第77案 | 张海涛Case 77 | Zhang Haitao
新疆维吾尔自治区乌鲁木齐的汉族维权人士，原国企下岗工人、电话卡零售商。2009年被无罪羁押近两月后走上维权与网络发声之路，长期批评新疆的民族宗教与维稳政策，并接受自由亚洲电台、美国之音采访。2015年6月26日在家中被带走，2016年1月15日被乌鲁木齐中院以煽动颠覆国家政权罪判十五年、为境外刺探非法提供情报罪判五年，并罚十九年，刑期至2034年6月25日，现于沙雅监狱服刑；家属十一年里只获准会见四次，妻子李爱杰已于2017年12月携子抵达美国。联合国任意拘留问题工作组第66/2021号意见认定其拘留属四类任意拘留，要求立即释放，中方未执行。A Han Chinese rights defender in Urumqi, Xinjiang — a laid-off state-enterprise worker who retailed phone cards. Wrongfully held for nearly two months in 2009 and released without charge, he turned to rights defence and online speech, criticising Xinjiang's ethnic, religious and stability-maintenance policies for years and giving interviews to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Taken from his home on 26 June 2015, he was sentenced by the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court on 15 January 2016 to fifteen years for inciting subversion of state power and five years for illegally providing intelligence to entities outside the country — nineteen years combined, running to 25 June 2034 — and is serving the term in Shaya Prison. In eleven years his family has been allowed to see him four times; his wife Li Aijie reached the United States with their son in December 2017. UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 66/2021 found his detention arbitrary under four categories and demanded his immediate release; China has not implemented it.
First, the errors that have circulated most widely, set straight
There has been no shortage of public reporting on the Zhang Haitao case, but the errors have circulated along with the reporting for ten years, so this page corrects them together before the main text begins, and everything quoted below follows the corrected version. First, the composition of the sentence. On the day sentence was pronounced, Agence France-Presse quoted defence counsel Li Dunyong as saying that the intelligence charge had drawn four years and that the two charges totalled nineteen years. The full text of the judgment, which this page has checked (the complete English translation is translated and archived by China Change; see Sources), states it plainly: fifteen years for inciting subversion of state power, five years for illegally providing intelligence to entities outside the country, and nineteen years to be executed with the punishments combined. What the lawyer relayed orally to the media on the day of sentencing does not match the judgment, and the judgment governs; the "four years" in the AFP report was an error of the early reporting. Second, the 120,000 yuan is confiscation of personal property, and it is split: 100,000 yuan confiscated on the incitement charge and 20,000 yuan on the intelligence charge, 120,000 yuan confiscated in total. A filing that Chinese Human Rights Defenders submitted to the United Nations, and many reports that reproduced it, wrote this as a "fine" of 120,000 yuan, conflating confiscation of property with a fine, which are not the same thing in nature — what is confiscated is property already in his name, the authorities did at the time notify the family that the confiscation would be enforced, and everything this family owned was one small flat in Urumqi. Third, the day sentence was pronounced, 15 January 2016, was a Friday; the AFP report nevertheless wrote that he had been sentenced "last Sunday," and this page has checked the calendar: the "Sunday" claim does not stand. Fourth, his native place: the judgment writes Fangcheng County, Henan Province; the Rights Defence Network's profile and monthly reports write Zhenping County, Nanyang, Henan, and one Rights Defence Network profile from January 2016 even printed a non-existent "Zhengping County." Fangcheng and Zhenping both belong to Nanyang; this page follows the court document and records Fangcheng County, leaving the Rights Defence Network's version in the Verification Note for reference. Fifth, his wife's name is Li Aijie, with "jie" written as the character for "outstanding"; some retellings write "Li Aijie" with the character for "clean," a homophone error, while Radio Free Asia's Chinese reporting of the time and China Change's feature both write Li Aijie, and this page uses Li Aijie throughout. Sixth, a China Change article telling Li Aijie's story says he was "arrested in 2014," which contradicts every other source and the judgment and is plainly a slip of the pen; he was taken away on 26 June 2015. None of these errors is large on its own, but fitted together they skew a case, which is why this page lists them one by one.
Life and rights defence: how a laid-off worker came to this road
Zhang Haitao was born on 10 March 1971 in Fangcheng County, Henan, and is Han Chinese (date and place of birth as given in the first-instance judgment; the Rights Defence Network records only the birth year, 1971). He worked in a state-owned enterprise when he was young and was laid off in the restructuring of state enterprises in the 1990s. In 1995 he left Henan to build a life in Xinjiang (the complaint filed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the Rights Defence Network profile and China Change's account agree with one another on this point). In Urumqi he earned his living selling telecommunications products; Radio Free Asia's January 2016 report puts it more precisely: he ran a phone-card retail business; the judgment registers him as self-employed; China Change's article says he was in the electronics business. The different versions point at the same thing: he had no work unit and no connections, and was a self-employed man making his living in Xinjiang. He later married Li Aijie, a fellow native of Henan, and they lived in Urumqi. There is no public record of finer personal details such as his educational background or family origins, and this page does not estimate or invent them.
What turned his life onto a different road was an imprisonment in 2009. The profile the Rights Defence Network wrote for him says that in 2009 he went back to Nanyang, Henan, on holiday, but Xinjiang police arrested him on suspicion of fraud and brought him back to Xinjiang, held him for nearly two months, and in the end released him innocent, unnamed and unexplained — no conclusion, no apology, and no document of any kind explaining what those two months were supposed to count as. The complaint filed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders records the same event in more restrained language: he was detained for nearly two months on suspicion of fraud, the charge was dropped when he was released, and from then on he began complaining and petitioning the relevant Xinjiang departments about this wrongful detention. The two sources differ in detail and fullness, but the core facts agree: detention of nearly two months, the charge dropped, release. From that time on he began to make contact with the law and to defend his own rights, and in doing so he came to see clearly how the machine he was complaining about actually worked. In the words of the Rights Defence Network profile, he thereafter began to engage with the administration of justice, to defend his individual rights, and frequently to publish his views on the government and current affairs online.
From around 2010 he became an active rights defender online. China Change's long 2017 account lists several of his activities: he took part in online forums discussing democratic questions, worked as a volunteer for the human rights website Rights Movement, signed an appeal calling for the abolition of the re-education-through-labour system, and gave interviews to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America about things he had seen with his own eyes on the streets of Urumqi (the signature on the appeal to abolish re-education through labour appears only in that article, and this page records it as single-source — see the Verification Note). Radio Free Asia's 2016 reporting also mentioned that he had helped petitioners put their own experiences of injustice online and had long expressed independent views on social issues. For a period he contributed pieces to Boxun, an overseas human rights website (in the words of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint); the judgment says that between March 2010 and March 2015 he was employed by an overseas website as a reporter, while he himself in court, and his wife to the media, both clarified the point: it was no more than registering and posting contributions on the Boxun website, whose system automatically labelled contributors as reporters, and he had never published a single piece in the capacity of a reporter. That distinction later became one brick in the narrative of the intelligence charge, so this page records his own account of it here first.
