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第46案 | 张少杰与南乐教会Case 46 | Zhang Shaojie & the Nanle Church

河南省南乐县基督教会牧师张少杰是县三自爱国运动委员会负责人，却因教会土地纠纷带会众三次进京上访，于2013年11月16日在教会内被捆绑带走。抓捕两个月后才出现的诈骗罪名撑起了重刑：2014年7月4日，南乐县法院以诈骗、聚众扰乱社会秩序判他十二年，罚金十万元，上诉在律师未获通知的情况下被驳回。他先后在白条河、河南第二和郑州三所监狱服刑，长女一家逃亡美国，妹妹被判一年六个月，教会千人规模被迫关闭、建堂款被划走。2025年11月16日，他刑满释放，出狱后情况无公开记录。Zhang Shaojie, pastor of the Nanle County Christian Church in Henan and head of the county Three-Self Patriotic Movement committee, was tied up and taken from his church on 16 November 2013 after his congregation petitioned in Beijing three times over a church land dispute. The fraud charge that carried his sentence appeared only two months after his arrest: on 4 July 2014 the Nanle County court sentenced him to twelve years and a 100,000-yuan fine for fraud and gathering a crowd to disrupt public order, and his appeal was rejected at a hearing his lawyers were never told about. He served his term in Baitiaohe, Henan No. 2 and Zhengzhou prisons; his eldest daughter's family fled to the United States, his sister was jailed for eighteen months, and his thousand-member church was closed and its building fund emptied. He was released on 16 November 2025; nothing about his life since is on the public record.

Time span

Zhang Shaojie taken from his church on 16 November 2013; sentenced to twelve years on 4 July 2014; appeal rejected on 21 August 2014; released on completion of his sentence on 16 November 2025

Place

Nanle County, Puyang, Henan Province; held successively at the Nanle County Detention Center, Baitiaohe Prison in Neihuang County, Henan No. 2 Prison in Xinxiang, and Zhengzhou Prison

Figures

Zhang Shaojie (born 30 December 1965), pastor of the Nanle County Christian Church and head of the county Three-Self Patriotic Movement committee and Christian Council; his wife Wang Fengrui; eldest daughter Zhang Huixin (Esther, also called Yunyun); younger daughter Zhang Lingxin (Shanshan); sister Zhang Cuijuan; defence lawyers Xia Jun, Liu Weiguo, Jiang Tianyong and others

Charge and sentence

Fraud and gathering a crowd to disrupt public order: twelve years in prison and a fine of 100,000 yuan, imposed by the Nanle County People's Court; a further sum of 700,000 yuan appears in reporting variously as restitution and as a fine, and the accounts conflict (see text and verification note)

Characterisation

Religious persecution: a pastor inside the official Three-Self system was given one of the heaviest sentences imposed on a state-church pastor since the Cultural Revolution, after leading his congregation's lawful petitioning over a church land dispute

Current status

Released on 16 November 2025 at the end of his twelve-year term, as recorded by USCIRF, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and Church in Chains; his health, residence and whether he remains under surveillance since release are a matter of no public record as of this page's research in October 2026

A pastor who worked inside the system

Zhang Shaojie was not like many of the house-church pastors who fill prison lists in China. The Nanle County Christian Church he pastored was registered inside the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and Zhang himself headed the county's Three-Self committee and its Christian Council. He had also sat as a member of the ninth Nanle County committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In other words, he was not an outsider to the system; he was one of the religious figures the system itself had stamped and approved. His date of birth is stated plainly in the complaint that Chinese Human Rights Defenders filed in 2019 with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several other special procedures: 30 December 1965. ChinaAid reporting from January 2014 put his age at 49, which is broadly consistent with that birth year, and this page uses 1965.

Years earlier, independent house churches in Nanle County had been ordered by the local government to fold themselves into the Three-Self system, and it was in that process that Zhang took on the county Three-Self leadership. His church grew fast, to more than a thousand members. He became known locally not only for preaching but for standing up for people with no power of their own: when members of his congregation or neighbours ran into workplace injuries, land seizures or doors slammed in their faces, they came to him, and he went with them from office to office to argue their case. Church members and his lawyers said afterwards that the authorities could not tolerate him for reasons that went well beyond one piece of land. He habitually took the side of the marginalised, and he did so from the chair of the county Three-Self committee itself. A pastor inside the system who would not behave was, in the local authorities' eyes, a worse problem than any pastor outside it. The church's side of the story also holds that the operation against him was meant, in part, to remove him from that post; this page records that as the church's account.

