第59案 | 张凯Case 59 | Zhang Kai
张凯（约1978年生，内蒙古人，北京执业律师，基督徒），2003年受洗并通过司法考试，2006年起专做公益与维权案件，经手萧山、临汾等教会大案与冯建梅强制引产案。2014年8月起他常驻温州，组织三十多人的律师团，以行政复议、行政诉讼、政府信息公开与申请游行等程序，代理一百多家在浙江拆十字架运动中受冲击的教会，并为救恩堂牧师黄益梓与下岭教堂辩护。2015年7月10日深夜，他已被国安审讯整夜并被警告不得介入浙江宗教案件；同年8月25日晚，他与两名助手在下岭教堂被带走——次日他原定会见美国国际宗教自由无任所大使萨珀斯坦。8月27日起他被以涉嫌聚众扰乱社会秩序、为境外提供国家秘密实行指定居所监视居住六个月，不得会见律师与家属，家属委托的律师被逐个通知已被他“解聘”。2016年2月25日六个月期满之日，温州电视台播出他的“认罪”，次日他被转刑事拘留，3月23日取保候审回到呼和浩特。其后他被带去旁听周世峰庭审并被迫受访谴责同行，2016年8月翻供称关押“全是黑的”后一度再被带走，同年12月又被扣留48小时，母亲与姐姐被上门要求劝他“悄悄配合”。获释后他的执业状态被标注无效三年，2018年才恢复执业，其后在北京创办凯门律师事务所。2025年10月北京锡安教会金明日等十八人被抓，他出任金明日的首席辩护律师，随即被北京市司法局多次约谈、警察午夜登门，同年12月收到拟吊销执业证通知，2026年1月听证后执业证被永久吊销，同时自2025年起被限制出境，其律所被施压自行注销、多名同事被停业。截至2026年10月，他无恢复执业或解除出境限制的公开记录；他从未被起诉、受审或判刑。Zhang Kai (born c. 1978 in Inner Mongolia; a Beijing lawyer and a Christian) was baptised and passed the judicial examination in 2003 and from 2006 practised public-interest and rights-defence law, handling major church cases at Xiaoshan and Linfen and the Feng Jianmei forced-abortion case. From August 2014 he was based in Wenzhou, where he organised a legal team of more than thirty lawyers to represent — through administrative reconsideration, administrative litigation, freedom-of-information requests and march applications — more than a hundred churches hit by Zhejiang's cross-demolition campaign, defending Pastor Huang Yizi and Xialing Church. On the night of 10 July 2015 state security interrogated him all night and warned him off Zhejiang religious cases. On the evening of 25 August 2015 he and two assistants were taken away from Xialing Church — the day before he was due to meet U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein. From 27 August he was held for six months under residential surveillance at a designated location on suspicion of gathering a crowd to disturb public order and providing state secrets to overseas entities, denied all access to counsel and family while the family's lawyers were notified one by one that he had 'dismissed' them. On 25 February 2016, the day the six months expired, Wenzhou television broadcast his 'confession'; he was criminally detained the next day and released on bail to Hohhot on 23 March. He was then taken to attend Zhou Shifeng's trial and made to denounce fellow lawyers on camera; after retracting that interview in August 2016 — calling the detention 'all black' — he was briefly detained again, and in December held for 48 hours while officers visited his mother and sister to demand they urge him to 'cooperate quietly.' His practice status stayed marked 'invalid' for three years; he resumed practice only in 2018 and went on to found Beijing's Kaimen Law Firm. After Zion Church pastor Jin Mingri and seventeen others were arrested in October 2025, Zhang served as Jin's lead defence counsel — and was repeatedly summoned by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, visited by police at midnight, notified in December 2025 of intent to revoke his licence, and permanently disbarred after a hearing in January 2026, under an exit ban imposed in 2025, with his firm pressed to deregister and colleagues suspended. As of October 2026 there is no public record of restored practice or a lifted exit ban. He has never been indicted, tried, or sentenced.
Remember what he actually did: he was the churches' lawyer
The first fact in the Zhang Kai file needs to be set straight: he is not a pastor, not a church leader, and he never stood in front of a crane outside a church. He is a lawyer. Everything he did in more than a year in Wenzhou consisted of paper procedures, each of them written into China's own law: filing applications for administrative reconsideration for churches, lodging administrative lawsuits, requesting government information, applying to visit a detained pastor, claiming state compensation for clients, and collecting more than a thousand signatures on an application for permission to hold a march. On the evening of 25 August 2015, when police entered Xialing Church in Wenzhou and took him away, the work on his desk was still those procedures. The next day he was due to meet David Saperstein, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, to talk about those same cases. The man was removed first; the meeting, naturally, then did not exist.
The charges under which he was taken were gathering a crowd to disturb social order, and providing state secrets to overseas entities. Set the charges beside the conduct and the case explains itself: a lawyer represented more than a hundred churches; the courts would not accept the filings, the march applications were not approved, visits to his client were delayed past the legal limit — he completed every procedure anyway and left a record of each refusal. The procedures were then renamed. Organising believers to defend their rights through the law became "gathering a crowd"; passing publicly known persecution cases to the outside world became "stealing state secrets." A charge of this kind is not a description of conduct but a renaming of it — and once the renaming is done, six months of secret detention, a televised confession, and the dismissal of his own lawyers all follow as paperwork. Ten years later, in 2025, the same logic ran over him a second time, this time without even the secret detention: disbarment and an exit ban, directly. The church was still a church, the lawyer was still the same lawyer, and what stood accused was still the same thing — taking a defence seriously.
The Zhejiang cross demolitions: the campaign he walked into
Zhang Kai cannot be understood without the campaign that began in Zhejiang at the end of 2013, or his story shrinks into one lawyer's private misfortune. The campaign's official name was the "Three Rectifications and One Demolition" drive — the renovation of old residential districts, old factory districts and urban villages, and the demolition of illegal structures. The name was about urban construction in general; the impact fell with remarkable concentration on one category of building: churches, and on the crosses on their roofs. Large-scale removals began in February 2014. On 28 April 2014 the Sanjiang Church in Yongjia, Wenzhou, was demolished in its entirety — a newly completed church seating two thousand, built at a cost of twenty to thirty million yuan, whose congregation had already reached an agreement with the government to remove only two floors of an annex; in the end the whole building came down, after thousands of believers had camped overnight to guard it. On 21 July 2014, at three in the morning, at Salvation Church in Shuitou, Pingyang, after a month of all-night vigils to protect the cross, large numbers of personnel forced the cross down and dozens of believers were injured in the confrontation. Scenes of this kind recurred across Zhejiang through 2014 and 2015: cranes, pre-dawn hours, human walls, weeping, and the next day's official notice speaking calmly of "illegal structures demolished according to law."
The numbers must be set out side by side, as this site's rules require, and not taken from a single source. The counts differ by closing date and by what is counted: Christian Solidarity Worldwide recorded more than 400 church- and cross-related incidents in a single year as of April 2015; the Associated Press reported in May 2015 that some 400 crosses had by then been removed; the range most commonly used by activists and human-rights organisations through 2015–2016 is 1,200 to 1,700; Amnesty International's March 2016 file, citing activist figures, put the torn-down crosses at more than 1,500, and the U.S. State Department's 2015 International Religious Freedom Report used the same figure of more than 1,500; figures from the ChinaAid network are the highest, at more than 1,800. This file's text uses the multiply corroborated range of 1,200 to 1,700 and registers the higher single-network figures only in the verification note. On any of these counts the conclusion is the same: this was not sporadic code enforcement but a two-year, systematic removal of the visible symbol of Christianity across an entire province.