Xinjiang accounted for a large share of what he spoke about. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint says that over the years he used Weibo, WeChat and Twitter to publish statements criticising government policy, including the restrictions on Uyghur Muslims' religious freedom, and gave interviews on the subject to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. This point needs to be stated plainly: Zhang Haitao is Han Chinese, not Uyghur. He lived in Xinjiang for twenty years, watching the city he lived in acquire more checkpoints and more patrols year by year, and watching the religious life of his Uyghur neighbours being tightened bit by bit, and he chose to say so. Amnesty International, both in its submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review and in its 2016–2017 annual report, made a point of identifying him as a Han Chinese human rights defender, and his lawyer believed that one reason the sentence was so heavy was precisely that he had touched the ethnic question. That a Han Chinese man was sentenced to nineteen years in part for speaking up for Uyghurs is exactly what makes this case stand out so starkly among Xinjiang's series of persecution cases.
The price of speaking out was already being tallied against him, item by item, before his arrest. Radio Free Asia reported in 2016 that in past years, whenever sensitive dates arrived as the authorities defined them — the Two Sessions, the anniversary of 4 June and the like — he would be monitored by the local police station as a stability-maintenance target. One more serious episode has an exact date: a 2011 briefing by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (republished on the website of Amnesty International's UK section) records that on 30 August 2011, the night before the China–Eurasia Expo opened in Urumqi, he was dragged away near the entrance of the Xincheng district government building by two plainclothes officers who had been assigned to monitor him since 29 August, taken to a nearby construction site, roughly handled and robbed of his mobile phone, then taken to the Zhongya South Road Police Station, held and beaten, where a state security officer warned him to stay near his home and not to go near the Expo venues; he was released more than three hours later and his phone was returned, but its contents had already been deleted. He himself believed that this beating was connected with his having complained for more than a year about an earlier violent beating by law-enforcement personnel — which is to say that around 2010 there was a further occasion on which he was beaten, and the specific date and course of that occasion are not on public record. As for the blocking of his Sina Weibo account: he did use Weibo (the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint lists Weibo, WeChat and Twitter as the platforms he posted on), but when his Weibo account was blocked, and how many times it was blocked, cannot be found in any source available to this page and can only honestly be recorded as not on public record; and the list of statements the court later used to convict him contains only WeChat and Twitter, not Weibo. His Christian faith is also part of the background to understanding the second half of his course: according to his wife Li Aijie's later public speeches (published by ChinaAid), at the appeal stage he refused to confess in exchange for a reduced sentence; his lawyer asked him whether he had a faith, and he answered that he was a Christian and believed in God; while he was in the detention centre his wife also specifically asked the centre whether he could read the Bible she had sent in for him. This part comes from the family's public account, and this page records it as the family's own statement.
The arrest and the search of his home: 26 June 2015
On 26 June 2015, Urumqi police came to Zhang Haitao's home and took him away. That day, seven plainclothes police officers returned to search the home (the number of officers and the course of the search are given in the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint). The fullest record of what was taken away is the confiscation list at the end of the judgment: one desktop computer, one Lenovo laptop computer, two hard drives, one black Xiaomi mobile phone, one white Samsung mobile phone and two USB drives. The complaint also records that his bank cards and identity card were seized and his bank accounts frozen. The Rights Defence Network records the events of the same day as follows: police of the Zhongya South Road Police Station searched his home and criminally detained him on suspicion of inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination. Note that first charge — inciting ethnic hatred, an ordinary charge carrying a maximum of under ten years, and nothing at all like the two charges on which he was eventually sentenced to nineteen years.
Li Aijie was already several months pregnant at the time. The complaint records what she went through that day: she was made to hand over her mobile phone and to sign the criminal detention notice, but was not allowed to keep a copy of the notice; she was then taken to the Zhongya South Road Police Station, where she was photographed, had DNA samples and fingerprints taken, and was questioned about her relationship with Zhang Haitao. Urumqi state security personnel later told her she could go to the Zhongya South Road Police Station to obtain a copy of the detention notice; on 14 July 2015 she did go, and a police officer at the station told her that she had already seen and signed it, and that "this offence is a state secret — letting you see the detention notice would be the same as telling you a state secret." But the charge Zhang Haitao was then being held on was inciting ethnic hatred, which is not an offence endangering state security or involving state secrets at all. The complaint points out that under Article 83 of the Criminal Procedure Law, the family should have received written notification within twenty-four hours. A detention notice was withheld on the ground of "state secrets" in just this way, and from the very first day this family was placed inside an information black box.
The procedural dates need to be kept distinct: he was taken away on 26 June, and the date of criminal detention recorded in the judgment is 27 June, executed by the Urumqi Municipal Public Security Bureau. In the end, however, the sentence was counted from 26 June, the judgment on this point counting the day he was taken away into the term. For several weeks after he was taken he could not see a lawyer; the first lawyer's visit took place on 1 or 2 August 2015, and the complaint itself states that "the exact date is unclear" as to which of the two days it was. He later told his lawyer that it was precisely during this period, when he could not see a lawyer, that he was tortured: according to the detailed statement he gave his appeal lawyer on 14 November 2016, during the twenty days after he was taken away, state security personnel did not let him sleep, interrogated him continuously, burned a lighter next to his head whenever he fell asleep, denied him food and water, and beat him, including hanging him up and punching and kicking him (all of the above are his own allegations as relayed by his lawyer — see the complaint; the court ultimately did not accept them — see the trial section). What the defence counsel said at the first-instance trial differs slightly from this: that the torture took place in the first ten days after his detention, at night, in an interrogation room without surveillance cameras. The two figures, ten days and twenty days, coexist; this page records both, without merging them or choosing between them, and the discrepancy is set out in the Verification Note.
The charge changed three times while he was in custody. On 31 July 2015 he was formally arrested, and the arrest charge had become picking quarrels and provoking trouble (the complaint and the judgment corroborate each other on the arrest date). After he had been held for nearly five months, the charge changed again: the Rights Defence Network records that on 18 November 2015 the charge was changed once more and he continued to be held on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power (this specific date appears only in the Rights Defence Network's system, and this page marks it as a single-source-system record). By 25 December 2015, the Urumqi People's Procuratorate had formally brought the prosecution, and the indictment charged exactly the two offences on which he was ultimately convicted: inciting subversion of state power and illegally providing intelligence to entities outside the country, arguing for aggravated punishment under Article 106 of the Criminal Law on the ground of "colluding with institutions, organisations or individuals outside the country" (the date of prosecution, the indictment number and the structure of the charges are all given in the judgment). Chinese Human Rights Defenders commented in its complaint on the trajectory of this drifting charge: from criminal detention for inciting ethnic hatred, to arrest for picking quarrels, to prosecution for inciting subversion plus spying out intelligence, the charge escalated step by step, which suggests that at the time of the criminal detention the authorities did not have sufficient evidence, and it cannot be excluded that torture was used to assemble the heavier political charges. That comment is that organisation's judgement; this page reproduces it as such and names its source.
He was held at the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Detention Centre. He spent roughly a year and a half there, from June 2015 to December 2016, including the eleven months after he was sentenced — and what happened in those eleven months is an important part of the next section and of the section on his present situation in prison: according to his statement to his lawyer, from January 2016, after he was sentenced, he was kept in heavy shackles continuously for six months, given less to eat and drink than the other people in his cell, not allowed out of the cell for exercise, and made to sleep pressed tightly against another detainee. His wife complained about this abuse to a judge of the Xinjiang Higher People's Court on 11 July 2016; on 19 July, the Xinjiang People's Procuratorate told Li Aijie that they had ordered the "punishment implements" to be removed; but when the lawyer visited on 14 November 2016, Zhang Haitao confirmed that the shackles had never been taken off at all. An order from a provincial-level procuratorate turned into empty words inside a detention centre — an episode the complaint records day by day, and the most concrete slice of this case's procedural black box.
