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第55案 | 张春雷Case 55 | Zhang Chunlei

张春雷1985年进机关、1993年下海经商、2008年信主，2014年12月在贵阳与同工创办不足百人的仁爱归正教会并任长老，拒绝加入三自体系。2018年他最早一批联署王怡发起的牧者声明，同年9月30日教会聚会点被民宗部门查封，此后辗转餐馆酒店聚会，2019年8月又被南明区民政局以非法社会组织取缔。2021年3月16日，教会三天退修会第一天被国保、民宗与警察冲击，十多名信徒被带走；他当晚到派出所询问情况，反被留置，先以擅自以社会组织名义活动行政拘留，再以涉嫌诈骗刑事拘留，5月1日被逮捕，同年11月又被追加煽动颠覆国家政权调查，律师因案件涉危害国家安全七个月见不到人。2022年11月29日贵阳中院秘密开庭六个多小时，二十个月后才宣判：诈骗的事实是五名从未报案的信徒交纳的奉献一万四千四百元，煽颠的事实是转发二十一篇（幅）文章图片；煽颠三年六个月、诈骗二年，合并执行五年，贵州高院2024年10月25日驳回上诉。羁押期间他被查出肝硬化，取保被拒。2026年3月16日，他六十二岁，刑满获释。Zhang Chunlei entered government work in 1985, went into business in 1993, became a Christian in 2008, and in December 2014 co-founded Guiyang's Ren'ai Reformed Church — fewer than one hundred members, refusing to join the Three-Self system — serving as its elder. In 2018 he was among the first to sign Pastor Wang Yi's Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith; that September the religious affairs authorities shut the church's meeting place, and in August 2019 the Nanming District Civil Affairs Bureau banned the church as an illegal organisation. On 16 March 2021, the first day of a three-day retreat, state security agents, religious affairs officials and police raided the rented venue and took away more than a dozen believers; that evening Zhang went to the police station to ask after them and was himself held — administrative detention, then criminal detention for suspected fraud, formal arrest on 1 May, and from November 2021 a second investigation for inciting subversion, under cover of which his lawyer was kept from him for seven months. Tried in secret on 29 November 2022, he waited twenty months for a verdict: the fraud consisted of 14,400 yuan in offerings from five believers who never reported any crime, and the subversion of 21 forwarded articles and images. Three years and six months for inciting subversion and two years for fraud were combined into five years, upheld on appeal on 25 October 2024. Diagnosed in custody with liver cirrhosis, he was refused bail. On 16 March 2026, aged sixty-two, he completed his sentence and was released.

Time span

Zhang Chunlei began work in a Guizhou provincial government office in 1985, left to run his own business in 1993, became a Christian in 2008 and later gave up business for full-time ministry. In December 2014 he co-founded Ren'ai Reformed Church in Guiyang and served as its elder; the church met on the 27th floor of the Zhongtian Business Port in Nanming District, had fewer than one hundred members, and refused to join the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement. In 2018 he was among the earliest of 458 pastors to sign Pastor Wang Yi's "Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith." On 30 September 2018 the Nanming District religious affairs authorities issued an administrative penalty and shut the Zhongtian meeting place; the church thereafter rotated among restaurants, hotels and private homes. On 12 May 2019 some eighty religious-affairs and public security personnel raided a hotel service, and on 12 August 2019 the Nanming District Civil Affairs Bureau banned the church as an illegal social organisation. On 16 March 2021, the first day of a three-day church retreat, state security agents, religious affairs officials and police took away more than a dozen believers from the rented venue; that evening Zhang went to the Yan'an Middle Road police station in Yunyan District to ask about them and was himself held. He was moved from administrative detention to criminal detention on suspicion of fraud, formally arrested on 1 May 2021, learned through his lawyer in November 2021 that he was also under investigation for inciting subversion of state power, and had the two matters combined and sent to the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court around 27 January 2022. He was tried in secret on 29 November 2022 for more than six hours with no verdict announced; the first-instance judgment came on 24 July 2024; the Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court rejected his appeal on 25 October 2024, and his family did not see the ruling until 8 December. He completed his sentence and was released on 16 March 2026

Place

Guiyang, Guizhou Province: the former meeting place on the 27th floor of the Zhongtian Business Port in Nanming District and the restaurants, hotels and homes used afterwards; the rented retreat venue inside the Wenzhou Hotel complex building in Yunyan District (the site raided on 16 March 2021, described in some reports simply as commercial premises); the Yan'an Middle Road police station in Yunyan District, where Zhang went to inquire and was held; the Yunyan District detention centre, Guiyang No. 2 Detention Centre and Guiyang City Detention Centre (pre-trial custody, with the name varying by stage in public reporting); a hospital stay for cholecystitis in 2023 (reported as Sanjiang Hospital); Courtroom 14 of the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court (the sentencing hearing of 24 July 2024) and the Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court (appeal decided on written review); the name of the prison in which he served the remainder of his sentence is a matter of no public record

Figures

Zhang Chunlei (co-founder and elder of Guiyang Ren'ai Reformed Church; reports of his March 2026 release give his age as 62, from which a birth year of about 1963–1964 can be inferred — no exact date of birth is on public record; the name and post of his former government office, and a circulating claim that he was a tax official, are unverified); his wife Yang Aiqing, who was criminally summoned for 24 hours on suspicion of fraud on 21 April 2021 and thereafter, for five years, issued prayer updates, retained lawyers and pressed the courts for news, becoming the case's principal window to the outside world; their two daughters (a June 2025 prison letter to his daughters is reported; the daughters' names rest on a single Church in Chains compilation and are not fixed here); his defence lawyer or lawyers (names are mostly undisclosed in English-language reporting and are not fixed here); the five congregants named in the judgment as fraud victims — Xu Chaoying, Liao Ailin, Xiang Yu, Gao Xiaomei and Chen Fuqiong, in the transliteration of the appeal ruling as relayed — none of whom ever reported a crime, appeared in court, or asked for money back; and the more than a dozen retreat participants taken away on 16 March 2021, none of whom became a co-defendant: the published judgment names Zhang Chunlei as the sole defendant