One piece of land: from a dangerous-building notice to three trips to Beijing

The root of the case was the church's old building. According to church members' account given to ChinaAid, in January 2010 the county government notified the church that its building was dangerous. The church negotiated repeatedly and proposed buying a plot of land on which to build a new church. In 2012 the county government agreed to sell land at a price it set itself; the church completed the paperwork at the relevant provincial and municipal departments, the plot was located by satellite and surveyed, and the church paid 200,000 yuan for the land from its own account to the county finance bureau. These details come from the church members' side alone; officials have never publicly responded to them, and this page records them as the church's account, marked as such.

The land was paid for, but it was never handed over. The church's version is that after a change of leadership, the new county leadership refused, on one pretext after another, to honour its predecessor's promise. Several reports name the official who refused as Huang Shouxi, the Nanle County Party secretary at the time; Zhang is said to have demanded to his face that he keep the earlier promise that the Three-Self church could build on that plot, and to have been refused. The church's plans for the site were substantial: a new sanctuary, a Bible school and a ministry centre. When negotiation went nowhere, in November 2013 members of the congregation travelled to Beijing in three groups, of their own initiative, to petition the central authorities about the land. The church's own appeal letter states the sequence plainly: the persecution began after the second group of petitioners returned to Nanle, and reached its peak when the third group returned and Zhang Shaojie was arrested. The complaint later filed with the UN confirms that the three Beijing petitioning trips were written into the indictment and used as evidence of gathering a crowd to disrupt social order. A grievance pursued through the petitioning channel the state itself maintains became, inside the case file, the crime itself.

16 November 2013: a meeting that turned into an arrest

On 15 November 2013, several church members on their way to raise the land issue with local authorities were taken into custody first. On 16 November, Zhang Shaojie was at the Nanle County Christian Church in a meeting with the chief of the county Public Security Bureau and a deputy chief — a meeting the church afterwards described as a trap. During the talks, about a dozen police officers entered the church and, without producing any formal documents, tied him up and carried him away. The complaint filed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders records the same details: no detention warrant was shown, in violation of Article 83 of the Criminal Procedure Law; Zhang was placed under criminal detention the next day and formally arrested on 22 November 2013. USCIRF's database gives 23 November for the formal charges, one day later; this page follows the complaint's 22 November and notes the discrepancy.

That same day, family members and church members gathered outside the public security bureau to demand his release. According to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, more than one hundred police violently broke up the gathering, leaving several people hospitalised and more than ten detained, among them Zhang's two sisters; church members said his parents were taken to hospital with high blood pressure, and local officials came to church members' homes that night with threats. The next day, 17 November, was a Sunday. More than two hundred government personnel took up positions guarding the church gates, with police vehicles outside; a temporary command post was set up to watch the building and surveillance cameras were installed. About twenty-three Christians — most of them leaders on the church staff — were detained, the church's funds were frozen, and government officers were stationed at the pastor's home. The CECC's count is that Zhang and more than twenty members were detained over those days; the total given across sources runs from twenty-three to twenty-five people, and this page says more than twenty throughout. A legally registered, state-approved church had, in the space of one weekend, its pastor seized, its staff detained, its account frozen and its doors watched by two hundred people. That is not how a single case is investigated. It is how an organisation is taken apart.

The lawyers could not get in: what happened to Xia Jun and the legal team

The man was inside; his lawyers could not get in to see him. According to the CECC, Zhang was held incommunicado for two full months before he was allowed to meet a lawyer for the first time, and during that time his family did not know where he was. His first lawyer, Xia Jun, tried everything he could think of: he stood outside the Nanle County Public Security Bureau holding a cloth lantern lettered with the words Looking for Zhang Shaojie; a delegation of lawyers formed to support the church at one point mounted a hunger strike outside the bureau, demanding the meetings the law entitled them to. When the lawyers went to the procuratorate to complain that the police were blocking access to their clients, worse followed. According to ChinaAid and the China Human Rights Briefing relayed by Amnesty International UK, on 12 December 2013 a large group of unidentified men first blocked the lawyers outside the Nanle County Detention Center and later attacked them at the guesthouse where they were staying; the lawyers called the police emergency number, but no officers were sent, and the operator reportedly said finding the attackers was not their responsibility. On 13 December the same kind of crowd attacked the fifteen lawyers and the journalists from Britain's Sky News outside the county procuratorate: lawyer Liu Weiguo was struck on the head and bled, lawyer Yang Xingquan's glasses were knocked off, lawyer Jiang Tianyong's jacket was torn off him, and several lawyers' mobile phones and tablet computers were taken. Lawyers and journalists were forced to retreat inside the procuratorate building and barricade themselves in. Local sources said the mob had been hired by the authorities. In late December, the church's attempts to hold Sunday worship were broken up again and again, and the congregation kept having to move from place to place; one member told an interviewer that since Pastor Zhang's detention they were watched far more closely, that fewer people came to worship, that some could not get in and some no longer dared to come.