Trial and sentencing: two hundred and seventy-four statements, and a camera used on the street
On 11 January 2016, the Intermediate People's Court of Urumqi heard the case. The judgment records that this was a public hearing, with Deng Ying as presiding judge, Ding Junsheng, Shi Shuai and Xu Lei of the Urumqi People's Procuratorate appearing for the prosecution, Li Dunyong of Beijing Gongxin Law Firm as defence counsel, and Zhang Haitao himself present in court. Only seventeen days passed from the prosecution (25 December 2015) to the hearing, and only twenty-one days to the pronouncement of sentence. In court, Zhang Haitao admitted the objective acts the prosecution described — he had indeed said those things on Twitter and WeChat, accepted those interviews and taken those photographs — but denied that they were crimes: he said he had been exercising the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution; that giving accounts and photographs to overseas media was conveying his personal observations and letting the public know the facts, that there were no state secrets in any of it, and that there was no "spying out" of anything; he also denied in court that he had subjectively harboured the purpose of subverting state power, saying that the parts of his initial confession concerning subjective intent were false statements made under the unlawful conduct of the case-handling organs, and that his behaviour had been nothing more than criticism of the relevant policies. Li Dunyong's defence had three layers: first, that criticising and even cursing the ruling party is not the same as inciting subversion — his client opposed dictatorship and demanded democracy, had no subjective intent to subvert, and, as the witness testimony showed, firmly opposed achieving his aims by violence; second, that "intelligence," as the judicial interpretations define it, must consist of matters that are unpublished or that by regulation should not be published, whereas the information his client provided was either already public or belonged to the category of emergency-response information that the government is obliged to publish on its own initiative under the Regulations on Open Government Information — it could be obtained without any "spying out," and accepting media interviews was an expression of reform and opening up and had not harmed state security; third, that the detention centre's synchronised audio and video recordings could not exclude the possibility of torture at night in an interrogation room without cameras during the first ten days, that the certificates produced by the case-handling unit were one and all perjured, and that the illegally obtained evidence should be excluded (all of the above defence points are as relayed in the text of the judgment). The court rejected all three layers of the defence one by one, on the grounds that the statements exceeded the bounds of freedom of speech in both form and content and that the torture allegations did not match the facts as ascertained.
The facts the judgment found on the incitement charge were these: from 2010 to 2015 he repeatedly used circumvention software to browse overseas websites and came under their influence; from July 2010 until the case broke, with the purpose of subverting state power and overthrowing the socialist system, and exploiting sensitive social hot-spot issues, he published and forwarded the statements at issue to unspecified internet users on Twitter and WeChat — sixty-nine items on WeChat and two hundred and five on Twitter (including retweets of other people's posts) — whose content was sorted into three categories: attacking and insulting the ruling party and state power; slandering and distorting the policies of the Party and the state; and slandering, distorting and inciting the subversion of the socialist system. The judgment further found that he had introduced people around him to overseas hostile websites and to circumvention methods and propagated his own stance to them, which proved his subversive purpose still further. The facts found on the intelligence charge were these: from February 2011 to March 2015 he actively collected intelligence on Xinjiang's street stability-maintenance police presence and, through online submissions, emails and interviews, provided "sensitive" police information such as "street patrols" and "the crackdown handling of emergencies" to overseas hostile organisations and media. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint summarises the matter: the so-called intelligence evidence was in fact simply photographs he had taken on public streets — stability-maintenance personnel, police vehicles, armoured vehicles and other everyday street scenes. A 2022 ChinaAid report gives a more precise figure: thirteen photographs of Urumqi streets (that figure appears only in ChinaAid's reporting, and this page marks it as single-source). The court's response is written into the judgment: Xinjiang has adopted a series of stability-maintenance measures to prevent violent terrorist incidents, among which the organisation of police forces, their deployment and the distribution of weapons all bear on state security and the state's interests, and since he knew full well that these matters were classified as unclassified yet connected with state security and still provided them to entities outside the country, he constituted the offence of spying out and illegally providing intelligence. In other words, in the logic of this judgment, the patrol posts on Urumqi's streets that every passer-by can see with their own eyes become intelligence the moment they are spoken of to a foreigner.
The judgment also devoted a whole paragraph to his relations with overseas media: knowing full well that these websites and media were of an anti-China and anti-Communist character, he nevertheless colluded with them, actively cooperated with their needs by submitting pieces and accepting interviews, and his many interviews were used by overseas hostile organisations such as the "World Uyghur Congress" to attack China's ethnic policies, for which he should be severely punished according to law. Among the interviewers named were Voice of America and Radio Free Asia — two public media outlets funded by the United States Congress. When China Change translated the full text of the judgment at the time, it singled out exactly this point and called on the United States government to intervene: a citizen of a country accepting interviews from American public media is used as evidence of collusion with hostile forces and punished with nineteen years, and that is no longer merely a question of China's internal-affairs narrative. When Li Aijie was interviewed by Radio Free Asia in January 2016, she said that recordings of the interviews had been played in court, that the prosecution said he was a Boxun reporter, and that he had argued in his own defence that this was only the system's automatic label; she asked in return: could mere words really subvert a government? All he had done was forward some articles online and accept media interviews — that was all the evidence there was, and there was nothing else at all.
On 15 January 2016, the judgment was handed down. According to Li Aijie's account to Radio Free Asia, that afternoon court personnel went directly to the detention centre to pronounce the sentence, and the family was never notified; the lawyer had told them a day in advance that there would be a result at four o'clock that afternoon, and when they hurried to the court they were told it had already been decided, and that sentence had already been pronounced on him at the detention centre. The family received the judgment on 18 January (Rights Defence Network). The content of the judgment follows the judgment itself: for inciting subversion of state power, fifteen years' imprisonment, five years' deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 100,000 yuan of personal property — Li Dunyong told AFP that this charge had been sentenced at its highest band, and that he had originally expected the whole case to draw eleven or twelve years; for illegally providing intelligence to entities outside the country, five years' imprisonment, one year's deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 20,000 yuan of personal property; with the punishments combined, the court decided to execute nineteen years' imprisonment, five years' deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 120,000 yuan of personal property, the term running from 26 June 2015 to 25 June 2034. The instruments of the offence that were confiscated were exactly the computers, hard drives, phones and USB drives on the home-search list. Maya Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told AFP at the time that it was extremely rare for the incitement charge to be sentenced at the very top of the scale. In making comparisons, many organisations mentioned the same point of reference: Liu Xiaobo received eleven years on the same charge for Charter 08, and Zhang Haitao received eight years more than that — while he was neither the leader of any organisation nor the drafter of any programme document; all he had was two hundred and seventy-four internet posts, some street photographs and a few interviews.