Charge and sentence

Two offences, combined into five years. Guiyang Intermediate People's Court, first instance, 24 July 2024: inciting subversion of state power — three years and six months' imprisonment plus three years' deprivation of political rights; fraud — two years' imprisonment plus a fine of 5,000 yuan; combined execution: five years' imprisonment, three years' deprivation of political rights and a 5,000-yuan fine, the term running from 17 March 2021 to 16 March 2026 with each day of pre-trial detention credited. The court further ordered recovery of 14,400 yuan in alleged fraud proceeds to be returned to the victims, and confiscation of two Huawei phones, four external hard drives, seven USB drives, two card readers, two memory cards, church study notebooks and church financial materials. The fraud facts were confined to offerings totalling 14,400 yuan received from five believers between October 2019 and February 2021; the subversion facts consisted of 21 articles and images forwarded on Facebook and similar overseas platforms between March 2018 and February 2021. The Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court issued its second-instance ruling on 25 October 2024 dismissing the appeal and affirming the original judgment; the ruling is final

Characterisation

Religious persecution in a new procedural form: a church of fewer than one hundred people whose offerings were finally judicially valued at 14,400 yuan in total, with not one alleged victim reporting a crime, testifying, or asking for a refund, was made into a two-year fraud conviction; and a pastor's forwarding of 21 articles and images written by others was made into three and a half years for inciting subversion. One charge cuts off the money, the other punishes the speech; together they convict a church that refused to join the Three-Self system on both the economic and the political axis at once. The case is an early, complete specimen of the criminalisation of offerings: declare the church illegal first, then say the believers did not know it was illegal and were deceived into giving, and ordinary tithes become fraud

Current status

Zhang Chunlei completed his sentence and was released on 16 March 2026, corroborated by ChinaAid's Guiyang report of 17 March 2026, a Release International update and Church in Chains' profile update. He was 62 at release; during custody he was hospitalised with severe cholecystitis and diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and hypertension, and five years of imprisonment left a deep mark on his body, according to his family and lawyers as relayed by ChinaAid. Beyond general warnings, based on comparable cases, that figures of his profile typically face long-term residential surveillance, travel restrictions and social isolation after release, no specific post-release restriction imposed on him personally is on public record, and the present state of Ren'ai Reformed Church is likewise a matter of no public record. The USCIRF religious prisoners of conscience database continued for a time to list him as not released after 16 March 2026; this page treats that as database lag and follows the three release reports, flagging the discrepancy. His three years' deprivation of political rights runs from completion of the sentence, reaching its end around March 2029 by arithmetic on the judgment's terms — an inference, not an official announcement

Remember the man before the case

The numbers in Zhang Chunlei's case are abnormally small. Fraud: 14,400 yuan — under 3,000 yuan per alleged victim across five people. Subversion: 21 articles and images forwarded, not one of them written by him. Those two sets of numbers bought one man the whole of his life from his late fifties to the age of sixty-two: five years, without a single day's interruption. But anyone who looks only at the numbers will miss what this case actually is. It is an early and complete specimen of a newer method now used against China's house churches. The older method was administrative: ban the church, seal the venue, detain the pastor for a fortnight, and let the congregation scatter to the next rented room. In Zhang's case the method changed. Offerings were renamed fraud. Forwarding was renamed inciting subversion. The elder of a church of fewer than a hundred people became a two-count felon, and he stayed locked up for more than three years before any court pronounced a sentence at all.

His own road to the pulpit was also unusual among Chinese house-church pastors. He was not seminary-trained and he did not come to faith young. He entered government work in 1985, went into business in 1993, and became a Christian in his forties, in 2008, later abandoning business altogether for full-time ministry. In a short autobiographical poem written in custody and relayed by ChinaAid in 2022, he compressed that road into a few lines: government from 1985, business from 1993, politicians and businessmen once his idols, called to faith in 2008. It is the most direct public statement of his early biography that exists. One circulating error needs correcting at the outset: some secondary material, and the commissioning brief for this page, describe him as a former tax official. No such specificity appears in ChinaAid, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, or Church in Chains; the fullest formulation found is service in a Guizhou provincial department from 1985. Which office he served in, and in what post, is not established on any reliable public record consulted, and this page marks it unverified rather than repeating it. That a defendant's former work unit cannot even be pinned down is itself a measure of how thin the public record on this case is, and it is why every sentence below is tied to a source.

From government office to business, and then to the pulpit

The biography that can be assembled from his own account and multiple reports runs as follows. Government work from 1985. Business from 1993. Conversion in 2008 — in his own phrasing, a man who had been blind suddenly seeing. Then a gradual move into full-time ministry and, in December 2014, the founding of Ren'ai Reformed Church in Guiyang with fellow workers, Zhang serving as elder. The name Ren'ai means benevolence or love; theologically the church stood in the Reformed tradition. It was never large — fewer than a hundred members — and it met in rented commercial space on the 27th floor of the Zhongtian Business Port in Nanming District, not in anything resembling a church building. It was not registered, and it did not join the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement. That refusal is the key to the whole case. Under the registration framework as applied, a Protestant church can exist legally inside the Three-Self system or it can effectively have no legal existence at all. Ren'ai made the same choice as Beijing's Shouwang Church and Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church: to carry the risk of being labelled illegal rather than enter the system. Before 2018 that choice could still purchase a grey, tolerated existence. After 2018 it could not.

His connection to Wang Yi matters here. Wang Yi, pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, was among the most influential figures in the Reformed house-church world. After the revised Regulations on Religious Affairs took effect in February 2018, Wang launched the "Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith," ultimately signed by 458 pastors and church leaders across China; Zhang Chunlei was among the very first to sign. After Early Rain was raided on 9 December 2018 and Wang Yi detained, Zhang joined Yang Hua of Guiyang's Living Stone Church and Jin Tianming of Beijing's Shouwang Church in a public statement declaring themselves willing to bear the same charges as Wang Yi. In official eyes that statement settled his file long before 2021: he was not an anonymous small-church elder but a named signatory who had said, in advance and in public, where he stood. Church in Chains also records that he travelled to Chengdu to visit Early Rain families affected by the crackdown, and that on one occasion police removed him from a church member's home to a police station and on another officials handed him to Guiyang state security agents who put him on a plane home. Those two details rest on that single compilation and are graded accordingly in the verification note below.