In May 2015 the campaign took an institutional turn. Zhejiang published a draft regulation on religious buildings, more than thirty pages long, providing that a cross must be affixed to a building's exterior wall, must not exceed one-tenth of the wall's height, must never again stand on a roof, and prescribing height-to-width ratios for Catholic and Protestant crosses separately. Zhang Kai understood at once what the draft meant, and immediately attacked it with a freedom-of-information request, as the next sections describe. A demolition campaign conducted by crane, once written into a building code, no longer needs cranes: from then on, no church could place a cross on its roof even at the drawing stage. Remove the existing stock first, then control everything built afterwards — those were the campaign's two complete steps. The official position is also recorded here, without being adopted: that the removals were part of the "Three Rectifications and One Demolition" enforcement against illegal structures and had nothing to do with religion; that Sanjiang Church exceeded its approved floor area; and that the 2015 draft merely required crosses to "coordinate" with façades and surroundings. These claims are recorded, not credited, for a simple reason: if what was being demolished was merely illegal construction, it is hard to explain why the illegal construction being demolished had, overwhelmingly, exactly one shape.
One name must be handled with care. Xia Baolong, then Party Secretary of Zhejiang, has been identified by ChinaAid and sources repeating it as the campaign's driving force, with the specific claim that on an inspection tour of Wenzhou he found church crosses "too conspicuous." That specific claim rests on a single source chain and is marked unverified in this file; it is not carried in the main text. What can be confirmed is institutional: the campaign ran during his tenure at the head of the province, was carried out province-wide in the name of a provincial government drive, and the 2015 cross regulation issued from Zhejiang's administrative system. This file keeps those two layers separate — it will not turn hearsay into a verdict, and it will not let the unverified status of hearsay dissolve institutional responsibility either.
Wenzhou was both the campaign's hardest-hit area and the place where resistance was best organised. The city's Christian population is unusually large by Chinese urban standards — it is called "China's Jerusalem" — and both the official churches and the house churches are deeply rooted there. The believers' resistance deserves itemised record: all-night vigils guarding crosses, human walls at church doors, the joint Catholic-Protestant "a cross in every hand" action of July 2015 that put small crosses into homes, cars and shops, and the peaceful street protest by the 89-year-old Bishop Zhu Weifang of Wenzhou with twenty Catholic leaders. That was everything ordinary believers could do. What Zhang Kai brought to Wenzhou was another kind of resistance: a legal team of more than thirty lawyers, and a whole apparatus of administrative law. The believers keeping vigil were guarding a cross; the lawyers' lawsuits asked a question — on what legal basis, exactly, are you taking it down?
From Xiaoshan and Linfen to Feng Jianmei: where this Christian lawyer came from
Zhang Kai did not appear in church cases out of nowhere in 2014. The fullest public account of his early career is the biographical introduction published in March 2016 by Qin Chenshou, one of the lawyers then representing him. Its main points: baptised a Christian in 2003, he passed the judicial examination the same year and began as an assistant lawyer; he entered practice in 2004, spent two years on commercial work and corporate counsel retainers, then in 2006 resigned all of that work and moved into public-interest and rights defence, concentrating on criminal defence and administrative litigation. In religious-freedom work he handled the Xiaoshan case and the Linfen case — both among the major church cases of that decade, covered by international mainstream media — and took part in many house-church defence cases. In public-interest work he was a member of the melamine milk-powder compensation team, gave legal support in the Shanxi tainted-vaccine affair, and worked on anti-discrimination cases for people with HIV and hepatitis B; he represented the family of a migrant worker who died in 2008 after being tied up by railway staff on a train, the family of a man tortured to death in police custody in Nanchang, the family of the victim in the 2010 "My dad is Li Gang" hit-and-run case, and defended a witness in the Qian Yunhui case. The pattern across that résumé is consistent: his clients were, over and over, the families of the dead, the detained, and the wronged, and across the table sat, over and over, organs of state power. The résumé was supplied by his own counsel and is a single-source, self-presented document; this file adopts its framework and does not expand its individual case details, as the verification note states.
The Feng Jianmei case of 2012 carried his name to a national audience. Feng Jianmei, a farmer's wife in Zhenping County, Shaanxi, seven months pregnant, was subjected to a forced abortion by local family-planning officials; photographs of the dead foetus beside her produced national outrage and international condemnation. Zhang Kai announced on his blog that he was willing to take the case, calling the tragedy an offence against the most basic human conscience; Feng's husband Deng Jiyuan then retained him, and he filed legal applications with the police and the government seeking criminal accountability for the responsible officials and compensation. The Associated Press and the Christian Post both recorded his role at the time. One detail is worth keeping: he was about thirty-four that year, and already a lawyer of a recognisable type — where there was a death at official hands, or believers in custody, that was where he went. His move to Wenzhou in 2014 was not a change of career. It was the same road, arriving in Zhejiang.
His own understanding of the work survives in words he wrote himself. In an essay published shortly before he was taken away, he said he believed that seeking justice for China's churches in this era, and promoting reconciliation and the rule of law, was the calling and historic mission of Christian lawyers today; asked what the political climate would bring and whether churches would face more oppression, he answered with the biblical sequence in which suffering produces perseverance, and said one should thank God for having been born in China in this era. Those words were quoted by The Guardian in September 2015; they are not retrospective embroidery. They matter for understanding the eleven years that followed, in which he twice stood in the defence seat of a church case and was twice stripped: for Zhang Kai, litigating for churches was not a business choice but a practice of faith. The men who disposed of him understood this perfectly — which is why each disposal landed precisely on his faith community and on his professional qualification, the two places where it would hold.
A year in Wenzhou: the Huang Yizi case and Xialing Church — exhausting every procedure
Zhang Kai's entry into the Wenzhou cases was the case of Pastor Huang Yizi of Salvation Church. After the Salvation Church cross was forced down in July 2014 and believers beaten, Huang was arrested as the alleged organiser of the resistance. From August 2014 Zhang acted for him and based himself in Wenzhou. Initium Media's long 2015 report, translated by China Change, documents his method in unusual detail. Huang had waited more than seventy hours to see a lawyer after arrest — beyond the 48 hours the Criminal Procedure Law allows — so Zhang sued over that alone, claiming compensation. Huang was forbidden to read a Bible in custody, so the legal team brought a separate action over that, which Zhang called China's first detention-centre Bible-reading case. The Zhejiang provincial government's own website, answering a letter through the governor's mailbox, described Huang's conduct in advance as "criminal conduct," so Zhang sued over that too — conviction without trial, and defamation of his client. After Huang's arrest they collected more than a thousand signatures and applied to hold a protest march. Zhang called the method a gambit played in procedure: filing a case is one thing; a court's refusal to file it is another — the refusal itself must be turned into a written record that can later be pursued. He broke Huang Yizi's single case into four cases and mobilised eleven lawyers to work them.
The authorities' answer to this method is also on record. Three months in, they proposed a bargain to Huang Yizi: dismiss Zhang Kai as his counsel, and he would be out within a month. Zhang was thus forced to withdraw. The bargain was not honoured: in March 2015 Huang was sentenced to one year for gathering a crowd to disturb social order; he was released on 1 August 2015 and briefly detained again that September. This episode is recorded separately because it previews an action that recurs throughout the following eleven years: a fixed step in the handling of church cases is to detach the lawyer from the client first. In 2015 what was detached was a retainer; in 2025 it was a practising licence. The instrument was upgraded. The logic did not change.