The first shockwave after sentencing landed on his home. Li Aijie told Radio Free Asia that after her husband's arrest his bank cards had been seized and the family had been left with no means of support, and that officials had also notified her that his property was to be confiscated; they had only one small flat in Urumqi, she had no job, and their son had only just turned one month old, so if the confiscation were enforced, mother and child would not even have a place to live. She said she had cried at home for a long time, and felt that this was a case of "where there is a wish to condemn, excuses are never wanting." As to whether that flat was in the end actually confiscated and enforced, and how the confiscation of 120,000 yuan was finally carried out, no source available to this page contains any public record, and it can only be written as such: no public record. He declared in court that he would appeal; in February 2016 the appeal procedure began (China Change recorded the start of the appeal in an article of 21 February 2016). The grounds of appeal included: that he had been tortured to extract a confession; that exercising freedom of speech does not constitute a crime; that accepting media interviews is a normal act of journalism and does not constitute providing intelligence; and that the sentence was excessively heavy (the complaint). The appeal should have been concluded by 19 April 2016, but the Supreme People's Court twice approved three-month extensions, the second of them on 18 July, pushing the deadline to October; no hearing was held in October; in November the lawyer received notice that the appeal would be decided on the papers alone; and in the end, on 28 November 2016, the Xinjiang Higher People's Court did hold a hearing of about thirty minutes and ruled to uphold the original judgment (the extensions and the course of the hearing are given in the complaint). According to Li Aijie's later public account, during the appeal a judge conveyed a message to Zhang Haitao through the lawyer: confess, and the term could be halved; he refused, and replied in words to the effect of "can the Communist Party's word be believed?"; the appeal lawyer afterwards told her that in his more than twenty years of practice, this client was a man of faith, and asked Zhang Haitao whether he had a faith, to which Zhang Haitao answered that he was a Christian and believed in God (this episode appears only in Li Aijie's public account, is the family's own statement, and is marked by this page as single-source and unverified — see the Verification Note). The British government's human rights report for the second half of 2016 noted the November ruling upholding the original judgment. A 2019 report that Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the Human Rights Watch network submitted to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recorded a further sequel: Liu Zhengqing, the lawyer who had defended Zhang Haitao, was stripped of his lawyer's licence on 25 December 2018, and one of the grounds the authorities listed was precisely that statements he had made in Zhang Haitao's defence were suspected of endangering state security and maliciously slandering others. For having spoken on behalf of a man serving nineteen years, the price was his livelihood.
His situation in custody: shackles, a solitary cell, and four years and ten months of silence
During the eleven months after sentencing he was not sent to a prison; he remained in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Detention Centre awaiting the appeal. What those days were like came out bit by bit in two lawyer's visits, and the complaint records them item by item. At the visit on 7 July 2016 he said: since sentencing in January he had worn heavy shackles continuously for six months, he was given less to eat and drink than others, he had to sleep pressed tightly against another detainee, and since sentencing he had not been allowed outdoor activity. His wife complained, the provincial procuratorate verbally promised to order the shackles removed, and then came the confirmation at the visit on 14 November 2016: the shackles had never been removed at all. He said more on that occasion: custodial staff forced him to sit in a fixed posture and blew a horn as a warning if he moved; his personal photographs, letters and defence materials had been confiscated in a security inspection; he was not allowed the personal use of pen and paper; he was forced to write activity reports for the guards; at night someone was still assigned to sleep pressed against him; before every lawyer's visit he was strip-searched, and on the way to the visiting room he had to wear a black hood. The explanation the detention centre and the local prosecutor gave the lawyer on 17 November 2016 was that cases involving endangering state security had to wear shackles — that was the detention centre's rule; the prosecutor gave Li Aijie a different account, saying he had violated custody regulations and so had to wear them, but could not say which regulation he had violated. His body was also failing by then: from September 2016 he had stomach pain roughly once every ten days, each time for several hours; in late September he underwent several examinations whose results no one ever told him; detention centre staff said he hurt because he had "eaten too much," and that when it hurt he should tell them and do some exercise; his wife asked the prosecutor for his examination report and was refused, and what she got was still the three words "ate too much." A man sentenced to nineteen years had stomach pain for two months, and the official diagnosis given to him was that he had eaten too much, and the answer given to his family was that they could not see the report. All of these episodes come from the complaint's relaying of the records of the lawyer's visits — they are the party's allegations conveyed through his lawyer; the authorities have never publicly responded to these specific allegations, and this page can only honestly mark their level of sourcing.
His wife's dealings with the detention centre in the same period were relayed at the time by ChinaAid from an open letter by Li Aijie (republished by the Gospel Herald and others; the details belong to a single-organisation source chain, and this page marks them as such): having heard that her husband's shackles had not been taken off for over a year, she hurried to the detention centre and, on the questions of his drastic weight loss, whether he was forbidden outdoor activity, and whether he could read the Bible she had sent in, questioned the detention centre's director, Director Ma, to his face; he guaranteed that her husband had enough to eat, had collective outdoor activity, and could read the Bible, but would not allow him to see his infant son. She lingered with the baby and Zhang Haitao's elder sister outside the detention centre under the blazing sun, where all they could see was barbed wire and high walls. She wrote in the letter that a child should grow up under his father's protection, that since his birth he had never seen his father, and that, hard as it had been to come this close, barbed wire and high walls still cut them off from each other. Note the point in time: the letter was written before he was transferred to prison, and its "over a year" of shackling is consistent in direction with the complaint's record of "at least six months from January 2016, and still on in November."
On 2 December 2016 he was sent to Shaya Prison to serve his sentence (the date and place of transfer are given in the complaint, and Li Aijie also confirmed this date in Radio Free Asia's 2020 reporting). Shaya Prison stands in Shaya County, Aksu Prefecture, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert; the Rights Defence Network's monthly reports record him as held in its Ninth Prison District. Li Aijie said the distance from Urumqi to Shaya was about 1,100 kilometres, while she was living in Henan at the time — every single visit was a journey of thousands of kilometres. During his first three months in the prison, the prison would not let the family visit, on the ground that he had to undergo three months of "education" and pass an examination before he would be allowed to see family (the complaint). On 24 April 2017 Li Aijie saw him for the first time — the family's first visit since he was taken away in June 2015, nearly two years earlier. She had set out from Henan on 19 April 2017 (China Change records her journey) and travelled more than two thousand miles to reach Shaya; the visit lasted thirty minutes, and on that first occasion the prison would not allow her to show her son's photograph to him or hand it over. The second visit came on 27 July 2017, again thirty minutes, and this time the photograph was given. Unlike the "in good condition" reported after the first visit, after the second visit Li Aijie said he had told her he was held in solitary confinement, was not allowed outdoors, and that his cell had only one small window that let in a little air and sunlight, and that he was inside it day and night. Under Chinese law, a person in custody may be visited by family once a month; the visits this family applied for after September 2017 were never approved again (China Change).
The third — and, in the sentencing stage, the last — in-person visit took place on 26 April 2018, and the visitor was his elder sister. According to the sister's account to Radio Free Asia (2020 report), before the visit the prison guards called them into an office and instructed them not to mention that his wife and child had gone to the United States, and not to mention religion; at about the thirty-minute mark they nevertheless told him that his wife and child had arrived safely in America, and the visit was terminated immediately. The sister also said that he was still in solitary confinement and could not go outdoors for activity; she asked how many people lived in one cell and he said only himself; she asked whether he could go out for activity and he said there had originally been a door, which had since been sealed shut. Afterwards the sister telephoned again and again to apply to visit once more; the prison first said this was an order from above, and later simply stopped answering; when Radio Free Asia called Shaya Prison during office hours in July 2020, it likewise got no answer. From that day on, for four years and ten months, this man vanished entirely from his family's field of vision.