Guiyang: a city that had already destroyed one church

Ren'ai was not the first Guiyang church to be processed whole. Living Stone Church had already run the full course before it. On 9 December 2015 the Guiyang Civil Affairs Bureau and the Nanming District religious affairs administration deployed some 300 personnel to seal all three of Living Stone's meeting places on a single day; more than two hundred members were placed under house arrest; Pastor Yang Hua was administratively detained and later sentenced to two years and six months for intentionally leaking state secrets, and Pastor Su Tianfu was subsequently imprisoned as well. The Living Stone case set the local benchmark: in this city, the measure of disposal was to deal with a church root and branch, not to fine it and move on. Zhang Chunlei and Yang Hua were in the same city and the same Reformed world, and they signed the 2018 joint statement together; from then on the two churches' fates were entangled. When USCIRF's October 2021 factsheet on China's new measures for managing religious clergy gave examples of detained unregistered church leaders, the two names it placed in a single passage were Guiyang's Zhang Chunlei and Yang Hua.

The other thing to record about Guiyang is the completeness of the machinery that eventually moved against a congregation of under a hundred. Across this case the organs that appear, in sequence, include the municipal Public Security Bureau and its state-security arm, the Municipal State Security Bureau, the civil affairs and religious affairs departments of two districts, a district police station, the municipal procuratorate, the Intermediate People's Court and the Provincial Higher People's Court. Listing them is not rhetoric. It is the archival point: a case like this is never one police station's improvisation. It is a graded machine in which every level produces its own document, and in the timeline below almost every turn corresponds to an identifiable organ.

2018 to 2019: closure, raids, and worship on the move

Ren'ai's fixed meeting place lasted until the autumn of 2018. On 30 September 2018 the Nanming District ethnic and religious affairs authorities issued an administrative penalty decision: Zhang Chunlei and others had, without approval, established a religious venue in the Zhongtian Business Port, organised religious activities and accepted religious donations; all activity was to cease and the church's fittings and signs were to be removed. The church lost its home and began rotating among restaurants, hotels and members' homes — a pattern its members described as guerrilla worship: a venue announced late, a service held, and dispersal before the next meeting could be predicted. Two official documents must not be conflated. The 2018 instrument came from the religious affairs authorities and penalised the venue and the activities. On 12 August 2019 the Nanming District Civil Affairs Bureau issued a second instrument declaring Ren'ai Reformed Church an illegal civil organisation for acting in the name of a social organisation without registration, and banning it. That 2019 finding later entered the fraud judgment itself, as the premise on which the fraud construction stands. First the place was closed; then the body was declared illegal. The order matters, and this page keeps the two instruments separate.

The raids of 2019 came in threes. The best documented, on 12 May, brought some eighty religious-affairs and public security personnel into a hotel service; the cross used in worship was taken down, Zhang's computer and other personal possessions were confiscated, and the venue was sealed. The church moved to new rented premises; in July the authorities pressed the landlord, and the church had to move again. That rhythm ran on into 2021: no single fatal blow, but an unbroken attrition of moves, seals and summonses. Seen from the end, the mass detention of March 2021 was not a sudden escalation but the point this pressure line had been travelling towards. The administrative toolbox — penalties, bans, landlord pressure — had been used to its limit; the next step was criminal law, and all that remained open was the choice of charges. That is what makes the retreat of 16 March 2021 so consequential: it supplied the occasion on which criminalisation could land.

16 March 2021: the first day of the retreat

On 16 March 2021 Ren'ai Reformed Church began a three-day retreat at a rented venue, in premises within the Wenzhou Hotel complex building in Yunyan District (some ChinaAid reporting describes the gathering more loosely as Bible study at the church; this page follows the rented-retreat-venue account and flags the variation). On the first day, state security agents, religious affairs officials and police entered the venue — without showing identification, according to ChinaAid's reporting of 2021 and 2024 — and took more than a dozen believers to a police station. Other reporting adds that homes were searched and possessions confiscated. Headcounts vary between sources — ten, over ten, more than a dozen — and this page records "more than a dozen" without fixing a number the sources do not fix. One downstream fact must be stated plainly: none of the believers taken away that day became a defendant in a criminal case. On the public record they were released after that sweep, and the only person indicted and sentenced in this case was Zhang Chunlei. This was not, despite its opening scene, a multi-defendant prosecution.

Zhang himself was not at the retreat. He learned what had happened and went, that evening, to the Yan'an Middle Road police station in Yunyan District to ask after the detained believers and press for their release. He did not come out again. Police held him on the ground that he was illegally operating in the name of a social organisation, and his home was searched. An elder walked into a police station to fetch his people and was himself taken — nearly every account preserves that detail because it states the nature of the case without commentary. He was not seized for anything he had done at the retreat; he was seized because he was this church's elder, and because he arrived in person. From that evening he remained continuously deprived of liberty for exactly five years.

From administrative detention to an arrest warrant: the escalation inside forty-six days

The disposal after he was held falls into three stages, and the dates need care. Stage one is administrative detention. Most English-language sources — Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Church in Chains — record fifteen days beginning 17 March. ChinaAid's May 2021 reporting and Bitter Winter record eleven days. The four-day gap cannot be resolved from any public document, and this page records both figures side by side; the difference may turn on days actually executed versus days announced, but no source consulted says so, and this page does not tidy it away. Stage two is criminal detention on suspicion of fraud. Sources consistently give the figure of thirty-seven days — the statutory ceiling for criminal detention before a procuratorate must approve arrest — yet the interval from his being held on 16 March to formal arrest on 1 May is forty-six days, and how the administrative and criminal periods were joined, and from which day the thirty-seven were counted, is not explained in public reporting. This page records the sources' figures and the arithmetic tension together. Custody locations also shift with the stages in reporting — Yunyan District detention centre early on, Guiyang No. 2 Detention Centre and Guiyang City Detention Centre later — whether through transfer or through inconsistent relaying, and they are recorded by stage.