In November 2014 Zhang became legal representative of Xialing Church in Lucheng District, Wenzhou. Xialing was a government-registered church; from mid-2014 the authorities repeatedly tried to remove its cross, the congregation resisted, and in October 2014 the church's outer wall was demolished and its steps left as rubble. The subdistrict authorities then issued a penalty decision declaring the entire church an illegal structure, for incomplete documentation, to be demolished in full. Zhang first applied for administrative reconsideration, then sued over the reconsideration result, and simultaneously launched freedom-of-information proceedings against every government department involved; when the church's water and electricity were cut off, he sued the State Grid as well. He lived inside Xialing Church, receiving pastors and believers who travelled from all over Zhejiang every day. Across the province he organised a team of more than thirty Christian lawyers: four churches represented in Wenzhou itself, a six-lawyer group taking cases in Jinhua and Lishui, and churches province-wide telephoning for advice. He reckoned there were roughly nine things lawyers could do — apply for marches, hear testimony, impeach officials, write letters, sue, request disclosure of government information, and more. He told the reporter plainly: lawyers cannot necessarily stop the crosses coming down, but they can at least expose the illegality of the exercise; even if a structure did breach regulations, there should be a reasonable and lawful process for dealing with it — otherwise, where is the legality?
In July 2015 the Zhejiang religious-buildings regulation was formally issued — the code that moved crosses from rooftops to façades and capped them at one-tenth of a wall's height. Zhang at once filed a freedom-of-information application on Xialing Church's behalf: the government was to disclose the legal basis for drafting the regulation, the procedure by which it was drawn up, the expert committee's research report, the religious affiliations of the committee's members, and the organs and procedures that would enforce it — with a response demanded within the statutory fifteen days, failing which he would sue. The sentence he repeated to believers in those weeks was that church-state relations had reached an extremely strained point, but that these were their rights. Read that record against what happened a month later and the chronology comments on itself: in July he demanded that the government answer according to law within fifteen days; on 25 August the government's answer arrived in another form — the police came into the church where he lived.
The night of 10 July 2015: the warning before the arrest
Before 25 August 2015 there was 10 July. The date carries a double meaning: it was the opening night of the nationwide "709" crackdown on lawyers, and it was also the day Zhang Kai had planned to begin a lecture series in Wenzhou titled "Laws and Decrees" — "decrees," he explained to believers, being the Christian word for God's law; Christianity teaches submission, but what one ought to submit to is the constitution and morality, not illegal people and illegal conduct. Late that night, Wenzhou state security police took him away and interrogated him through the night. According to Initium Media's report, he later recounted to its reporter the three demands the officers made: do not stir up the Zhou Shifeng case; do not hold legal seminars in Wenzhou; do not get involved in religious cases in Zhejiang. He did not agree. A state security officer urged him to think about his position: Zhou Shifeng at least had some connections; Zhang had none; taking Wenzhou religious cases was asking for trouble. He replied: you are wrong — I have God as my backer. The exchange comes from the reporter's face-to-face interview, published on 31 August 2015, six days after Zhang disappeared; it is a contemporary first-hand interview record, and this file adopts it with its source named.
The taking and release of 10 July and the formal arrest six weeks later form a pair of texts that must be read together. The first time, the content of the warning was perfectly explicit: no lectures, no religious cases — what was prohibited was not criminal conduct but law practice itself. When he refused, the second encounter was no longer a conversation but an RSDL notice. This file keeps the two steps separate so that readers can see the staircase: one step is a verbal warning, the next is secret detention, and what separates the steps is not any new unlawful act but a single refusal. On 8 August 2015 he wrote to friends on WeChat that he had thought it through: at worst they could put him in jail, but if he kept silent he would regret it for the rest of his life. Seventeen days later, the first half of that sentence came due.
25 August 2015: taken the night before the meeting with the U.S. envoy
On the evening of 25 August 2015, Zhang Kai and his two assistants, Liu Peng and Fang Xiangui, were taken away from Xialing Church in Wenzhou. According to Radio Free Asia and ChinaAid, police climbed over the church wall to get in. The timing is not secret and is hard to read as coincidence: David Saperstein, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, was then visiting China, his itinerary included Zhejiang, and Zhang, together with a group of religious figures, was scheduled to meet him the following day to discuss the cross demolitions and the pressure on churches. Saperstein himself publicly called in Zhejiang for an end to the campaign of cross removals and church demolitions and to harassment of members of unregistered religious groups; the man due to meet him had been removed from his church the night before. U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner called that month for Zhang's release, describing the detention as indicative of an ongoing pattern. On 14 October 2015, launching the State Department's 2014 International Religious Freedom Report, Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador Saperstein specifically raised Zhang's case as an example of the harassment faced by China's Christians and its legal community — Saperstein adding that all ten religious-freedom figures he had arranged to meet on that late-August trip, pastors and lawyers among them, had been detained.
Zhang was not the only person taken in Wenzhou at that moment. A 2018 case study of Wenzhou in the academic journal Religions records that at the end of August and into September 2015, eighteen Wenzhou church leaders and associated people, Zhang among them, were arrested. This was not an isolated lawyer case but a sweep closing the cross-demolition campaign's summer: first the lawyer who spoke for the churches, then the people in the churches who spoke. His two assistants were held for three and a half months and released on 11 December 2015. His own whereabouts, for the six months that followed, were a blank that the authorities did not publish, his family did not know, and his lawyers could not fill.
Six months of RSDL: no visits, and counsel "dismissed" one by one
On 27 August 2015 the Wenzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau notified his family: under Article 73 of the Criminal Procedure Law, Zhang Kai was placed under residential surveillance at a designated location, on suspicion of gathering a crowd to disturb public order and of stealing, spying into, purchasing, or illegally providing state secrets or intelligence to overseas entities. RSDL means the place of custody is not a detention centre but an undisclosed location; a state-secrets suspicion means that a lawyer's visits require the investigating organ's approval — and approval never came. Radio Free Asia reported on 4 September 2015 that his defence lawyer Li Guisheng's application to meet him, submitted that week, had been refused on the ground that the investigation was continuing. Amnesty International's urgent action of September 2015 (UA 190/15) stated the position more bluntly: he was being held at a location outside the formal detention system, with no access to his lawyers or his family, at real risk of torture and ill-treatment. That was the whole of his situation for the next six months: no visits, no letters, no address, no news. The term "black jail," which recurs in human-rights and foreign media files for this state of affairs, refers to exactly this; the main text of this file uses the legal name and notes the common term at first mention.
The family's own actions belong on the record day by day, because they form the skeleton of the family-impact section that follows. The family successively retained several lawyers — Li Guisheng, Zhang Lei, Qin Chenshou and others formed a defence team — and Zhang Lei, in his capacity as counsel, submitted a formal legal opinion to the Wenzhou Municipal People's Procuratorate asking it to exercise legal supervision over the Wenzhou police's filing and investigation of the case. The supervision produced nothing; the visits produced nothing; and then the defence relationship itself began to be dismantled. On 13 November 2015 the Wenzhou police notified Zhang Lei that Zhang Kai had "temporarily" dismissed him; Liu Peng's lawyer, Li Baiguang, received a notice to the same effect. On 27 January 2016, a letter Zhang had written to his parents on 12 November 2015 reached the family's newly retained lawyer: in it he said he was "communicating positively" with the police and hoping for a good outcome, and was therefore temporarily dismissing his lawyers, and he asked his parents to look after their health and face matters correctly. The handwriting and signature are his, but the letter was written inside secret detention and passed out through the case-handling channel, and the freedom of its making cannot be verified. A detainee first dismissing his own lawyers and the police then notifying the lawyers is a manoeuvre that recurs across the 709 cases; this file treats the letter the same way in its verification note — its existence and contents are recorded, and it is not cited as an expression of his free will.