All that leaked out during those four years and ten months was letters. By the middle of 2022 he had written his family only five letters in total (Radio Free Asia, 2022). The most recent was written on 27 June 2022, and the one before it had been a year and eight months earlier. The sister received the letter back home in Henan; the letter was in his own hand, and Li Aijie does not doubt the handwriting — but she did doubt its contents: the letter listed in detail how well he ate — beef, mutton, chicken, fish, steamed buns, rice, vegetables, fruit, eggs and milk; it said his clothes were good; it said there was more than 8,000 yuan in his account that he could not spend, and told the family not to send more money and not to come and see him; and it closed with thanks to the Party, to the nation and to the government. ChinaAid's report of 2 August 2022 and Radio Free Asia's of 29 July the same year recorded the same letter and the same set of questions. Li Aijie's counter-question was simple: if everything is so good, why has the family not been allowed to see him for four years? Meng Yuanxin, an activist familiar with the prison environment (the name is as given in ChinaAid's reporting), told the association that letters of this kind are in most cases drafted first by the police and copied out by the person in custody, and that for a man held in solitary confinement to write "do not come and see me" is not a normal state of mind. Li Aijie said that the circumstances in which such words against his heart were written were, in the phrase carried in ChinaAid's headline, terrifying to contemplate on reflection. This page's position is a restrained one: the authenticity of the letter is not in dispute among the family; what is in dispute is whether it was written voluntarily; and in the absence of any means of independent verification, this page records the letter's content, the family's doubts and the bystander's judgement separately, and draws no conclusion for either side — it points only to a fact: a letter reporting good news at every turn was mailed from a prison that for four years would not let his family through its gate.
The turn came in early 2023, when his elder sister Zhang Qingzhen, now over fifty (for the written characters of her name see the Verification Note), travelled from Henan to Xinjiang once again. According to ChinaAid's report of 7 March 2023, she set out the course of it on WeChat: on 30 January 2023 she travelled from Henan to Urumqi; on 1 February she went to the petitions department of the regional Prison Administration Bureau to submit an application for an in-person visit; and after she had pressed repeatedly, and told the judicial department staff plainly that she would not leave Xinjiang without seeing her brother, on 28 February the authorities at last arranged a thirty-minute video visit in the office of a judicial station in Urumqi; she was not allowed to take her mobile phone in, so there are no photographs. She said her brother was much thinner than in 2018, but that his spirits were still good. Li Aijie confirmed the visit on Twitter on 1 March and thanked her sister-in-law; the message she had asked her sister-in-law to carry to her husband was also reported: take care of your health, keep hope in your heart, she and their son are well, he should not worry, she will do her best to raise the child, and let him write a letter home every month to say he is safe. This was the first confirmation from the outside world since April 2018 that he was still alive and could still speak. And after that? After that, silence again. As of October 2026, in every source available to this page: since the video visit of February 2023 there is no public record of any new family visit, telephone call, sentence-reduction ruling, medical parole or health examination result. How his stomach illness went afterwards, whether the solitary confinement is continuing, how far his weight has fallen — none of it is on public record. More than seven years of his term remain: when he is released on 25 June 2034 he will be sixty-three, and his son will be eighteen; from birth to adulthood, father and son will have seen each other only in photographs and in stories.
The wife and the family: ten years of raising a child alone
Li Aijie is a native of Henan who made her home in Urumqi with Zhang Haitao, a fellow native of Henan. When her husband was taken she was pregnant, her bank cards had been frozen and her identity documents seized for a time, and the income from her husband's small self-employed business dropped to zero overnight. Their son was born while his father was in custody — he had just turned one month old when sentence was pronounced in January 2016, from which his birth is inferred to have been around December 2015 (the birth month is this page's inference from Radio Free Asia's "just turned one month old"; the child's exact date of birth is not on public record); the child's name was given by his father, the pet name is "Little Mandela," and China Change records that this was the name his imprisoned father gave the child. After sentencing, the authorities notified the family of the confiscation of property; mother and child were left with one small flat in Urumqi and nearly lost their home altogether; she had no job and no savings, and lived on the support of relatives (Radio Free Asia, 2016). She took the child back to her parents' home in Henan.
She did not stay silent. From 2016 she travelled and campaigned everywhere for her husband's treatment: at the detention-centre stage she complained about the shackles to a judge of the Xinjiang Higher People's Court, negotiated with the procuratorate organs, and demanded her husband's stomach examination report; at the prison stage she crossed thousands of kilometres again and again to visit Shaya. In the summer of 2017 she also made a trip to Beijing, wanting to appeal to the central level and to ask, on humanitarian grounds, for her husband to be transferred to a prison in Urumqi, which would have shortened the visiting journey by two-thirds — she did not get through the Ministry of Justice's gate, and a man who came out directed her to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls; she did not get through that bureau's gate either (China Change records her account). The pressure soon fell on her own family's heads: according to China Change, the local authorities there threatened her brothers' and sisters' jobs and demanded that they "keep her under control"; on 8 October 2017, at her parents' home, she was beaten by her elder brother and elder sister — fists struck her in the face and head, she was pushed to the ground and kicked, and her elder brother picked up a chair to smash her with it before another brother stopped him; her elder brother shouted at her: the police have talked to me I don't know how many times — what good is waiting for Zhang Haitao? Cut the relationship off, and stop going to Xinjiang. The words she wrote were published by China Change in substance: I love a person and wait for a person — is that wrong? Visiting Haitao is my lawful right; my son and I are Haitao's hope of walking out of prison alive, and at this moment I cannot leave him. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint, describing her situation, used the summary "subjected to domestic violence," and recorded that her family had received threats from the authorities over her continued appeals. These details, which come from her own public accounts, are recorded by this page as family testimony, and their character is marked in the text.
In December 2017 she left China with her two-year-old son; with the help of ChinaAid and of Bob Fu, mother and child arrived in the United States on 23 December 2017 (ChinaAid's reporting; the complaint records that she fled China in December 2017 and sought asylum in the United States). Since then she has lived in California, raising the child alone. In her words to Radio Free Asia, the child asks her every day when his father can come home (2020 report). She has not stopped appealing in the United States: in September 2021, during the forty-eighth session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, she issued a video statement through the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), recounting how her husband had been arrested and tried for exercising freedom of speech; she has also spoken at many public events about the torture allegations and the solitary confinement her husband suffered (ChinaAid published the text of her remarks at an event at the University of California, Berkeley). When her sister-in-law video-visited Zhang Haitao in February 2023, the message she asked her to carry was that he should write home every month to say he was safe — in the years when the right to visits was stripped away, one monthly letter was the minimum proof of life this family set for itself. As of October 2026, beyond the public advocacy activity above, there is no further public record of her and her son's circumstances, and this page neither asks after nor fills in the private details of their life in America.
The bill this family has paid must also count those who stayed in China. His elder sister Zhang Qingzhen was the one who carried out the visits of 2018 and 2023: at the 2018 visit, hers was terminated on the spot for saying one sentence — that his wife and child were safe; in the four years and ten months that followed, she wrote letter after letter of application to the departments concerned (in ChinaAid's words), and in 2023 she simply moved to Urumqi for a month and put down the words that she would not leave without seeing him, and only thereby exchanged them for thirty minutes of video. The circumstances of the parents' generation, and the names and present situations of other relatives, are not on public record. Whether Zhang Haitao's father is alive, and whether his mother has ever received a letter from him, are not mentioned in any source available; this page writes all of these as not on public record, without any embellishment.