Stage three is the arrest itself. At 3 p.m. on 1 May 2021 the Yunyan District People's Procuratorate approved Zhang's arrest on suspicion of fraud, the stated basis being the unauthorised collection of offerings from believers. At noon on 5 May, at a Yunyan District police station, an officer handed Yang Aiqing the arrest notice. Ren'ai Reformed Church issued a prayer letter in response, stating that it had authorised no one to solicit funds on its behalf, that the congregation's legal support rested on trust and faith, and asking fellow churches to pray. Across the six weeks from police station to arrest warrant, the accusation had made its decisive jump. Acting in the name of an unregistered organisation is an administrative wrong worth a fortnight's detention at most. Fraud is a grave crime that can carry more than ten years. The moment offerings were renamed fraud, a small church's ordinary income was wired directly into the criminal law — and once that step was taken, the subversion count that followed was an addition of weight, not a change of kind.

How offerings became fraud: taking the judgment's logic apart

Fraud, in elementary criminal-law terms, requires at least three things: a false representation or concealment of the truth; a victim who, because of that deception, disposes of property under a mistaken understanding; and unlawful appropriation by the accused. The appeal ruling's relayed account of the first-instance facts shows, link by link, how Ren'ai's offerings were made to satisfy them. First link: the defendant concealed the fact that the church had been banned and was an illegal organisation. Second link: five believers — Xu Chaoying, Liao Ailin, Xiang Yu, Gao Xiaomei and Chen Fuqiong, in the ruling's transliteration — not knowing the church was illegal, were deceived into handing over offerings between October 2019 and February 2021, totalling 14,400 yuan. Third link: money given to the church was, by that fact, money defrauded by Zhang Chunlei. The defence's answers were equally specific. The ban had been publicly enforced by officials in front of the whole congregation, so Zhang neither thought of concealing it nor could have; Reformed pastors do not personally handle church finances, and the church operated a financial system designed to prevent corruption; and not one of the five alleged victims had ever reported a crime, demanded a refund, or appeared at the November 2022 trial. Defence and family accounts add that even some investigating officers privately said the case should not constitute fraud — recorded here as a relayed claim, at its proper level. The courts adopted none of it: the first instance convicted, and the second instance confirmed the facts exactly as found.

The shrinking of the amount is a separate archival fact. In November 2021 Yang Aiqing disclosed on social media that Guiyang's Public Security Bureau, in its recommended-indictment account, accused her husband of holding gatherings without state-approved clergy status and swindling believers of about 100,000 yuan. By the first-instance judgment of July 2024, the fraud amount stood at 14,400 yuan, the victims at five named individuals, and the period at sixteen months. The accusation lost more than eighty-five per cent of its value across two and a half years of investigation and detention. That shrinkage establishes two things at once: the allegation as first framed was far larger than anything that could finally be written into a judgment; and even at the reduced scale — small sums, no complainants, no testimony — the court still returned two years for fraud rather than finding that the offence was not made out. Set beside the Three-Self churches, which collect offerings every week without any of it being fraud, the operative variable is plain: what decides whether an offering is a crime is not the giver's willingness but the receiving church's position inside or outside the official system. Zhang's own response to the charge, as relayed by his family, was that treating offerings as stolen money and the church as a den of thieves was an insult to religious feeling that he could never accept. The words are relayed, not verbatim record, but they match the position he held without deviation for five years: he never pleaded guilty to either count.

How inciting subversion was added: twenty-one forwards

The second count arrived later, and it reveals the case's political level more clearly than the first. In November 2021 Zhang's lawyer learned that his client was also being investigated by the Guiyang Municipal State Security Bureau for allegedly inciting subversion of state power. A suspected endangering-state-security offence carries an immediate procedural dividend for the investigators: meetings between lawyer and client require the handling unit's approval, and that approval simply stopped coming. In late January 2022 the Guiyang procuratorate told the lawyer that fraud and incitement were being reviewed as one combined case — prosecutors spoke of the two matters together on 25 January — and on 27 January 2022 the case was transferred to the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court. The content of the subversion accusation only became fully visible with the 2024 judgments, as relayed in the appeal ruling: between March 2018 and February 2021 Zhang had used Facebook and other overseas platforms to forward to multiple friends a total of 21 articles and images, among them a pastor's statement of faithful resistance and a report of a Guangzhou church persisting with Christmas street evangelism despite repression; the judgment's language held that these items distorted China's religious policy, incited religious hatred and undermined national unity. Forwarding a fellow pastor's statement and news of another city's church is among the most ordinary traffic inside China's house-church world. Written into a judgment, it became the crime of attempting to subvert the people's democratic dictatorship and overthrow the socialist system — and it was punished more heavily than the fraud: three years and six months, plus three years' deprivation of political rights.

Lay the two counts side by side and the structure is unmistakable. Fraud, two years, disposes of the money. Subversion, three and a half years, disposes of the words. The money finally recognised was 14,400 yuan. The words finally recognised were 21 forwards, not one an original call to arms: no speech, no organisation, no act. Of the five-year term served by a man released at sixty-two, the larger share was purchased by the act of forwarding itself. That is the factual basis for this page's characterisation of the case as a double conviction — for belief and for speech together. Had he only collected offerings, the fraud construction would have been contestable on its own terms. Had he never signed the Declaration, never voiced solidarity with Early Rain, never forwarded his fellow pastors' words, the three and a half years would have had nothing to attach to. Zhang's answer to the subversion charge, consistent across his family's account and the judgment reporting, was a distinction the court refused to draw: he held differing views on some religious policies, above all the banning of churches and the arrest of Christians, but he had neither the motive nor any act aimed at subverting state power.

