a half years counted from his detention in December 2015.

The others followed. On 15 February 2017 Zhang Xiuhong was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal business operations; material later submitted to the UN Universal Periodic Review says her sentence was subsequently changed to three years, suspended for five — a detail resting on a single chain of sources, marked here as unverified. Su Tianfu remained under residential surveillance and house arrest from December 2015 until he was finally tried on 26 April 2018, when he received one year in prison, suspended for two years, plus a further six months of residential surveillance. In May 2017, meanwhile, the two pastors were notified of a joint fine: officials had ruled that the congregation's offerings were illegal income, totalling 7,053,710.68 yuan — more than 1.09 million US dollars. The pastors appealed repeatedly, arguing that the money was freely donated by members and spent only on church expenses. In January 2018 a provincial court gave the final word: the fine was mandatory.

Health in custody: from scabies to the edge of paralysis

Yang Hua's health collapsed in custody. Early in his detention he suffered scabies over his whole body and was diagnosed with fatty liver disease. In March 2017 his condition deteriorated sharply: both legs broke out in extensive rashes and areas of necrosis, with seeping wounds around the shins and feet swollen to the ankles. The diagnosis was anaphylactoid purpura, a form of blood-vessel inflammation. The provincial hospital issued a notice of critical illness, warning of possible septicaemia, digestive-tract haemorrhage and kidney damage. Lawyers who met him on 20 and 24 March 2017 reported that the inflammation in his legs had brought him to the verge of paralysis, and they applied for medical bail. One aid organisation also reported that he developed vasculitis and diabetes in detention; the diabetes detail rests on a single source and is marked unverified here. He was eventually transferred to an armed-police hospital and treated with large doses of hormones and anti-inflammatory drugs, which stabilised him, but the care available inside remained basic.

The sequence deserves recording. A man of 41, in what should have been the strongest years of his life, came within reach of a critical-illness notice after two and a half years in the system's hands — accused, at bottom, of having seen the government's own plan for dealing with his church. This page cannot assert a causal line between the torture allegations his lawyers made public and the collapse of his health a few months later; that must be stated honestly. What can be stated is that every piece of information about his condition reached the outside only in fragments, through lawyer visits and his wife's accounts. What happened inside the detention facilities remains a matter of no public record.

What happened to the church's property: valuation, auction, and the end of Living Stone as an institution

With the pastor in prison, the disposal of the church's property followed. On 23 January 2018 an assessment company engaged by the authorities valued Living Stone's three premises and their contents at 5.36 million yuan. On 11 February 2018, acting on the demand of the Nanming District Religious Affairs Bureau to enforce the fine, the Baiyun District Court auctioned the property. It was bought by the state-linked Nanming Investment Group for 5.12 million yuan. Su Tianfu received the court's notice on the day of the auction itself — which is to say, the property's owners learned of the sale at the moment it was completed. A 2021 retrospective by ChinaAid says the church's property was sold off cheaply to a commercial buyer for a little over five million yuan in an earlier period; the sum broadly matches the 2018 auction price, but the timing conflicts with the detailed court-enforcement account, so this page follows the well-documented 11 February 2018 auction and notes the discrepancy. Some secondary Chinese-language retellings claim the church building was later demolished; no reliable source consulted for this page records a demolition, so that claim is not adopted here.

By that point Living Stone Church as an institution had been taken apart completely: its pastor in prison, its other pastor convicted and surveilled, its deacon imprisoned, its bank account frozen, its premises sealed, its property auctioned, and its members called in one by one for stability control. On 31 July 2019 the authorities went further still, issuing a notice to former Living Stone members citing Article 40 of the revised Regulations on Religious Affairs, declaring their gatherings illegal religious activities, ordering them to stop immediately, and confiscating furniture, a projector and other items. Three and a half years after the church was dissolved, even its former members meeting again in small groups remained prohibited. Former members have since met only in smaller, more scattered groups, under continuing harassment, according to the organisations that follow the case.

19 June 2018: release at the end of the sentence

In the early hours of 19 June 2018, Yang Hua completed his sentence and was released. Aid organisations recorded that he sang hymns as he came out. He returned home to Guiyang, where his wife Wang Hongwu told visitors that neither persecution nor attacks would shake her husband's faith. He came out in urgent need of medical care: the inflammation in his legs, the skin conditions and the other health problems from detention were all unresolved. The international organisations welcoming his release said, above all, that he should never have been convicted in the first place.