The international response: from "extremely rare" to a United Nations arbitrary-detention opinion
On the day of sentencing and in the weeks that followed, the international response concentrated on the abnormality of the term. AFP quoted Human Rights Watch's Maya Wang as saying that for the incitement charge to be sentenced at the fifteen-year top of the scale was quite rare; Chinese Human Rights Defenders issued a statement at the time calling the judgment unusually severe (the words as carried in ChinaAid-relayed reporting). Freedom House's 2017 Freedom in the World report and its 2017 Freedom of the Press report both listed this case among the representative Chinese speech-crime cases of 2016, and the latter also recorded the scale of the evidence: some two hundred microblog-style short posts criticising the government and socialism, and the provision of information about Xinjiang to foreign media, punished with nineteen years. When Human Rights Watch recorded the case in its World Report 2017, the charges it used were inciting subversion and illegally providing intelligence to entities outside the country. Amnesty International followed up in two successive documents: its 2016–2017 annual report recorded him as a Han Chinese human rights defender sentenced to nineteen years for inciting subversion and providing intelligence abroad, whose lawyer believed the heavy sentence derived in part from his commentary on ethnic issues; and its 2018 submission to the Universal Periodic Review placed him on the list of speakers persecuted under state-security charges. The British Foreign Office's human rights report for the second half of 2016 recorded the nineteen years being upheld on appeal. These records have one thing in common: not one of them treated his case as an ordinary criminal case; every one of them placed it in the framework of freedom of speech and ethnic policy.
The procedural international pursuit of accountability ran for a full six years. On 13 January 2020, Chinese Human Rights Defenders submitted a complaint in Zhang Haitao's name to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and to six special rapporteurs, alleging that his detention constituted arbitrary detention of a human rights defender, persecution for speech, and retaliation by torture (most of the day-by-day detail in this page's main text about the torture, the shackles and the visits comes from this very complaint). In 2021, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted Opinion No. 66/2021: Zhang Haitao's deprivation of liberty violated Articles 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and constituted arbitrary detention under Categories I, II, III and V; the Working Group asked the Chinese government to release him immediately and to grant him an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations, asked for a full and independent investigation of the circumstances of the arbitrary detention and for those responsible to be held to account, and asked that paragraph 2 of Article 105 and Article 293 of the Criminal Law be revised into conformity with international human rights obligations; the Opinion also referred the case for follow-up to seven special procedure mandate holders — on freedom of expression, on peaceful assembly and association, on human rights defenders, on minority issues, on freedom of religion, on torture, and on the independence of judges and lawyers (for the full text of the Opinion see Sources). The Chinese government has not implemented this Opinion — he is still in Shaya Prison, and that in itself is the whole of the answer on implementation. At the forty-eighth session of the Human Rights Council in September 2021, when the Working Group presented its annual work, Li Aijie issued her statement through the International Service for Human Rights; the Service's programme director, Sarah Brooks, said that for a state not to be content with punishing a dissenting voice with an extreme sentence but also to keep a family from meeting for nearly four years was a cruelty that was hard to comprehend.
The most recent round came in 2025. In 2021, four to five United Nations special procedure mandate holders had written to the Chinese government in communication AL CHN 4/2021, concerning several long-serving human rights defenders including Zhang Haitao, asking for investigation of the torture allegations and for medical information; the Chinese government provided no information about him. On 28 February 2025, five special procedures — the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and the Special Rapporteur on torture — jointly issued the follow-up communication AL CHN 5/2025, grouping together seven human rights defenders who have served more than ten years — Ding Jiaxi, Huang Qi, Huang Yunmin, Ilham Tohti, Qin Yongmin, Zhang Haitao and Zhao Haitong — for joint inquiry, demanding details of health conditions, medical examinations and the investigation of torture allegations, and noting that visits by Zhang Haitao's family had been persistently and heavily obstructed (for the communication see Sources). The Chinese government replied on 29 April 2025. In August 2025, Mary Lawlor, the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, issued a press release urging the Chinese authorities to provide details of these seven people's health and treatment and of visits by family and lawyers; the press release disclosed that China had provided specific information on two of the seven, and only general information, or no information at all, on the other five. The press release does not state which two received specific answers, and this page therefore does not infer which group Zhang Haitao belongs to; it records only this: as of August 2025, United Nations experts stated publicly that they were still asking after his health, his medical care and information about visits to him, and whether the Chinese government has ever given a substantive answer about him personally is not on public record. As for Front Line Defenders, what this page found is that its website hosts the text of the 2021 joint communication; no case page set up for Zhang Haitao alone by that organisation was found, so none is falsely recorded. The entries in the databases of the U.S. Department of State and of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China were not retrieved item by item in this round of checking, and this section makes no unverified statements about them, leaving the matter for later supplementary checking (see the Verification Note).
Full Timeline
10 March 1971: born in Fangcheng County, Henan Province (judgment). 1990s: laid off from a state-owned enterprise. 1995: goes to Xinjiang to build a life (multiple sources agree). 2009: while on holiday back in Nanyang, he is arrested by Xinjiang police on suspicion of fraud and brought back to Xinjiang; after nearly two months in custody the charge is dropped and he is released; from then on he takes up complaints and rights defence and speaks out online (Rights Defence Network profile; Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint). From July 2010: extensive posting and reposting on Twitter and WeChat (the starting point of the speech period as found in the judgment). February 2011 to March 2015: the period in which the judgment finds that he collected and provided street stability-maintenance "intelligence." 30 August 2011: on the eve of the China–Eurasia Expo, in Urumqi he is dragged away and beaten by the plainclothes officers monitoring him, the contents of his phone are deleted, and he is held for more than three hours (Chinese Human Rights Defenders briefing). 26 June 2015: he is taken from his Urumqi home and the home is searched; he is held on suspicion of inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination; his pregnant wife is taken to the police station to be photographed and to have DNA samples and fingerprints taken. 27 June 2015: criminally detained by the Urumqi Municipal Public Security Bureau (judgment). 14 July 2015: his wife goes to the Zhongya South Road Police Station to request a copy of the detention notice and is refused, being told it is a "state secret." 31 July 2015: formally arrested on the charge of picking quarrels and provoking trouble. 1 or 2 August 2015: the first visit by a lawyer is permitted, after several weeks of refusal (the exact date is unclear, as the complaint itself notes). 18 November 2015: the charge is changed to suspicion of inciting subversion of state power (Rights Defence Network; single-source system). Around December 2015: his son is born (inferred from "just turned one month old" in January 2016). 25 December 2015: the Urumqi People's Procuratorate brings the prosecution and the two charges take shape (judgment). 11 January 2016: hearing at the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court. 15 January 2016 (a Friday): sentence pronounced — nineteen years with the two punishments combined, five years' deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 120,000 yuan of personal property; the pronouncement takes place inside the detention centre and the family is not notified (judgment; Radio Free Asia). 18 January 2016: the family receives the judgment (Rights Defence Network). February 2016: appeal lodged. 7 July 2016: he tells his lawyer of the post-sentencing treatment, including six months in heavy shackles. 11 July 2016: his wife complains of abuse to a judge of the Xinjiang Higher People's Court. 19 July 2016: the Xinjiang People's Procuratorate says it has ordered the shackles removed. From September 2016: periodic stomach pain begins; the examination results are never told to him. 14 November 2016: at a lawyer's visit it is confirmed that the shackles have not been removed, and the allegations of the fixed sitting posture, the horn, the strip search before visits and the black hood are recorded. 28 November 2016: the Xinjiang Higher People's Court, in about thirty minutes at second instance, upholds the original judgment. 2 December 2016: transferred to Shaya Prison to serve his sentence. 24 April 2017: his wife is permitted to visit for the first time (nearly two years after he was taken), for thirty minutes; she is not allowed to show him their son's photograph. 27 July 2017: his wife's second visit, at which she learns he is in solitary confinement and not allowed out for exercise. Summer 2017: his wife goes to Beijing to appeal for a prison transfer and is turned away at both the Ministry of Justice and the State Bureau for Letters and Calls (China Change). 8 October 2017: his wife is beaten at her parents' home in Henan by her elder brother and sister and demanded to cut off relations with her husband (China Change, citing her own account). 23 December 2017: his wife arrives in the United States with their son (ChinaAid). 26 April 2018: the elder sister's visit is terminated on the spot because she tells him his wife and child are in America; his solitary confinement and the sealed cell door are confirmed. 25 December 2018: appeal counsel Liu Zhengqing is stripped of his lawyer's licence, with one of the grounds listed by the authorities concerning his defence statements in this case (human rights organisations' submission to the United Nations). 13 January 2020: Chinese Human Rights Defenders submits the complaint to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and others. July 2020: Radio Free Asia reports that the family has had no news for two years and three months and that all visits have been refused. 2021: Opinion No. 66/2021 of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention finds the detention to be arbitrary detention of Categories I, II, III and V and demands his immediate release. September 2021: Li Aijie issues a video statement during the forty-eighth session of the Human Rights Council (International Service for Human Rights). 27 June 2022: Zhang Haitao writes the fifth letter home, whose content is questioned; it is made public through reporting in late July to early August of that year. 30 January to 28 February 2023: the elder sister travels to Xinjiang and stays a month in her effort; on 28 February she is granted a thirty-minute video visit and sees that he is markedly thinner, with his spirits still fair (ChinaAid). 28 February 2025: five United Nations special procedures write jointly to the Chinese government about him and six other long-serving prisoners (AL CHN 5/2025). 29 April 2025: the Chinese government replies to that communication (record of the United Nations special procedures website). August 2025: Special Rapporteur Lawlor publicly urges China to provide details of the health and visitation situation of the seven, Zhang Haitao included. 25 June 2034: the day his term expires (absent any reduction or other change). As of October 2026: he is still serving his sentence in Shaya Prison, and since February 2023 there has been no public record of any new visit, telephone call, sentence reduction or state of health.