That was not the end of it. According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, when the case reached the courts Zhang's lawyers were themselves detained at one stage, and, fearing they would lose their licences, he felt he had to dismiss them. The lawyer who represented him at trial challenged witness statements in court as having been taken under duress and pointed out that for the supposed fraud there were not even investigation records to show. The UN complaint records the defence's central questions: the police had no proper grounds to detain Zhang; the sequence was arrest first, then search his home for evidence, then assemble a case; and the woman prosecutors named as the fraud victim had never accused Zhang of fraud at all. If a case can withstand scrutiny, questions like those get answered in court. They were never answered. The people who asked them were beaten first.

How the charges were built: from obstructing official business to fraud

Spread the case file out in date order and the movement of the charges tells its own story. When Zhang was first detained, the only label was gathering a crowd to disrupt social order. At his formal arrest, obstructing official business was added. After the Nanle County Public Security Bureau finished its investigation in December 2013, prosecutors in January 2014 recommended that the court try him on a further charge — fraud — alongside gathering a crowd to disrupt social order. USCIRF's database describes the same shift in slightly different terms: the obstruction charge was later changed to fraud. Either way, the fraud charge was not the reason for the arrest. It was found two months after it.

The content of that fraud charge, according to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint, is this. A woman in the congregation had a son who was killed in a workplace accident. In 2010 she asked Zhang Shaojie for help in pursuing compensation. He helped her; no compensation was ever obtained. Years later, prosecutors rebuilt that act of help into the factual basis of a fraud case, naming the woman as the fraud's victim — a woman who herself went missing in December 2013, even as a written statement bearing her name was produced at trial as evidence against Zhang. The defence asked in court that she be summoned to testify, and asked the prosecutors how they had obtained a statement from a missing person. No answer was given. The lawyer's view, recorded in the complaint, was that if she had made such a statement at all it could only have been under police coercion, and that had she appeared she would in all likelihood have testified to Zhang's innocence. ChinaAid later reported that the court also refused the lawyers' request to call the alleged victim, named Li Cairen, as a witness. A fraud case in which the victim never accused anyone, never appeared, and could not be found — leaving a single sheet of paper to speak in court. Paper cannot be cross-examined.

Trial and sentence: heard in April 2014, twelve years on 4 July

The proceedings themselves were delayed again and again. The CECC records that the Nanle County court changed the trial date repeatedly and at one point postponed it indefinitely. The case was finally heard in April 2014. The defence applied to call ten witnesses; the court refused. The hearing concluded at the end of April, with the judge announcing that judgement would be delivered later. On 4 July 2014 the Nanle County People's Court delivered it: Zhang Shaojie was convicted of fraud and of gathering a crowd to disrupt public order, sentenced to twelve years in prison, and fined 100,000 yuan, about 16,000 US dollars. He said in court that day that he would appeal. His lawyer Liu Weiguo's words were carried by many outlets afterwards: he strongly believed Zhang Shaojie was innocent, and that this was a total set-up by the local government.

What does twelve years mean? The complaint filed with the UN in 2019 sets out the statutory ranges for the original charges: for gathering a crowd to disrupt social order, ringleaders face three to seven years; obstructing official business carries a maximum of three years. The weight of the twelve years therefore rests on the fraud charge — the charge that appeared two months after the arrest, built on a victim who never appeared. CSW and ChinaAid both noted that Zhang was among the first Three-Self pastors to receive so heavy a sentence since the Cultural Revolution, and Associated Press reporting at the time described it as one of the harshest sentences against a church leader in China in decades. On 21 August 2014 the Puyang Municipal Intermediate People's Court rejected his appeal and upheld the verdict — and, according to the consistent accounts of several organisations, his lawyers were not told the date of that appeal hearing in advance and were not permitted to attend it. A procedure that has to be completed behind the defence's back is not adjudication. It is paperwork.