The months when the lawyer could not get in

The procedural black box of this case is best documented in its lawyer-access timeline, which can be laid out almost day by day. The lawyer met Zhang at the detention centre on 10 June 2021. Thereafter, from 29 June to 2 July, four meeting applications were made and four were refused. On 6 July the Guiyang Municipal State Security Bureau notified the detention centre that the case was suspected of endangering state security and that meetings required the handling unit's approval. On 21 July the lawyer attended Guiyang No. 2 Detention Centre for a fifth time, with complete paperwork, and was refused again; he was not permitted even to copy or photograph the notice. The same day he went to the Yunyan District procuratorate, where the prosecutor handling the case told him he knew nothing of any such state-security notice and had received no update on the case from superiors. One case, two organs, two incompatible accounts, and counsel in the middle unable to obtain a single page. Christian Solidarity Worldwide's July 2021 release placed Zhang's case beside that of Zhao Weikai of Taiyuan's Xuncheng Reformed Church for exactly this point: a fifth refusal inside a month, justified by endangering state security.

Access resumed on 5 January 2022, nearly seven months after the previous meeting. At Guiyang No. 2 Detention Centre the lawyer found Zhang thinner but in fair physical and mental condition; Zhang sang hymns during the meeting and asked counsel to greet fellow Christians. The black box did not open with that visit. The case had been transferred to the court on 27 January, yet on 31 March 2022 the lawyer travelled to Guiyang and was refused a meeting by the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court itself: he could see neither the judge nor the indictment. Past the one-year mark of detention, the procuratorate had still not told the family what the formal accusation was or when a trial might be held. As late as 4 June 2024 — eighteen months after the trial — the lawyer was finally permitted to inspect the case file and found parts of it missing, in Church in Chains' wording mysteriously so; that detail rests on a single compilation and is graded accordingly. This section stands on its own in the archive because pre-trial detention of three years and four months is not a summary phrase. It is an accumulation of refused meetings, an indictment that could not be obtained, and a file with pieces gone, day after day and month after month.

Yang Aiqing: the wife's five years

After Zhang was taken, the person who spoke to the outside world was his wife, Yang Aiqing, and what it cost her belongs in the record in its own right. On 21 April 2021, while her husband was in criminal detention, she was served a criminal summons on suspicion of fraud and interrogated for a full twenty-four hours about Ren'ai Church and the Christian faith, handcuffed and shackled during that interrogation according to Church in Chains' account — an account consistent in direction with CSW's reporting of her summons and interrogation, and recorded here at relayed level. She was never charged and she went home, but the summons carried its own message: this case could acquire a second defendant at any time. For five years her role did not change. She collected the arrest notice. She retained lawyers. She disclosed the prosecution's accusation figures on social media. She issued prayer letters. She pressed the court for news. On 8 June 2024 she disclosed on her WeChat Moments that her husband had been found to have liver cirrhosis. She and the couple's two daughters — and a grandchild, on Church in Chains' account of the family — kept this case in Guiyang for five years. In September 2024 Zhang's mother died suddenly while her son was in custody; he could not say goodbye. That item rests on Church in Chains' timeline alone and is graded single-source, but it belongs to a pattern this archive meets repeatedly: a sentence does not pause, and neither do the births and deaths outside it.

Her position on sentencing day shows the real content of this trial's supposed openness. The judgment was nominally pronounced in public. Her summary, later quoted by ChinaAid, describes the arrangement in substance: a small courtroom of twenty seats, seventeen of them filled in advance, the wife the only family member admitted, her phone surrendered to a locker; Christians who hoped to observe stopped at the court's security checkpoint; one woman who had reached Courtroom 14 pushed out again; a police line drawn. If a court wishes a verdict to be formally public yet actually unseen, her account concludes, it need only choose a small room and fill its seats early. The wording here is compressed paraphrase rather than verbatim quotation, but the underlying facts are corroborated across reporting of 24 July 2024: at the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court that morning, the only relative inside the room was Yang Aiqing.

29 November 2022: a six-hour trial, and twenty months of silence

The first-instance trial took place on 29 November 2022 at the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court. Yang Aiqing applied in advance to attend and was refused; after the hearing she asked to see her husband — a courtesy families are ordinarily granted after a trial — and was refused that too. The hearing ran from 9:30 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, over six hours. The courthouse entrance was guarded so heavily that security staff themselves said they had never seen such a show of force; Ren'ai members waiting outside were removed by subdistrict personnel, and others were followed. Inside, Zhang made his own statement, recounting his road from government work to business to full-time ministry, and its core was two sentences: what he did was for the sake of the gospel, and he had neither incited subversion nor defrauded anyone; not one alleged victim had reported a crime, appeared in court, or demanded money back, and the fraud accusation had no foundation. His lawyer argued innocence. The prosecutor, after reading the indictment, said little. No verdict was announced. After that day the case sank into twenty months of silence. Wife and lawyer asked again and again for progress and were told, in Bitter Winter's account, that the case involved national security and nothing could be disclosed. As late as 12 March 2024, the handling judge's answer to Yang Aiqing was still that the case, given its special nature, remained in process.

Of Zhang himself in those twenty months, only fragments survive. Trial reporting from 2022 described a man nineteen months into detention, hair and beard greying, apparently in fair health. At a lawyer's visit in early May 2024 he appeared thin, his hair entirely white, and he reflected — as relayed through counsel — on his years as a pastor: that he had once wanted to accomplish many things in the church while neglecting the feelings of brothers and sisters, and that serving a church is not the same as running a business. Set the fragments together and the shape of untried detention becomes visible. It was not a few months of waiting for a court date. It was a man ageing from fifty-nine to sixty-one in a detention centre, outliving his mother inside it, acquiring cirrhosis inside it, his hair turning white inside it, while the judgment that a single day's hearing should have produced took twenty months to arrive.