25 February 2016 was the day the statutory six-month RSDL term expired. What happened that day is a confession in its own right, in its ordering alone: first the televised confession, then criminal detention, and finally bail. The man was put on television first, and the paperwork was completed afterwards. The next three sections take those thirty days in order.
The impact on his family: a mother's letter, and a father taken to Wenzhou
Zhang Kai's family were not bystanders. They were the procedure's second set of bearers, and unusually, they left written records. Soon after he was taken, his mother wrote him an open letter, published by ChinaAid. Your lawyers and I, she wrote, do not have even the smallest bit of information about your situation now that you have been taken; these days she was terribly upset, her mind held nothing but missing him, she tried to control herself but his shadow kept appearing before her eyes. The letter could not be delivered to its addressee — the addressee was in a place with no address. It was in fact written for the outside world: the one thing a mother can do when her son is disappeared is to write the longing into a public text and compel the world to acknowledge that a man is missing.
After the confession aired on 25 February and Zhang was converted to criminal detention at nine in the evening on 26 February, his parents issued a statement on 28 February: they believed Zhang Kai was innocent; they hoped the government would respect the rights the law already guaranteed him; they hoped Wenzhou's law-enforcement organs would handle the case according to law; they hoped their son would come home soon; and they thanked all the friends who had shown concern. The statement's language is restrained to the point of pain — there is not one accusation in it, only the word "law" recurring. A lawyer's parents, pleading for their lawyer son, asked for the law itself. At the same time, according to information posted on social media by ChinaAid president Bob Fu, Zhang's father was taken to Wenzhou by that city's public security and state security police on 27 February and was at the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau on the morning of the 28th, likely to be held temporarily and deprived of his freedom. That item rests on Fu alone and is marked unverified in this file; it is recorded here because it forms one continuous line with what this family went through over the following decade.
That line tightened twice more within 2016. Once in late August and early September, after Zhang's retraction (detailed in the next section), when Wenzhou state security officers travelled specially to Inner Mongolia and entered his parents' home. And once on 27 December 2016, when he answered a summons to a Hohhot police station at ten in the morning and did not return, while public security personnel from Zhejiang, Wenzhou, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia came to his mother's house for a "conversation," and Beijing Municipal Public Security officers visited his sister at her workplace, were refused permission to film her, and instructed mother and daughter to urge Zhang to "cooperate quietly," saying whether he could come home "depended on his attitude." His mother's published words afterwards contained exactly one sentence of emotion; the rest was record: our family is waiting anxiously; I hope Zhang Kai returns safely; please pay urgent attention. Using the family as a conduit, and framing release as a question of attitude, is the cheapest component of this whole apparatus: it requires no document, leaves no record, and teaches a family to be afraid before every festival. That December detention lasted 48 hours, 27 to 29 December, corroborated both by Christian Solidarity Worldwide and by the U.S. State Department's 2016 International Religious Freedom Report.
For nearly ten years after that, the public record concerning this family essentially stops — which tracks the change in the disposal method in 2025–2026, when the blows fell on professional qualification and exit rights and the family no longer appears in reporting. His parents' ages and present condition are matters of no public record, and this file records the item as such without inventing a single detail for them. What can be confirmed is structural only: between 2015 and 2016 this family lived through a son disappeared into secret custody for six months, a father taken to the city handling the case, a mother and daughter visited at home and at work, and a son who, after bail, was taken away twice more. All of that stands on published sources. None of it is inference.
25 February 2016: the "confession" on Wenzhou television
On the evening of 25 February 2016, television programmes in Zhejiang and Wenzhou broadcast Zhang Kai's "confession." The man on screen was thin and haggard. In the officially prepared formula he acknowledged violating national laws, disturbing social order, and endangering national security; he acknowledged receiving funding from overseas organisations and organising believers to "defend their rights"; and he warned so-called human rights lawyers to take him as a warning — not to collude with foreign forces, not to take foreign organisations' money, not to engage in activities that break the law or harm national security and interests. The programme further accused him of extracting exorbitant fees from churches for their cases and inciting believers against the government, and named ChinaAid and Purdue University scholar Yang Fenggang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society, as the "overseas forces" behind him. His assistant Liu Peng was also produced on the programme to join in the condemnation. The broadcast date was the exact day his six months of secret detention expired, and any review or prosecution by a procuratorate lay far in the future: the confession preceded the indictment, and the verdict preceded the court — the standard structure of these television productions.
The rebuttals arrived within twenty-four hours, and every one of them came from a person the programme had named. Yang Fenggang issued a statement calling on the Wenzhou authorities to release Zhang, describing him as a friend and one of the most courageous lawyers defending Christian churches in Wenzhou, and pointing out that the supposed evidence displayed on the programme was all dated before 2013, while Zhang had not begun working in Wenzhou until August 2014 — material from before his arrival, used to prove his crimes there. Pastor Guo Baosheng, author of the annual "Top Ten Persecution Cases" lists, stated that those case materials all came from public websites inside and outside China and had no connection with Zhang whatsoever; the charge of providing state secrets to overseas entities was, on his account, baseless fabrication. Bob Fu stated that Zhang was plainly under duress while delivering scripted remarks, and disclosed that he and Zhang had an arrangement made before the imprisonment: short of insurmountable hardship, Zhang would never compromise or betray his friends — the implication being that the televised denunciation of ChinaAid itself testified to what he had endured. Thirty-six Chinese pastors signed an open letter condemning the authorities' use of forced confessions and describing Zhang as a devout Christian who had used his legal expertise to help the church for years. Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church wrote at length that every one of Zhang's alleged "crimes" — meeting the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, attending the same conferences abroad, opposing the cross demolitions — was something he himself had also done, and that on the government's logic he too should be prosecuted, cheekily writing out his own identity-card number at the end.
Fellow lawyer Zhang Lei's assessment of the televised confession amounted to one sentence: it is utterly appalling for a person to be made to confess on television. This file fixes the broadcast's archival position here: the programme was certainly aired; its content contradicts, point for point, everything its subject said and did in freedom; every key allegation in it was denied, with specific defects identified, by the named parties within days; and its timing — the last day of six months of secret detention, before the criminal process had left the investigation stage — determines that it can be preserved in this file only as a television programme produced under secret detention, not as evidence of Zhang's position or of any fact. As with the blog post written under confinement in the Ma Daqin file elsewhere on this site, anyone quoting this page who repeats the confession must repeat this characterisation with it.
26 February: criminal detention; 23 March: bail — back in Hohhot
The day after the confession aired, at nine in the evening on 26 February 2016, Zhang Kai's status was converted from RSDL to criminal detention and he was taken to the Wenzhou Detention Centre, on the same two suspicions. The procedural meaning of the conversion is worth spelling out to readers: the six months of RSDL were exhausted, and to keep holding him, a new instrument was required. Confession first, criminal detention second — the order shows that the broadcast date was calculated against the detention term, not against any news schedule. His newly retained counsel Qin Chenshou chose that moment to publish the biographical introduction described above — in effect announcing to the whole society who this televised confessor was and what he had done, an attempt to answer stigma with a résumé, one of the few tools his supporters had.
On the evening of 23 March 2016, Zhang posted on WeChat and Weibo that he had safely returned to his hometown in Inner Mongolia, thanking the friends who had shown concern for him and looked after and comforted his family during his detention. Friends and family confirmed the release. Amnesty International promptly updated its urgent-action file, confirming that he had been released after seven months in detention, and noting that he gave no reason for his sudden release. The form of release, according to multiple reports and his own counsel's later account, was bail pending trial, on conditions that included not speaking to the media. On 24 March, Representative Chris Smith and Senator Marco Rubio, the chair and co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, welcomed the reports of his release while cautioning that its terms were not fully known, and called on Xi Jinping, on the eve of Easter, to end the campaign of cross removals and church demolitions in Zhejiang and to respect religious freedom more broadly. From 25 August 2015 to 23 March 2016 he had spent 211 days in formal and informal places of custody. There was no indictment, no trial, no judgment — and then, one March evening, he was home, with the case neither withdrawn on any document nor pursued with any sound. It hung there, as it still hangs, as a handle that can be picked up again at any time in the following ten years.