Our Take
Read this judgment from beginning to end and the most glaring thing is not the figure of nineteen years; it is its list of incriminating materials: sixty-nine WeChat items, two hundred and five tweets, a few photographs taken on the streets of his own city, and a few recordings of interviews with foreign radio stations. No organisation, no programme, no flow of funds of a single cent, no act of violence of any kind — even the witness testimony the court itself found showed that he firmly opposed solving problems by violence. On this alone, an ordinary man who sold phone cards was sent to a prison at the edge of a desert, with a term that stands in the front rank of contemporary Chinese speech cases — eight years more than Liu Xiaobo, who wrote Charter 08. The court's explanation is that he "colluded with forces outside the country." His method of collusion was to answer journalists' questions on the telephone; the "intelligence" he provided was the patrol police and armoured vehicles that every pedestrian on an Urumqi street could see by lifting their eyes. By that standard, any resident of Xinjiang who describes to the outside world what his own city looks like can at any moment be fitted into the pocket of Article 111. That is exactly where the exemplary meaning of this case lies: it did not set out to punish a man for something he did, but to teach everyone in an entire region to shut their mouths — if this is what happens to a Han Chinese, Uyghurs need not even be mentioned.
What happened after the sentence tells one more about the texture of this system than the judgment itself. A provincial procuratorate stated plainly that it had ordered the shackles removed, and four months later they were still on the prisoner's legs; a man whose stomach hurt for two months was given the diagnosis "ate too much," and his family was not even allowed to see the examination report; the right written into prison law to one visit a month was, for this family, redeemed four times in eleven years, one of them thirty minutes across a screen, and that one obtained only because a sexagenarian family member moved into Urumqi and laid down the words "I won't leave without seeing him." When a man has to rely on his elder sister spending a month at the gates of the Prison Administration Bureau to confirm that her younger brother is still alive, the problem no longer lies with any single prison guard or any single director, but in the fact that everyone along the whole chain knows perfectly well: for this man, the rules need not count. And then there is that letter of 2022. Even if we set aside the judgement that it was "copied out under dictation" — which to this day cannot be independently verified — and look only at the sentence in the letter, "do not come and see me": a man held in solitary confinement for years writes home telling his family not to come, and the person who receives the letter must first wonder whether those words are his own. That in itself is a punishment, a punishment added on top of the nineteen years.
This page also wants to bring the words back to the evidence: the most weighty document in this case is not any media outlet's commentary but the judgment itself. It is the court that admitted in black and white that the evidence of the offence was internet posts, photographs and interviews; it is the court that wrote down plainly that he opposed violence; it is the court that called public media funded by the United States Congress hostile forces outside the country. Ten years on, this judgment has not become defensible with time; it has simply archived, exactly as it stood, the logic of Xinjiang at that time — "to describe reality is to commit a crime." There is a further layer that the Zhang Haitao case holds up to those who come after: he is not a Uyghur. He is a Han Chinese who lived in Xinjiang for twenty years, who saw, who spoke, and who then proved with nineteen years one thing — in that logic, silence was never an obligation apportioned by ethnicity, and the price of opening one's mouth does not fall only on a single ethnic group. His term runs to 2034. This page is left here so that everyone who searches for his name before 2034 knows: he is still inside, and this matter has not passed.