His body: cholecystitis, cirrhosis, and the refused bail application

The health record must be kept strictly at the level of what his family and lawyers said, with sourcing stated. The timeline that can be assembled is this. In the second half of 2023 he was hospitalised with an attack of cholecystitis: Church in Chains' timeline places the admission in August 2023, at Sanjiang Hospital, for more than twenty days; ChinaAid's June 2024 reporting places the hospitalisation at the end of 2023, lasting over a month with more than twenty days of intravenous treatment, and states that liver cirrhosis was already detected during that stay without the lawyer or family knowing of it at the time, the diagnosis becoming clear to them only after the lawyer's visit in May 2024. The two accounts cannot both be exactly right on the month, and this page records them in parallel. What is established is that during 2023 he spent weeks in hospital for gallbladder inflammation, that cirrhosis was detected during that hospitalisation, and that his family's knowledge of it lagged badly behind the diagnosis. He had no record of liver disease before imprisonment, on the family's account; he also had hypertension. ChinaAid's reporting speculated that the liver condition might be connected to long-term consumption of mouldy rice in custody; that is that organisation's speculation and is not adopted here as fact. In June 2024 family and lawyer urgently informed the judge of the diagnosis. On 8 July 2024 the defence applied for bail pending trial on the ground of liver cirrhosis, and the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court refused it; the detention centre, ChinaAid reported, had not arranged any recent physical examination for him either. Sixteen days after that refusal came the first-instance judgment. The Dui Hua Foundation's 2024 prisoner update independently records that Zhang, diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, was denied release on medical grounds. On ill-treatment the record needs one explicit limit: USCIRF's database marks both torture reports and medical-neglect reports for this case as "No," and no credible allegation of torture of Zhang himself appears in the public sources consulted. This page therefore makes no torture claim. What is documented is prolonged untried detention, restricted access to counsel, and the refusal of medical bail to a man with a diagnosed, potentially life-threatening liver condition.

Sentence and appeal: 24 July 2024 and 25 October 2024

Sentence was pronounced at 10 a.m. on 24 July 2024 at the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court. Beyond the terms already set out in the metadata above, the judgment's property orders deserve their own lines. The 14,400 yuan was to be recovered and returned to the victims. Confiscated as criminal tools were the two Huawei phones, four external hard drives, seven USB drives, two card readers and two memory cards, together with what the judgment called illegal church study notebooks and church financial statement materials. A confiscation list that places a church's notebooks and accounts beside its phones and drives states, without commentary, what this prosecution was actually seizing and condemning: not criminal proceeds but the entire information-bearing apparatus of a small congregation. The term's arithmetic was stated expressly: one day of pre-trial detention credits one day of sentence, the term running from 17 March 2021 to 16 March 2026. On the day sentence was finally passed, three years and four months of it were already served, with under twenty months remaining. Zhang did not accept the verdict and in early August 2024 appealed to the Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court.

The appeal was decided without a hearing. The Higher Court's criminal ruling, dated 25 October 2024, confirmed the first-instance facts and evidence in full: forwarding articles and images that distorted religious policy constituted inciting subversion; fictionalising facts and concealing the truth to cheat others of property constituted fraud; the original judgment had applied the law correctly, the sentence was appropriate and the procedure lawful; under Article 236(1)(1) of the Criminal Procedure Law the appeal was dismissed and the original judgment affirmed, the ruling being final. The defence's applications in the second instance — exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, access to the synchronous audio and video recordings of interrogations, evidence taken from the victims, a hearing, victims and witnesses summoned to testify, remittal for retrial — were adopted in no part. The ruling's own internal dating carries a small discrepancy in the relayed text, with a decision passage dated 15 October against the ruling date of 25 October; this page uses 25 October as the ruling date and flags the variance. What is not in dispute is the delivery: the ruling was made in October, and the family learned its result only on 8 December, more than forty days later — ChinaAid's report of the rejection is dated 20 December and headlined by the family's late discovery. With that, the judicial process closed on paper, with fifteen months of the sentence still to run. In June 2025 ChinaAid reported a letter from prison to his two daughters, expressing longing for his family and assuring them, in relayed summary, that all was well inside, with fruit and milk. Where he served those final months, public reporting never states: the prison's name is a matter of no public record.

International response

The firmest international record comes from the United States' official bodies. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom entered Zhang Chunlei in its Religious Prisoners of Conscience database — Protestant Christian, religious leader, detained 16 March 2021, charges of fraud and subversion — cited him in its October 2021 factsheet on China's measures for the management of religious clergy and in its 2023 Annual Report, and its commissioners spoke publicly for him on 6 March 2024. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China carries his case in its political prisoner database, and in congressional hearing testimony of 2025–2026 his name was read into the record alongside Wang Yi and others in appeals for prisoners of conscience to be raised in dealings with Beijing. In the State Department's continuing designation of China as a Country of Particular Concern, the imprisonment of house-church leaders on fraud and state-security charges forms part of the recurring factual background; this page did not find Zhang individually named in the text of a State Department report and records that limit rather than inflating it. Beyond official bodies, Christian Solidarity Worldwide followed the case in releases from April 2021 onward — criminal detention, formal arrest, the refused lawyer visits, the added subversion charge — the Dui Hua Foundation recorded the sentence and the denial of medical release in its 2024 prisoner updates, and Release International and Church in Chains maintained his file through to his release. None of it altered a single step of the case: counsel still could not get in while visits were refused, and the bail application was still rejected when it was filed. This section is kept for the contrast it documents. A case carried simultaneously by America's religious-freedom commission and its congressional China commission could nonetheless proceed at home to three years and four months without a judgment, a verdict delayed twenty months past trial, and an appeal ruling undelivered to the family for over forty days.

16 March 2026: completion of the sentence, and what followed

On 16 March 2026 Zhang Chunlei completed his sentence and walked out, aged sixty-two. ChinaAid's Guiyang report of the following day, published 18 March, confirmed the release and recorded that five years of imprisonment had left a deep mark on his body: hospitalisation for severe cholecystitis during custody, diagnoses of liver cirrhosis and hypertension, a physically weakened man who had nevertheless refused throughout to plead guilty. A Release International update and Church in Chains' revised profile give the same release date and the same health outline within the same period — three accounts in mutual corroboration, on the strength of which this page corrects his status from imprisoned to released. The commissioning brief for this page still treated his 2026 release as a matter of sentence arithmetic; it is recorded here instead as an accomplished, reported fact. One flag is owed to users of the official database: USCIRF's entry continued for a time after 16 March 2026 to show him as not released. This page judges that to be updating lag in the database; it does not disturb the release, but anyone citing the database should check its date.