What he endured in those six months he has never publicly described in detail, and this file records only the verifiable outline. China Change's retrospective of March 2026 states that he was held incommunicado and tortured in that period. Chinese Human Rights Defenders' January 2017 report placed his televised confession alongside the pattern of 709 lawyers such as Xie Yang who confessed after torture in custody, noting that those released were living under close monitoring and were unable to speak freely about the interrogation experience. A later-updated Gospel Herald report attributes to a statement by Zhang dated 24 March 2018 the words that the torture in jail was unbearable and that he had almost died; that item rests on that single outlet and is marked unverified in this file, registered as existing and not as established. The archive must be restrained here: that a man emerged from six months of secret detention visibly thinned and haggard was witnessed and relayed by fellow lawyers; what precisely was done to him inside is something this page will not narrate on his behalf before he can safely tell it himself.
Bail was not freedom: the audience seat, the interview, the retraction, the re-detentions
On bail, Zhang lived with his parents in Hohhot, and the machine that disposed of him did not stop; it changed speed. At some point in the first half of 2016, prosecutors from Wenzhou summoned him from Inner Mongolia to Wenzhou for interrogation. In a series of Facebook posts relayed by ChinaAid he wrote that his body was weak and that if he were arrested again he might not be able to endure it; that all interviews and videos recorded after his detention could not represent his real opinions, and that he would try to hold on; and that he had committed no crime — the only reason he was persecuted was that he had helped the churches safeguard their legal rights during the Wenzhou cross-demolition movement — asking the brothers and sisters of the church to look after and visit his parents if he were arrested. The exact dates of those posts are not consistently recorded across sources, and this file registers them as belonging to the 2016 bail period without inventing a day.
On 4 August 2016 Zhou Shifeng, the central figure of the 709 cases, was tried in Tianjin. The authorities brought Zhang from Inner Mongolia to sit in the public gallery, and then arranged for him to be interviewed, in which he denounced Zhou and the other imprisoned rights lawyers. The interview's purpose was identical to that of the February television confession: to use a man just released to testify against men not yet released. The difference is that this time, days later, Zhang personally overturned it. In late August he posted a video on WeChat retracting what he had said in that interview, asking the families of the imprisoned lawyers for forgiveness, and explaining that he had been too frightened — in his own words, the six months of secret detention had been all black, with no daylight. The price of the retraction was immediate. According to his lawyer Tan Chenshou, speaking to Radio Free Asia, state security officers from Wenzhou travelled to Inner Mongolia and went straight to his parents' home, and Zhang was taken away again; Tan judged that prosecution was very likely and could not be ruled out. The U.S. State Department's 2016 International Religious Freedom Report records the sequence in terms consistent with the above: he recanted his confession as coerced; according to his lawyer, the authorities detained him again in August; and in December they detained him again for two days before releasing him. Within the single year 2016, then, a man nominally on bail lost his freedom at least twice more, and each time the trigger was not a new fact in any case but speech — the first time, true speech after scripted speech; the trigger of the second is a matter of no public record.
Laid end to end, the year's trajectory shows what bail pending trial actually did in this case: it was not a release but a relocation of custody — from an undisclosed location in Wenzhou to his parents' home in Hohhot, with the guards replaced by summonses, arranged trial attendance, arranged interviews, and a standing power to take him away. The conditions forbade him to speak to the media, while interviews arranged by the authorities themselves somehow did not count as media interviews: the rules bound him, and did not bind the people who arranged him. This file therefore calls the 23 March 2016 node, here and in the indexes, "release on bail," never "release and case closed," because everything in the following decade proves the point: the case never closed. He had simply been retained inside it by another method.
The international response: quick naming, few levers
The international response to the Zhang Kai case was among the densest of any in the 709 series, in part because of the moment he was taken — inside the itinerary of a serving U.S. ambassador, the night before a scheduled meeting. The record, itemised: the United States — State Department spokesman Mark Toner demanded his release in August 2015 and called the detention indicative of an ongoing pattern; in October 2015 Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador David Saperstein raised the case by name at the launch of the 2014 International Religious Freedom Report; the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2016 annual report carried a dedicated passage, noting that he was seized before his meeting with Saperstein, held without charge for six months — likely in one of China's notorious "black jail" facilities — and criminally detained in February 2016; the two chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China issued a dedicated statement on his release on 24 March 2016; and the State Department's 2016 International Religious Freedom Report recorded in full his retraction and the two further detentions. Human-rights organisations — Amnesty International issued Urgent Action UA 190/15 in September 2015 and updated it twice through to confirmation of his release; Human Rights Watch's July 2016 statement on the first anniversary of the 709 crackdown recorded his case by name, stating that he had been held incommunicado between August 2015 and March 2016 for providing legal advice to Christians resisting the cross-removal campaign, and called for the cases against rights lawyers to be dropped; ChinaAid maintained a "Free Zhang Kai" campaign page and timeline, and Lawyers for Lawyers and Christian Solidarity Worldwide followed the case continuously. Media — The Guardian, the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, Radio Free Asia and UCA News all carried continuing coverage, and Reuters' report of the February 2016 televised confession was carried by many outlets.
The actual yield of that response must be written as plainly: he did come home on bail in March 2016, earlier than many 709 detainees, and how much of that the international attention caused no party can prove — this file makes no such claim. It is equally plain that the televised confession aired anyway, that he was detained again anyway after retracting, that his professional status was frozen for three years anyway, and that ten years later his licence was permanently revoked anyway. The function of the international response in this case is the same as in this site's other files: it ends as record. Underneath the label "state secrets," the man has been preserved in the world's human-rights archives under his real name, his real profession, and his real case — a lawyer who brought administrative lawsuits for churches — written into State Department reports, a USCIRF annual report and Amnesty files again and again. That is the most durable rebuttal there is to that suspicion notice.
Practice restored in 2018: three stolen years, and the decade that followed
After the 48 hours of December 2016, Zhang Kai's public record enters a sparse period of several years. The sparseness has one documented skeleton, and it is enough: China Change's retrospective of March 2026 records that after his release he remained under strict surveillance, that for three years his practice status was marked "invalid" on the Justice Bureau's website, and that only in 2018 was he permitted to resume practice. In other words, the professional price of the March 2016 bail was a three-year suspension with no document, no hearing, and no channel of appeal: not a revocation, not a formal suspension, merely a status field in an official system changed to "invalid," leaving him unable to take cases, unable to appear, without income — and leaving the outside world without a single penalty decision it could cite. After practice was restored in 2018, he returned to Beijing and continued defending church and belief cases, in time founding and directing the Kaimen Law Firm — rendered "VDoor" in the Associated Press's September 2026 reporting — with its practice centred on house-church cases and a generation of younger lawyers trained within it. No complete public list of his cases in this period exists, and this file does not fabricate one. What can be confirmed is the endpoint: by October 2025 his firm stood at the core of the Zion Church defence team, and his own name stood at the front of a forty-lawyer roster.