Verification Note
This page's method of verification: the full text of the first-instance judgment (complete English translation, translated by China Change, archived on the Shahit website) serves as the first tier of primary documents; the complaint that Chinese Human Rights Defenders submitted to the United Nations on 13 January 2020 serves as the second tier — that document records the lawyer's visits and the family's dealings day by day, and its character is that of a complainant's statement, so every item concerning torture and treatment is marked in this page with wording such as "according to his statement to his lawyer" or "allegation," and is not stated directly as proven fact; the remaining facts are cross-checked against the Rights Defence Network's monthly reports and profile, Radio Free Asia's reporting of 2016, 2020 and 2022, ChinaAid's reporting from 2016 to 2023, and China Change's accounts of 2016 to 2017; the international section is governed by the original text of Opinion No. 66/2021 of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the United Nations special procedures' 2025 communication and the communication summaries on the website of the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, and the August 2025 press release of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The corrections made in this round of verification are as follows, item by item. Correction one (the wife's name): the task briefing wrote "Li Aijie" with the character for "clean"; checking Radio Free Asia's original Chinese reporting and China Change's feature, the correct written form is "Li Aijie" with the character for "outstanding," and the main text has been amended. Correction two (the term on the intelligence charge): AFP, quoting the lawyer on the day of sentencing, said four years; the judgment states five years, and the judgment governs; the two charges are fifteen years and five years respectively, with nineteen years executed in combination — not fifteen plus four. Correction three (the character of the 120,000 yuan): it is confiscation of personal property (100,000 yuan on the incitement charge and 20,000 yuan on the intelligence charge), not a fine; the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint and many English-language reports treat it as a "fine," which is a misrecord. Correction four (the weekday of sentencing): 15 January 2016 was a Friday; AFP's "sentenced last Sunday" does not stand. Correction five (native place): the judgment gives Fangcheng County, Henan Province; the Rights Defence Network gives Zhenping County, and one of its profiles even misprinted a non-existent "Zhengping County"; this page follows the judgment and preserves the variant. Correction six (the layering of the dates of being taken away and of criminal detention): the taking away and home search took place on 26 June 2015, the criminal detention document is dated 27 June, and the term is counted from 26 June; the three coexist without contradiction, and the main text states them separately. Correction seven (the year of arrest): a China Change article says "arrested in 2014," which is a slip of the pen and should read 2015. Correction eight (age): Radio Free Asia's English report of 2020 called him "46 years old," which does not fit with his birth in 1971 and his being forty-four when taken away in 2015; this page does not adopt that age figure. Matters requiring a single-source or unverified marking: his signature on the appeal to abolish re-education through labour appears only in a China Change article and is recorded as single-source; the specific date of the charge change, 18 November 2015, appears only in the Rights Defence Network's system; the figure of "thirteen" street photographs appears only in ChinaAid's reporting; the judge's appeal-stage promise of "confess and the term will be halved," Zhang Haitao's refusal, and his statement that he is a Christian appear only in Li Aijie's public accounts, are family testimony, and are marked unverified; the episode of the dealings with Director Ma of the detention centre appears only in the chain of Li Aijie's open letter as relayed by ChinaAid; as to the duration of the torture, the lawyer's-visit statement says twenty days while the first-instance defence opinion says the first ten days, at night, and this page records both without adjudicating between them; as to the dates of his wife's two visits, Chinese Human Rights Defenders records 24 April and 27 July 2017, while China Change records her departure on 19 April and a further visit in late July, and the main text adopts the complaint's dates while noting the difference as to the departure day; the written characters of his elder sister Zhang Qingzhen's name could not be independently verified in the sources available — English reporting gives Zhang Qingzhen, and the characters used in the main text are adopted by this page from the transliteration, which is stated here expressly; his son's exact date of birth, the final execution of the confiscation of property, the specific times and frequency of the blocking of his Weibo account, the specific course of the further beating around 2010, and everything about his situation in prison after February 2023 are all without public record, and the main text states this at each place without speculative filling-in; the item-by-item entries in the databases of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and in United States Department of State documents were not retrieved in their original texts in this round, and are not written into the main text — they are marked as matters awaiting supplementary checking, not as non-existent. Grading of evidence: the judgment, the United Nations Opinion and the communications are first-tier documentary evidence; the family and lawyer accounts relayed in the human rights organisations' complaint are second-tier statement evidence, with sources marked throughout the main text; family testimony and single-organisation reporting are third-tier, and are marked item by item.
Sources
- Criminal judgment of the Intermediate People's Court of Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, case (2015) Wu Zhong Xing Yi Chu Zi No. 192, complete English translation (translated by China Change, archived on the Shahit website): birth, occupation, address, dates of criminal detention and arrest, indictment number and date, composition of the trial bench, composition of the evidence, main points of the defence, the individual sentences and the combined result, the start and end of the term, the list of confiscated items, the judges' names.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD): "Complaint concerning the arbitrary detention of Zhang Haitao, submitted to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the special rapporteurs," 13 January 2020: the course of the arrest and home search, the wife being taken to the police station and refused when she requested the notice, the trajectory of the changing charges, the summary of the 274 items of speech and the photographic evidence, the torture allegations, the day-by-day record of the shackles and the detention-centre treatment, the transfer date, the visit records of 2017 and 2018, and the course of the wife's departure to the United States.
- Rights Defence Network: multiple issues of the monthly reports on political prisoners and prisoners of conscience held in mainland China (Issue 6 of 2016, Issues 59 to 68 of 2020, among others), its report of 18 January 2016 on the Zhang Haitao case, and its profile of him: the variant native place, the course of the 2009 fraud detention, the change of charge, the date the family received the judgment, the Ninth Prison District of Shaya Prison, and the expiry date of the term.
- Radio Free Asia: report of 18 January 2016 interviewing Li Aijie (as carried by Conscience Friends): the impact of the property confiscation on the family, the son having just turned one month old, the pronouncement of sentence taking place in the detention centre, the lawyer's estimate of the term, the phone-card retail business and the help given to petitioners to speak out, and the monitoring on sensitive dates.
- Agence France-Presse reporting of January 2016 (as carried by Spacewar, TerraDaily and others): the immediate comments of counsel Li Dunyong and of Human Rights Watch's Maya Wang (the breakdown of the term and the weekday in that reporting have been corrected by this page against the judgment and the calendar; see the Verification Note).
- Radio Free Asia, 29 July 2020: only three visits in five years in prison, the course of the termination of the 26 April 2018 visit, the solitary confinement and the sealed cell door, and Shaya Prison's telephone going unanswered.
- Radio Free Asia, 29 July 2022, and ChinaAid, 2 August 2022: the content of the fifth letter home of 27 June 2022, the family's questioning of its voluntariness, and the "terrifying to contemplate on reflection" formulation.
- ChinaAid, 7 March 2023: the course of the elder sister's journey to Xinjiang from 30 January to 28 February 2023 to seek a visit, the thirty-minute video visit, his being markedly thinner with his spirits still fair, the message Li Aijie asked to have carried, and the arrival of mother and son in the United States on 23 December 2017.
- China Change: the article of 1 November 2017, "The wife of a political prisoner is required to leave; relatives of her husband beat her," and the attached materials of Li Aijie's own account: the Rights Movement volunteer work and the signature, the itinerary of the journey to visit at Shaya and the thirty-minute visit, the refusal of the Beijing appeal, the beating by her elder brother and sister on 8 October 2017, and the son's pet name "Little Mandela."
- ChinaAid's publication of Li Aijie's open letter and public speech texts (as carried by the Gospel Herald in 2016 and reported from the Berkeley event): the dealings with Director Ma of the detention centre, the appeal-stage promise of halving for confession and its refusal, and the statement of Christian faith (family-testimony tier; see the Verification Note).
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders briefing of 2011 (as republished on the website of Amnesty International's UK section): the dragging away and beating on the eve of the China–Eurasia Expo on 30 August 2011, the deletion of the phone's contents, and the detention and beating at the Zhongya South Road Police Station.
- Amnesty International: the China section of the 2016/17 annual report and the 2018 submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review: the characterisation of him as a Han Chinese human rights defender and the lawyer's judgement on the relation between the ethnic issues and the heavy sentence.
- Human Rights Watch: the China section of World Report 2017; Freedom House: Freedom in the World 2017 and Freedom of the Press 2017: the international characterisation and the record of the scale of the evidence.
- United Kingdom Foreign Office, "Human Rights Priority Country Report: July to December 2016": the record of the nineteen years being upheld at second instance.
- Joint report submitted by Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the China Human Rights Observer Network to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2019: counsel Liu Zhengqing's loss of his licence over defence work including the Zhang Haitao case.
- Opinion No. 66/2021 of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (A/HRC/WGAD/2021/66): the finding of four categories of arbitrary detention, the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights violated, the demands for immediate release and compensation, the demand for legal revision, and the referral to seven special procedure mandate holders.
- International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), 29 September 2021: Li Aijie's statement during the forty-eighth session of the Human Rights Council and the Service's comment.
- Joint communications of the United Nations special procedures AL CHN 4/2021 and AL CHN 5/2025 (28 February 2025; summaries and texts of the communications on the website of the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders): the joint inquiry into the seven long-serving prisoners, the demands for investigation of the torture allegations and for medical information, and the record of the Chinese government's reply of 29 April 2025.
- Press release of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, August 2025 (Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor): the urging of China to provide details of the seven people's health and visits, and the disclosure that China provided specific information on only two of them.