Release is not the end of the case. The judgment's three years of deprivation of political rights run from completion of the custodial term, reaching their end around March 2029 by the judgment's own arithmetic. ChinaAid's reporting and Release International's partner both caution that, by the pattern of comparable political and religious cases, release typically brings continued residential surveillance, travel restrictions and social isolation. That is a general warning drawn from other cases, not a report of any specific measure yet imposed on Zhang Chunlei himself, and this page keeps the two levels separate. Of his actual residence, his recovery, and the present condition of Ren'ai Reformed Church, there is as of this page's check in October 2026 no specific public record. The church itself has nearly vanished from public reporting since March 2021; whether a congregation of under a hundred people still meets in some smaller form is not verifiable from open sources. The archive's endpoint for this case is therefore exactly here: the man is out; news of the church has ceased; what follows awaits new public record.

Full timeline

• 1985 — Zhang Chunlei begins work in a government office (per his own autobiographical poem written in custody, relayed by ChinaAid); the office and post have no reliable public record, and the circulating tax-official claim is unverified.
• 1993 — He leaves the system and goes into business (same self-account, corroborated across reporting).
• 2008 — He becomes a Christian, and afterwards moves gradually into full-time ministry, giving up business.
• December 2014 — He co-founds Ren'ai Reformed Church in Guiyang and serves as elder; the meeting place is on the 27th floor of the Zhongtian Business Port in Nanming District; the church refuses to join the Three-Self system and has fewer than one hundred members.
• 2018 — He is among the first signatories of Wang Yi's "Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith"; 458 pastors and leaders sign in total.
• 30 September 2018 — The Nanming District religious affairs authorities issue an administrative penalty, seal the Zhongtian meeting place and order all activity stopped and fittings removed; the church moves to rotating venues in restaurants, hotels and homes.
• December 2018 — After the Early Rain raid, Zhang travels to Chengdu to visit affected families (per Church in Chains he is on one occasion taken to a police station and on another escorted back to Guiyang by state security — single-source relaying); with Yang Hua and Jin Tianming he issues a statement of willingness to bear the same charges as Wang Yi.
• 12 May 2019 — Some eighty religious-affairs and public security personnel raid a hotel service, remove the cross and confiscate Zhang's computer and other items; the church is raided three times in 2019 in all, and in July landlord pressure forces another move.
• 12 August 2019 — The Nanming District Civil Affairs Bureau bans Ren'ai Reformed Church as an illegal social organisation (per the facts as found in the first-instance judgment; a separate instrument from the 2018 religious-affairs penalty).
• October 2019 to February 2021 — The period later adjudicated as fraud: offerings from five believers totalling 14,400 yuan.
• 16 March 2021 — First day of a three-day church retreat; state security agents, religious affairs officials and police raid the rented venue, take away more than a dozen believers and search some believers' homes; that evening Zhang goes to the Yan'an Middle Road police station in Yunyan District to inquire and is held, and his home is searched.
• From 17 March 2021 — Administrative detention begins, its length recorded as fifteen days (CSW, Church in Chains) and as eleven days (ChinaAid, Bitter Winter), unresolved on public documents; criminal detention on suspicion of fraud follows, most often given as thirty-seven days.
• 21 April 2021 — Yang Aiqing is criminally summoned on suspicion of fraud and interrogated for twenty-four hours, handcuffed and shackled according to Church in Chains; she is not charged.
• 1 May 2021 — Zhang is formally arrested on suspicion of fraud, the arrest approved by the Yunyan District procuratorate; Yang Aiqing receives the arrest notice on 5 May; the church issues a prayer letter.
• 10 June 2021 — The lawyer meets Zhang at the detention centre; thereafter meetings are repeatedly refused.
• 29 June to 21 July 2021 — Five lawyer meeting applications are refused; on 6 July the Guiyang Municipal State Security Bureau notifies the detention centre that the case is suspected of endangering state security and meetings require the handling unit's approval; the case prosecutor tells the lawyer he knows nothing of the notice.
• November 2021 — The lawyer learns Zhang is also under state-security investigation for inciting subversion; Yang Aiqing discloses that the police recommended-indictment account alleges gatherings without approved clergy status and swindling of about 100,000 yuan.
• 5 January 2022 — Lawyer access resumes at Guiyang No. 2 Detention Centre; Zhang is thinner, in fair spirits, and sings hymns at the meeting.
• Around 27 January 2022 — Fraud and incitement are reviewed as one combined case (prosecutors state the combined review to the lawyer on 25 January) and the case is transferred to the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court.
• 31 March 2022 — The lawyer's meeting application is refused by the court in Guiyang; he can obtain neither a meeting with the judge nor a copy of the indictment.
• 29 November 2022 — Secret trial at the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court lasting over six hours; Yang Aiqing's application to attend is refused, as is a post-trial meeting; no alleged victim or witness appears; no verdict is announced.
• Second half of 2023 — Zhang is hospitalised for weeks with cholecystitis (August and year-end datings both reported); liver cirrhosis is detected during the hospitalisation, unknown at the time to lawyer and family.
• 12 March 2024 — The handling judge tells Yang Aiqing the case, given its special nature, is still being processed.
• Early May 2024 — A lawyer's visit finds Zhang thin and white-haired, reflecting on his ministry; the family thereafter confirms his cirrhosis and hypertension.
• 4 June 2024 — The lawyer is finally allowed to inspect the case file and finds parts of it missing (per Church in Chains; single source).
• 8 June 2024 — Yang Aiqing discloses on WeChat Moments that her husband has been diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and had no liver disease before imprisonment.
• 8 July 2024 — The defence's bail application on cirrhosis grounds is rejected by the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court; the detention centre has arranged no recent physical examination (per ChinaAid).
• 24 July 2024 — First-instance judgment at Guiyang: inciting subversion, three years and six months plus three years' deprivation of political rights; fraud, two years plus a 5,000-yuan fine; combined execution five years, with 14,400 yuan recovered and phones, drives, notebooks and financial materials confiscated; the term runs to 16 March 2026; Yang Aiqing is the only relative admitted.
• Early August 2024 — Zhang appeals to the Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court.
• September 2024 — Zhang's mother dies suddenly while he is in custody; he cannot say goodbye (per Church in Chains' timeline; single source).
• 25 October 2024 — The Guizhou Provincial Higher People's Court rules: appeal dismissed, original judgment affirmed (the relayed ruling text carries a 15 October decision passage against the 25 October ruling date; this page uses 25 October and flags the variance).
• 8 December 2024 — The family first learns the appeal result; ChinaAid reports it on 20 December.
• Around 25 June 2025 — Zhang writes from prison to his two daughters (per ChinaAid reporting); the name of the prison is a matter of no public record.
• 16 March 2026 — He completes his sentence and is released, aged 62 (ChinaAid's Guiyang report of 17 March, corroborated by Release International and Church in Chains updates of the same period).
• October 2026 — At this page's check: post-release restrictions on him personally and the church's present state are matters of no public record; the three years' deprivation of political rights runs, by the judgment's arithmetic, to about March 2029.