Space must also be left in this section for a change in the instruments used against him, set against the constancy of what he was doing. In 2015 the instrument was secret detention and a televised confession; in 2016, bail, summonses and arranged appearances; from 2016 to 2018, a status field in a licensing system; in 2025–2026, summonses for "talks," midnight door-knocks, licence revocation and an exit ban. The instruments moved from the body to the qualification and the livelihood; their visible intensity fell while their precision rose. Six months of secret detention draws naming by the State Department and Amnesty International; revoking one licence and deregistering one firm stirs only ripples inside a profession. That is not leniency. It is the same objective — removing the lawyer from his clients' cases — achieved by cheaper means. The evidence for that sentence is the next section.
2025–2026: the Zion Church case returns, and the licence is revoked for good
On 9–10 October 2025, public security organs moved in multiple places against Beijing's Zion Church; some thirty church members, lead pastor Jin Mingri among them, were taken away, and eighteen were held in Beihai, Guangxi, initially on suspicion of illegally using information networks. Zion Church, founded by Jin Mingri in Beijing in 2007, is one of China's largest unregistered churches; its Beijing meeting place had already been shut down and the church banned in 2018, after which it continued in a hybrid online and in-person form. After the arrests, as many as forty lawyers formed a defence team. Zhang Kai acted for Jin Mingri and was the team's lead counsel. The lawyers met their clients as the law provides, carried word of living conditions, medical needs and requests for Bibles to the outside, and filed complaints with the procuratorate over procedural violations in the investigation — exactly as in Wenzhou ten years before, the procedures were exhausted first. For a while, everything appeared normal. Then the familiar staircase appeared, step by step.
According to China Change's report of 24 March 2026: Zhang Kai was soon summoned repeatedly for meetings by officials of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, who issued veiled and direct threats, all meaning that he should withdraw from the case; neighbourhood police found reasons to visit his residence in the middle of the night; and in December 2025 he received a notice from the Bureau stating its intent to revoke his licence, on the ground that he had "disrupted order in the court" while representing another case. The report notes that Jin Mingri's family, the defence team, and observers of the Chinese judiciary all understood the notice's real intent: to remove Zhang Kai from the Zion case. In January 2026 the Bureau held its hearing in accordance with its "procedure," and the foreordained result followed: his licence was revoked — and this time, in the report's words, the revocation was permanent. Alongside this, according to the statement issued on 30 March 2026 by the Zion Church families and a legal-rights observation group and released by ChinaAid, Zhang had already been placed under exit restrictions in 2025; the Kaimen Law Firm he directed was being pressed by administrative coercion to "voluntarily deregister," on pain of consequences if it refused; among the wider team, Deng Qinggao was penalised and at least six lawyers — Yang Yaohua, Li Chunfu, Ge Xianyang, Liu Anqiang, Tang Xianlong among them — were suspended for six months, with Zhao Qingshan suspended in a second round; and judicial-administrative personnel, through summonses and administrative measures, pressed lawyers to leave Kaimen and to terminate their defence agreements in the Zion cases — the statement lists by name eight detained people who thereby lost the counsel they had chosen. The Wall Street Journal's March 2026 reporting and Bitter Winter's reporting the same month each corroborated, through their own channels, the core fact: Zhang's licence revoked, multiple lawyers suspended.
On 3 July 2026 Jin Mingri was released after nearly nine months in custody and travelled to the United States, a development his family linked to President Donald Trump having raised the case in a May meeting with Xi Jinping; several other Zion defendants remained in custody in Beihai and were indicted. What happened on the defence bench continued to spread outward: in August 2026, Kaimen partner Wang Xiahong, travelling in Japan, received a call from the authorities demanding she return to Beijing for a face-to-face meeting; she decided not to return to the mainland, and in early September reached Taipei in transit with her family and sought assistance from the Taiwanese authorities, who allowed a temporary stay. In the Associated Press's September 2026 interview with her, Zhang Kai's position was written in again as background: the firm's founder Zhang Kai had had his licence revoked and was barred from leaving China; other lawyers had been suspended for six months, and those who tried to transfer to other firms faced restrictions; the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice told the AP it was not authorised to deal with international media, and the Ministry of Public Security did not respond. From Wenzhou to Beihai, eleven years describe a great circle: in August 2015 he was taken away the night before he was to meet an American ambassador; in September 2026 his partner took the road into exile because their firm defended a church — while he himself, under an exit ban, stayed.
The density of sourcing in this section must be declared to readers. The two pivotal nodes — the December 2025 notice of intent and the permanent revocation of January 2026 — are narrated most completely by China Change alone; but the revocation and suspensions as facts are corroborated across the Wall Street Journal, Bitter Winter, the families' statement released by ChinaAid, and the Associated Press, and count as multiply sourced. Details such as the number of summonses and the midnight visits rest on China Change and the families' statement and are carried here in their sources' terms, neither expanded nor embellished. The specifics of the "other case" courtroom-disruption ground on which the revocation formally rests are provided by no source in verifiable form, and the authorities have published neither the hearing record nor the penalty decision; this file records that as no public record. A penalty that ended a lawyer's professional life, whose factual basis the public cannot inspect — that, too, goes into the archive without need of commentary.
Current status and the questions still unanswered
As of this page's check in October 2026, the confirmable position is as follows. First, his practising licence has been revoked, and on China Change's reporting the revocation is permanent; there is no public record of restored practice. Second, he has been under an exit restriction since 2025, the Associated Press was still describing it so in September 2026, and there is no public record of its lifting. Third, no public source records any criminal detention or arrest of Zhang Kai himself during 2026 — this file phrases that as "no public record" and asserts nothing about the detail of his circumstances. Fourth, the Kaimen Law Firm has been required to deregister itself; whether that process had been completed at the time of checking is a matter of no public record, and its partner Wang Xiahong has left the country to seek resettlement. Fifth, the 2015 Wenzhou case, opened in the name of state secrets, has never produced any publicly available document of indictment, judgment or withdrawal; whether it remains legally suspended is a matter of no public record. The unanswered questions include: his present health and income; the present situation of his elderly parents; when the full penalty decision and hearing record in the revocation might become public; and whether his position will change further once the Zion case is tried. Each is registered here as no public record and will be updated on later checks. A man of about forty-eight has practised law for twenty-two years, eleven of them spent between disposal and restoration, and now stands a second time at the end of his profession — this time with no television cameras and no suspicion notice, only a name deleted from a system. That is precisely what this file exists to preserve.
Full timeline
- c. 1978 — Born in Inner Mongolia (the year inferred from the age of 37 given in Amnesty International's 2015 file; exact birth date not in the public record).
- 2003 — Baptised a Christian; passes the judicial examination the same year and begins as an assistant lawyer.
- 2004–2006 — Practises in Beijing, first on commercial and corporate counsel work; in 2006 resigns the corporate work for public-interest and rights defence, concentrating on criminal defence and administrative litigation; thereafter handles the Xiaoshan and Linfen church cases and a series of public-interest cases (per the résumé published by his counsel Qin Chenshou in 2016).
- June–July 2012 — Publicly takes on the case of Feng Jianmei, subjected to a forced abortion in Shaanxi, and files applications seeking criminal accountability for officials and compensation, drawing national and international coverage.
- Late 2013 — Zhejiang's cross-demolition campaign begins under the "Three Rectifications and One Demolition" banner; large-scale removals from February 2014.
- 28 April 2014 — Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou demolished in its entirety; on 21 July the Salvation Church cross at Shuitou is forced down at 3 a.m. after a month of vigils, and Pastor Huang Yizi is subsequently arrested.
- August 2014 — Zhang Kai takes Huang Yizi's case and bases himself in Wenzhou, organising a legal team pressing church cases through reconsideration, litigation, information requests and march applications; in November he becomes legal representative of Xialing Church and lives in the church, receiving believers from across the province.