Release, however, did not mean freedom. According to what his family later told supporters, Yang remained under intense surveillance. At so-called sensitive times, or whenever officials feared trouble, police stepped up their watch: sometimes he was forced to travel away from the area, sometimes held under house arrest at home. Any plan to visit Christians in other cities or take part in church life first had to pass his monitors. That state of affairs lasted at least three years — until the beating of May 2021 confirmed to the outside world that his situation had not changed with the end of his sentence.

23 May 2021: the fist inside the police station

At about 11 p.m. on 23 May 2021, Yang Hua was preparing to travel the next day to Qingdao, in Shandong, to visit Christians there. His itinerary had evidently been noted. Local police took him to a police station. Inside the station, a man in plain clothes who claimed to represent the district-level Committee of Political and Legal Affairs in Guiyang's Yunyan District attacked him. According to the consistent accounts of several organisations, the man punched him and injured him so severely that someone in the station had to call the emergency number, and medical personnel took him to a hospital emergency room. Three other officials were present and watched; none intervened.

Hospital examination found scratches to his ear and neck and symptoms of tinnitus, and the attack triggered a flare-up of his pre-existing pancreatitis, requiring further checks. Consider the three facts together: the beating happened almost three years after he had served his full sentence; it happened inside a police station; and its purpose was to stop an ordinary visit to fellow believers. Together they show that the control exercised over him was never really about a sentence at all. The two and a half years on the judgement were only its most visible segment. The surveillance without end, and the violence that could be switched on at any time, were the long-term form of the punishment. After this incident, public news of Yang Hua fell silent again. As of this page's research, his health and activities after 2021 are a matter of no public record.

The cost to his family

Half of this case's bill was paid by his wife, Wang Hongwu. On 20 December 2015 she went to the detention centre to bring her husband home and instead watched the black hood and the unlicensed car. During the year he waited in detention she could not see him; she knew about his condition only through lawyers' messages and occasional letters. She campaigned publicly for his health, sat in the hospital while doctors explained how serious his condition had become, and wrote open letters asking fellow Christians to pray for him. Yang Hua is a father of two. When he was imprisoned the children were young; for the two and a half years when they most needed their father, their mother carried the family alone, while also dealing with the summonses and the watching at the door. The nominal debt of more than 7.05 million yuan hung over both pastors jointly, and even after the church property was auctioned the sum was not covered, with every appeal rejected — so the family lived under a long economic shadow as well. What the years since have meant in detail for the children's schooling and daily life has barely been reported, and this page does not speculate: it is recorded as no public record.

International response

The case drew sustained international attention from the moment of the arrest. The US-based ChinaAid followed it throughout and helped the family make its voice heard; its president called the sentence purely religious persecution and urged the US government to condemn it. Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued a continuous series of briefings from 2015 onward, and in 2018 folded the Living Stone case into its submission to China's Universal Periodic Review at the UN, documenting the full chain — rectification order, raid, torture allegations and the million-dollar fine — and calling on the Chinese authorities to respect citizens' right to freedom of religion or belief. International Christian Concern, Barnabas Aid and others issued statements and reports at his sentencing, at his release, and after the May 2021 beating. The fate of his lawyers is part of the story's edge: Chen Jiangang went on to become one of the most heavily targeted rights lawyers in China, which lies beyond this case, but one point belongs in this record — the torture complaint Chen filed in this case was never substantively addressed by any authority. In the sources consulted for this page, the official Chinese response to international criticism of the case has never gone beyond the general formula of an illegal organisation dealt with according to law.