Verification note

The core facts of this page — the founding of Ren'ai Reformed Church in December 2014 and its refusal to join the Three-Self system; the 2018 signing of the Declaration; the religious-affairs penalty and closure of the meeting place on 30 September 2018; the raids of 2019 and the landlord pressure; the raiding of the retreat and Zhang's detention at the police station on 16 March 2021; the formal arrest for suspected fraud on 1 May 2021; the addition of the subversion investigation in November 2021; the long refusal of lawyer access on state-security grounds; the secret trial of 29 November 2022; the first-instance judgment of 24 July 2024 with its two counts, combined five years, fine and recovery figures; the rejection of the appeal on 25 October 2024; the cirrhosis diagnosis and the refusal of bail; and the completion of the sentence on 16 March 2026 — are each corroborated by at least two independent sources, principally ChinaAid's continuous reporting from 2021 to 2026 including its full relaying of the appeal ruling, Christian Solidarity Worldwide's releases of 2021–2022, USCIRF's prisoners-of-conscience database and clergy factsheet, the Dui Hua Foundation's prisoner updates, and Church in Chains' continuously updated case file. The principal disputes and editorial choices are these. First, the commissioning brief's statement that he was sentenced to five years for fraud alone is factually wrong: the judgment imposed three years and six months for inciting subversion and two years for fraud, combined as five years, and this page follows the judgment and appeal ruling as relayed, recording the correction here and in the text. Second, year of birth: no exact date is on public record; release reporting consistently gives his age as 62 in March 2026, supporting an inferred birth year of about 1963–1964; a birth year of about 1969 in the brief is inconsistent with that age and is not adopted, and the claim that he was a tax official could not be found in any reliable source consulted — only provincial-government service is used, with the office and post marked unverified. Third, administrative detention is recorded as fifteen days and as eleven days by different reputable relays; with no instrument available, both stand. Fourth, the 2018 religious-affairs penalty and the Civil Affairs ban of 12 August 2019 are two distinct instruments that secondary material often merges; this page separates them on the judgment's facts and the reporting. Fifth, the month of the 2023 cholecystitis hospitalisation is given as August and as the end of the year by different sources, and both stand. Sixth, the appeal ruling's internal dating shows a 15 October decision passage against a 25 October ruling date; 25 October is used, with the variance flagged. Seventh, the fraud allegation's scale fell from a police account of about 100,000 yuan to a judicially found 14,400 yuan; the two figures are recorded at their separate levels and never blended. Eighth, the Chengdu episodes, the missing file materials, the date of his mother's death and the family's composition rest on Church in Chains' compilation alone and are graded down wherever they appear. Ninth, torture: USCIRF's database expressly records torture reports for this case as none, and no credible allegation of torture of Zhang himself appears in the sources consulted; this page makes no torture claim and records instead the documented matters of restricted counsel access, prolonged untried detention and refused medical bail. Tenth, the name of his prison, specific post-release restrictions and the church's present state are matters of no public record and are left blank as found. Evidence grading: the relayed texts of the first-instance judgment and the second-instance ruling are first-level documents; US official databases and reports are second-level; aid and advocacy reporting is third-level, with single-source details downgraded accordingly. This page does not use unsourced rumour.

Our Take

Our Take is tied to this case's facts alone. First, fraud was used here as a universal key. Declare a church an illegal organisation first; then every offering its members ever gave can be redescribed as money parted with in ignorance. On that logic, any unregistered church's every collection is a fraud case in waiting, needing only the decision to activate it. Fourteen thousand four hundred yuan, five victims who never complained, zero witnesses in court — assembled into two years. What this case proves is not that Zhang Chunlei deceived anyone; it is that once offerings can be criminalised, a conviction requires no victim at all, only a prior banning order. Second, the subversion count deserves to be preserved word for word in its factual core: 21 forwards, nothing original, no speech, no organisation, exchanged for three years and six months plus three years' deprivation of political rights — more than the fraud. A pastor forwarding a colleague's statement and news of another city's church became subversive only when laid beside his biography: the 2018 signature, the solidarity with Early Rain. In other words, what was punished was not any single forward but the side he had publicly stood on for years. Third, procedure in this case was not a blemish on the punishment; it was part of the punishment itself. Seven months without a lawyer. A wife barred from the trial. Three years and four months untried. A verdict twenty months after the hearing. An appeal ruling the family saw forty days late. Bail refused to a man with diagnosed cirrhosis. Taken singly, each of those is a news item; assembled, they are the complete record of punishment in advance of judgment. Fourth, count the cost on the state's side: for a church of under a hundred people and an elder of sixty, Guiyang deployed state security in two forms, religious affairs, civil affairs, public security, a procuratorate and two levels of court, and five years of custody — and what it purchased was a congregation driven into silence and an old man sent home with cirrhosis. The suppression did not extinguish the faith; it converted one small church's five years into a file the whole world can read. Fifth, remember the evening he walked into the police station. On 16 March 2021 Zhang Chunlei went to ask what had become of more than a dozen detained believers — the most basic act of an elder's duty. Five years later he walked out aged sixty-two, white-haired, cirrhotic, his mother gone. If asking a police station how detained Christians are faring is to be answered with five years, then the message this case leaves for those who come after is very clear: what was punished was never fraud, and never subversion. It was that a man served five years as the elder of a church that was never approved — and that, at the decisive moment, he did not hide.