- March 2015 — Huang Yizi sentenced to one year; the authorities had earlier offered him early release on condition he dismiss Zhang Kai, without success.
- May 2015 — Zhejiang publishes its draft religious-buildings regulation (crosses affixed to façades, no more than one-tenth of a wall's height); Zhang files a freedom-of-information application over the regulation on Xialing Church's behalf.
- Night of 10 July 2015 — On the opening night of the 709 crackdown, Zhang is taken away in Wenzhou by state security and interrogated all night, and told not to stir up the Zhou Shifeng case, not to hold legal seminars, and not to take Zhejiang religious cases; he refuses.
- 8 August 2015 — He writes to friends on WeChat: he has thought it through — at worst, jail; silence would mean lifelong regret.
- Evening of 25 August 2015 — Zhang Kai and assistants Liu Peng and Fang Xiangui are taken away from Xialing Church in Wenzhou; he had been due to meet Ambassador David Saperstein the next day. Eighteen church-related people in Wenzhou are arrested in the same period.
- 27 August 2015 — The Wenzhou police notify the family of RSDL on suspicion of gathering a crowd to disturb public order and of stealing, spying into, purchasing or illegally providing state secrets or intelligence to overseas entities; his counsel Li Guisheng's application to meet him is then refused.
- September 2015 — Amnesty International issues Urgent Action UA 190/15; the State Department spokesman calls for his release.
- 14 October 2015 — At the launch of the State Department's 2014 International Religious Freedom Report, Kerry and Saperstein raise Zhang's case by name.
- 12 November 2015 — In custody, Zhang writes to his parents saying he is temporarily dismissing his lawyers (the letter passed out through the case channel; the freedom of its making cannot be verified); on 13 November the Wenzhou police notify Zhang Lei and others that their client has "temporarily" dismissed them.
- 11 December 2015 — Assistants Liu Peng and Fang Xiangui are released.
- Evening of 25 February 2016 — On the day the six-month RSDL term expires, Wenzhou television broadcasts Zhang Kai's "confession"; Yang Fenggang, Guo Baosheng and Bob Fu issue statements refuting it point by point, and thirty-six pastors sign a letter condemning forced confessions.
- Evening of 26 February 2016 — Zhang is converted to criminal detention at the Wenzhou Detention Centre; his father is reported by a single source to have been taken to Wenzhou by police the next day (unverified). His parents issue a statement on 28 February affirming his innocence and demanding the case be handled according to law.
- Evening of 23 March 2016 — Zhang is released on bail to his parents' home in Hohhot; the next day the CECC chairs welcome the release and call for an end to the cross-removal campaign.
- 2016 — Human Rights Watch's July anniversary statement on the 709 crackdown records his case by name; Amnesty closes its urgent action on confirmation of his release.
- 4 August 2016 — Zhang is brought to Tianjin to attend Zhou Shifeng's trial and is made to give an interview denouncing the imprisoned lawyers; in late August he posts a video retracting it, describing the six months of detention as "all black," after which Wenzhou state security officers travel to his parents' home in Inner Mongolia and he is briefly taken away again (per his lawyer Tan Chenshou to Radio Free Asia; the State Department's 2016 International Religious Freedom Report records the same sequence).
- 27–29 December 2016 — Zhang answers a summons in Hohhot and is held for 48 hours; during it, public security officers from four jurisdictions visit his mother for a "conversation" and Beijing police visit his sister's workplace, asking the family to urge him to "cooperate quietly."
- 2016–2018 — He lives under strict surveillance; his practice status is marked "invalid" on the Justice Bureau's website for three years, and he is permitted to resume practice only in 2018; thereafter he returns to Beijing, founds and directs the Kaimen Law Firm, and continues taking church cases.
- 9–10 October 2025 — Some thirty Zion Church members, Jin Mingri among them, are arrested and eighteen held in Beihai; Zhang Kai acts for Jin Mingri as lead counsel of a defence team of up to forty lawyers.
- December 2025 — After repeated Justice Bureau summonses and midnight police visits, Zhang receives the Bureau's notice of intent to revoke his licence, on the stated ground of disrupting court order in another case; he is already under an exit restriction that year.
- January 2026 — After a hearing, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice revokes Zhang Kai's licence; China Change describes the revocation as permanent.
- March 2026 — The Wall Street Journal and Bitter Winter report the revocations and suspensions among the Zion defence lawyers; on 30 March ChinaAid releases the families' and observation group's statement recording the pressure on Kaimen to deregister, the six-month suspensions, and the forced termination of defence agreements.
- 3 July 2026 — Jin Mingri is released and travels to the United States; the remaining Zion defendants stay in custody in Beihai and are indicted.
- August–September 2026 — Kaimen partner Wang Xiahong leaves China and seeks assistance while transiting Taipei; the Associated Press interview reconfirms that Zhang Kai's licence has been revoked and that he is barred from leaving China.
- October 2026 — This page's check: no record of restored practice, of any lifted exit restriction, or of any publicly released penalty document.
Verification note
The core facts of this page — based in Wenzhou on church cases from August 2014; a legal team of more than thirty organised; interrogated by state security on the night of 10 July 2015 and warned off religious cases; taken from Xialing Church on 25 August 2015 on the eve of the scheduled Saperstein meeting; the 27 August RSDL notice and its two suspicions; visits refused; the assistants released on 11 December 2015; the 25 February 2016 televised confession and the rebuttals; conversion to criminal detention on 26 February; release on bail on 23 March; the August 2016 retraction and renewed detention; the 48-hour detention that December; practice status marked invalid until restoration in 2018; lead counsel for Jin Mingri in 2025; licence revoked in January 2026 under an exit ban; Kaimen pressed to deregister and multiple lawyers suspended — are corroborated by two or more independent sources, principally Amnesty International's Urgent Action UA 190/15 and its updates, the U.S. State Department's 2015 and 2016 International Religious Freedom Reports, USCIRF's 2016 annual report, the CECC chairs' statement of 24 March 2016, Human Rights Watch's July 2016 statement, Radio Free Asia's reporting of September 2015 and September 2016, Initium Media's 2015 long-form report, The Guardian, the Associated Press and Reuters reporting of the period, China Change's long articles of 2015 and 24 March 2026, ChinaAid's reporting and family statements from 2016 to 2026, the Wall Street Journal's March 2026 reporting, and the Associated Press's September 2026 interview. The main disputes and the choices made are as follows. First, totals for crosses removed vary by source (from 1,200 to 1,800 and above); the text adopts the multiply attested range of 1,200 to 1,700, with each figure's source named, and does not adopt the highest single-network figure. Second, the claim that Xia Baolong on a Wenzhou inspection called crosses "too conspicuous" rests on a single ChinaAid source chain and is marked unverified; the text records only the institutional fact that the campaign was run as a provincial drive during his tenure. Third, the name of assistant Fang Xiangui is transliterated inconsistently in English-language reporting (several spellings coexist); the Chinese text follows Amnesty International's rendering and the divergence is registered here. Fourth, the report that Zhang's father was taken to Wenzhou on 27 February 2016 rests on Bob Fu's social-media posts alone and is marked unverified. Fifth, Zhang's letter to his parents of 12 November 2015 and the dismissal arrangements conveyed in January 2016 were both formed under secret detention and passed through the case channel; the freedom of their making cannot be verified, and the text records their existence and contents without citing them as expressions of his free will. Sixth, claims that he was tortured in secret detention derive from China Change's 2026 retrospective and from Chinese Human Rights Defenders' pattern analysis, and the statement attributed to him dated 24 March 2018 by the Gospel Herald rests on that outlet alone; all are carried in their sources' terms or marked unverified, and this page makes no conclusive description of specific acts of torture. Seventh, his early résumé (the Xiaoshan and Linfen cases and the rest) derives from the introduction published by his counsel Qin Chenshou in 2016, a self-presented single source; its framework is adopted and its details kept brief. Eighth, the English name of the Kaimen Law Firm is rendered "VDoor" in the Associated Press's 2026 reporting; no source explains the correspondence between the two names, and both are recorded. Ninth, the factual detail of the "other case" courtroom-disruption ground for the 2026 revocation, and the full text of the penalty decision, are available in no public source and are recorded as no public record. Evidence grading: official reports of foreign governments and Amnesty International documents are grade one; wire-service and mainstream reporting of the period is grade two; human-rights organisations' and specialist outlets' accounts are grade three, and exclusive details have been downgraded or marked unverified throughout. This page uses no unsourced social-media rumour.