Full timeline

• 1976 — Yang Hua (birth name Li Guozhi) is born into a Christian family in mountainous Guizhou, the fourth of six children.
• 1989 — Aged 13, he leaves school and home and begins itinerant preaching across several provinces.
• 1997 — He returns to Guiyang and settles there as a preacher.
• 2009 — Yang Hua co-founds Living Stone Church in Guiyang with Su Tianfu and others; it begins with about 20 people.
• 2013 — Membership reaches about 400; the church buys three units totalling about 600 square metres in the Huaguoyuan International Center.
• November 2014 — Religious affairs officials declare the church an unregistered, non-religious organisation and its new premises an unauthorised site.
• May 2015 — Civil affairs authorities declare Living Stone Church an illegal organisation.
• July–August 2015 — Deacon board chair Zhang Xiuhong is detained; the church's account books are confiscated and its account, holding about 640,000 yuan, is frozen.
• 21 October 2015 — An administrative penalty notice is issued to Su Tianfu, Zhang Xiuhong and another member over the changed use of the premises.
• 18 November 2015 — The Nanming District enforcement bureau serves a Rectification Order; fines accumulate daily; the church's application for reconsideration is rejected by the Guiyang municipal government.
• 9 December 2015 — More than one hundred enforcement officers raid the church; Yang Hua is carried away by special police after blocking the seizure of hard drives, then given two five-day administrative detentions; the church's two branch sites are dealt with the same day.
• 14 December 2015 — Su Tianfu is taken into custody; in mid-December members Yu Lei and Wang Yao are arrested on suspicion of deliberately divulging state secrets.
• 20 December 2015 — Wang Hongwu arrives to collect her husband and watches him hooded and forced into an unlicensed vehicle.
• 21 December 2015 — Yang Hua is placed under criminal detention for illegally possessing state secrets.
• 22 January 2016 — Yang Hua is formally arrested on suspicion of deliberately divulging state secrets.
• September 2016 — Lawyers Chen Jiangang and Zhao Yonglin disclose allegations of torture in interrogation, including feet being stood on and death threats, and file a complaint, without result.
• October 2016 — Members Wang Yao and Yu Lei are tried for deliberately divulging state secrets.
• 26 December 2016 — Yang Hua's case is heard behind closed doors at the Nanming District People's Court (a few reports give 30 December; the discrepancy is noted).
• 5 January 2017 — The Nanming District court sentences Yang Hua to two years and six months for deliberately divulging state secrets.
• 15 February 2017 — Zhang Xiuhong is sentenced to five years for illegal business operations (a later change to three years suspended rests on a single chain of sources; unverified).
• March 2017 — Yang's leg inflammation worsens with necrosis; the hospital issues a critical-illness notice; lawyers say he is on the verge of paralysis and seek medical bail.
• May 2017 — Yang Hua and Su Tianfu are notified of a joint fine of more than 7.05 million yuan; after appeals it is made final in January 2018.
• 11 February 2018 — The church's three premises are auctioned by the court after valuation and bought by the state-linked Nanming Investment Group for 5.12 million yuan; Su Tianfu is notified only on the day of the auction.
• 26 April 2018 — Su Tianfu is tried and sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for two years, plus six months of residential surveillance.
• 19 June 2018 — Yang Hua is released on completion of his sentence, in poor health and in urgent need of treatment.
• 31 July 2019 — Authorities issue a notice prohibiting former Living Stone members from meeting, citing Article 40 of the Regulations on Religious Affairs, and confiscate meeting items.
• 23 May 2021 — On the eve of a trip to visit Christians in Qingdao, Yang is taken to a police station and beaten by a plainclothes man claiming to represent the Political and Legal Affairs Committee; he is hospitalised with ear and neck injuries, tinnitus and a pancreatitis flare-up.
• After 2021 — No public record of Yang Hua's current situation.

Our Take

Our Take rests on this case's facts alone. First, everyone can see what kind of document the charge in this case pointed at: the document targeted the church, its content was the plan for dealing with the church, and the man who had seen it became the criminal. On that logic, any secret plan drawn up against citizens can first be classified and then used to jail them, and the citizens lose even the right to know that they have been made the object of a political task. In this case the words state secret were not a tool of confidentiality; they were a shield against being questioned. Second, not one link in the chain of disposal was designed to persuade anyone of anything: fines that grew by the day over premises paperwork, an account frozen first so the fine could not be paid, the unpaid fine then doubled, and finally the property sold off in a single lot against the debt. Each step had its own document and its own seal; joined together, they form a machine built to dismantle one church. Third, the two and a half years on the judgement were served in full by 2018 — but the surveillance was never served out. His travel could be blocked, and a visit to fellow believers could end with a fist inside a police station. The judgement put a full stop at the end of the prison term; the stability-maintenance machine put no full stop at the end of this man's life. A church of more than 700 people, one pastor imprisoned and the other convicted, a deacon jailed, the property auctioned, the members placed one by one under stability control — and at the centre of the indictment, nothing but the leaking of the disposal plan itself. This is not a question of enforcement scale. It is what it looks like when faith itself is handled as enemy activity.