Our Take
Our Take is tied to this case's facts alone. First, notice that eleven years separate this man's two strippings, and the reason never changed. In 2015 the suspicion notice said disturbing order and state secrets, which translated means he had litigated for more than a hundred churches; in 2025 the revocation notice said disrupting court order, while every party and observer understood the trigger to be his defence of Jin Mingri. Across the decade three toolkits were rotated — secret detention, a licensing status quietly marked invalid, administrative disbarment — and the object to be removed was always the same: the line between a lawyer who works a case seriously and his client. A government that genuinely believed its demolitions and arrests lawful would find the cheapest course in letting the lawyer lose in court; each time, it chose the more expensive course of making the lawyer disappear. This page does not do the reader's arithmetic, but the ledger is set out above. Second, hold the confession and the retraction together. In February 2016, after six months that he later called all black, he appeared on television; in August 2016, after being produced to endorse another man's trial, he went home and recorded a video taking it back. That a man retracted at that price demonstrates what the televised confession always was — not a change of view but a product of custody — and this file prints confession and retraction on the same page precisely so that anyone who cites the broadcast must confront the video. Third, follow the family line: a mother's letter that could not be delivered, a father taken to the city handling the case, a sister visited at her workplace, and the message delivered to them all — urge him to "cooperate quietly"; whether he comes home depends on his "attitude." None of that required a single document, yet it converted one lawyer's professional choice into a whole family's daily fear. That the punishment of one man was arranged to reach his entire household is the part of this case that time should be least allowed to dilute. Fourth, set the 2026 revocation beside the 2015 surveillance notice: the first has no charge, the second no trial; the first's basis cannot be inspected by the public, the second's case has had no outcome in ten years. The punishments look more and more like administration, and the punished have less and less of a forum in which to answer. Finally, one entry for the ledger. When he resigned his corporate retainers in 2006 he can hardly have foreseen the road: six months' secret detention for litigating for churches, and, after restoration, permanent disbarment for litigating for a church again. The sentence he wrote to friends on 8 August 2015 stands in this file's timeline in his own terms: at worst, jail — silence would be a lifetime's regret. Eleven years on, he did not stay silent. This archive exists so that his refusal of silence does not end up surviving only as a revocation notice.
Sources
- Amnesty International, Urgent Action UA 190/15 and its 2016 updates (ASA 17/3559/2016; ASA 17/3715/2016): taken away on 25 August 2015; RSDL; assistants Liu Peng and Fang Xiangui released 11 December 2015; televised confession 25 February 2016; criminal detention 26 February; released 23 March and back in Inner Mongolia.
- Radio Free Asia, 4 September 2015 (via ChinaAid): the Wenzhou police notice of 27 August citing Article 73 of the Criminal Procedure Law and the two suspicions; Li Guisheng's meeting application refused; pro bono advice to more than a hundred churches.
- Initium Media's 2015 report "Zhang Kai: Church-State Relations Have Reached a Very Tense Moment" (China Change English translation, 31 August 2015): the disaggregated litigation of the Huang Yizi case; the Xialing Church actions; the thirty-plus-lawyer team; the night interrogation of 10 July 2015 and its three warnings; "I have God as my backer"; his information request over the July 2015 religious-buildings regulation.
- China Change, 29 February and 1 March 2016: analysis of the televised confession; the rebuttal statements of Bob Fu, Guo Baosheng and Yang Fenggang in substance; the résumé of Zhang Kai published by Qin Chenshou (baptism and entry into practice in 2003; the Xiaoshan and Linfen cases; the public-interest case list).
- U.S. Department of State: the launch of the 2014 International Religious Freedom Report (14 October 2015), at which Kerry and Saperstein raised the case by name; and the 2016 International Religious Freedom Report, China chapter, recording the recantation, the renewed detention in August, and the two-day detention in December.
- U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2016 Annual Report, China chapter (preserved via Refworld): seized before the meeting with Saperstein; six months held without charge; criminally detained in February 2016; Huang Yizi's one-year sentence of March 2015.
- Congressional-Executive Commission on China, chairs' statement, 24 March 2016: welcoming Zhang Kai's release, noting its terms were not fully known, and calling for an end to the Zhejiang cross-removal and church-demolition campaign.
- Human Rights Watch, July 2016, "China: Drop Cases Against Rights Lawyers" (via ChinaAid): Zhang held incommunicado from August 2015 to March 2016 for advising Christians resisting the cross-removal campaign.
- ChinaAid reporting, 2015–2016: the mother's open letter; the parents' statement of 28 February 2016; Radio Free Asia's 1 September 2016 report of the post-retraction detention (statement of counsel Tan Chenshou); the 28 December 2016 report of the 27 December summons and the four-jurisdiction visit to his mother.
- Christian Solidarity Worldwide, January 2017: Zhang Kai detained for 48 hours from 27 to 29 December 2016.
- The Guardian, 4 September 2015 (via ChinaAid): the seizure; his own words on a Christian lawyer's calling; activists' figure of 1,200 crosses removed; the State Department spokesman's statement. Associated Press and Christian Post reporting on the 2012 Feng Jianmei case: Zhang's applications on behalf of Deng Jiyuan.
- Background on the Zhejiang cross campaign: CSW's April 2015 count (more than 400 incidents); the Associated Press's May 2015 reporting on the draft cross regulation; contemporary reporting on the Sanjiang Church and Shuitou Salvation Church; and this site's item-by-item research file on the Zhejiang cross-demolition campaign, October 2026.
- China Change, 24 March 2026, "In Zion Church Case, Chinese Authorities Punish and Harass Defense Lawyers to Force Them Out": Zhang as Jin Mingri's lead counsel; repeated Justice Bureau summonses; midnight police visits; the December 2025 notice of intent and its stated ground; the January 2026 hearing and permanent revocation; the retrospective account of his practice status marked invalid for three years until restoration in 2018; more than twenty Zion defence lawyers under pressure.
- ChinaAid statement of 30 March 2026, with the attached statement of the Zion Church families and the Legal Rights Observation Group: Zhang's exit restrictions in 2025 preceding the revocation; Kaimen Law Firm pressed to deregister itself; the list of suspended lawyers; the named detainees whose chosen counsel were forced out.
- The Wall Street Journal's March 2026 reporting (as carried by the Washington Stand, Christian Forums and others) and Bitter Winter, 23 March 2026: revocations and six-month suspensions among the Zion defence lawyers; pressure on lawyers' families.
- Associated Press, September 2026, interview with Kaimen (rendered "VDoor") partner Wang Xiahong (carried by Religion News Service, Business Mirror and others): her departure from China; founder Zhang Kai's licence revoked and his being barred from leaving the country; colleagues suspended and blocked from transferring firms; the responses of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice and China's Ministry of Public Security.