The others in the case: a sister jailed for eighteen months, and a thousand-member church closed

The operation was never aimed at Zhang Shaojie alone. Most of the more than twenty church members detained in November 2013 were gradually released or freed on bail pending trial, but the cases dragged on until some of them were sentenced. On 9 September 2014, Zhang's sister Zhang Cuijuan was sentenced by the Nanle County court to one year and six months for gathering a crowd to disrupt public order — the conduct for which she was punished was travelling to Beijing to raise the matter of her brother's detention. On the same day, Zhao Junling, a preacher of the church, received a one-year sentence, suspended. ChinaAid's 2014 annual report records that the county Party committee and county government mobilised an entire apparatus against the church — the public security bureau, the religious affairs bureau, the education bureau, the United Front Work Department and more: intercepting members travelling to Beijing to petition, threatening members, holding them under house arrest and in extrajudicial black jails, and physically assaulting foreign reporters and lawyers. Nanle County also ordered government agencies, public institutions and schools to open and work on Sundays so that believers could not attend church, and school officials threatened students, telling them to go home and warn their parents against taking part in church activities. A church that had counted more than a thousand members was forced to close.

The money, afterwards: the fine, the 700,000, the house and the church account

With the man sentenced, the collection of money moved against his family. On 23 October 2014 the Nanle County People's Court notified Zhang's family that their home would be auctioned to satisfy the fine in his sentence, and ordered them to vacate by 26 October or face forced eviction. On 14 November more than twenty officials arrived to enforce the order against the family living in the house, which was owned by Zhang's parents. His mother, Mei Xian, stood in the doorway holding petrol and a lighter and threatened to set herself on fire; only then did the officials back away. Reporting drawing on the Associated Press said the eviction notice signed by the president of the county court had given the family — his 80-year-old father, his 78-year-old mother, his disabled wife and his younger daughter — three days to leave their home.

One figure in this part of the record has to be set down carefully, because the reporting does not agree. The fine of 100,000 yuan is the figure consistently recorded by the CECC, by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint and by several rights organisations, and this page adopts it. But a second sum, 700,000 yuan, recurs in the reporting: the detailed timeline maintained by Ireland's Church in Chains states that the officials came to auction the house because Zhang had failed to pay 700,000 yuan in restitution attached to the fraud charge, while a widely carried UCANews report called the 700,000 yuan itself the fine. The two accounts conflict, and from public sources this page cannot determine whether the 700,000 was restitution or a misreported fine; it is therefore marked as unresolved. What is certain is this: beyond the 100,000-yuan fine, the family was pursued for a sum in the hundreds of thousands of yuan, to the point of an attempted seizure of their home. In December 2014, local authorities also withdrew several million yuan from the church's bank account — the savings accumulated to build the new church, put at four million yuan in the Church in Chains account — removed the cross from the top of the church building, and blocked its entrance. The land was never given to the church, the money was taken, and the church was sealed. That was the final settlement of the land dispute.

Twelve years inside: from Baitiaohe to Xinxiang, then to Zhengzhou

Zhang served his sentence in three places. Before the verdict he was held in the Nanle County Detention Center. After sentencing he was sent first to Baitiaohe Prison in Neihuang County, under Puyang. In October 2014 he was transferred to Henan No. 2 Prison in Xinxiang, where he spent most of his term; USCIRF's database listed Henan No. 2 Prison as his location right up to his release. On 8 January 2021, with about five years left to serve, he was abruptly transferred again, to Zhengzhou Prison. The admission notice his family received stated that the first two months after admission would be a period of concentrated education; that within those two months visiting day would be every Tuesday; that each visitor was permitted one visit per month; and that no items could be passed during visits. His daughter Zhang Huixin said at the time that the family had not yet been granted any visit, knew nothing of conditions inside Zhengzhou Prison, and felt that the sudden transfer was not a good sign. Why a man in his mid-fifties with high blood pressure was moved between cities with five years of his sentence left was never explained by any official source, and this page records it as no public record.

Strict supervision, hunger and medication: the family's account of prison

What follows is drawn mainly from family accounts relayed by ChinaAid, Christian Solidarity Worldwide and other organisations. Chinese officials have never publicly responded to them, and this page records them as the family's allegations, not as facts established by a court. In 2017, Zhang applied from prison to lodge a further petition against his conviction. According to his daughter Zhang Huixin, prison officials told him the petition would not be processed unless he pleaded guilty, and then placed him under what they called strict supervision: kept from seeing the sun during the day, deprived of sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and given a single steamed bun a day, deliberately starved. She relayed the words of people released from that prison: her father was barely alive, suffering in both mind and body. On 7 July 2017 his sister Zhang Cuixia visited him and said afterwards that he looked like a bag of bones, his eyes deep-set with dark circles burned in by lack of sleep; that he was forbidden to sleep during strict supervision and was depressed; and that throughout the visit a prison guard held the telephone, while brother and sister were forbidden to discuss his case. Zhang Huixin said the family was allowed one thirty-minute visit a month, that calls were cut off the moment her father complained about prison life or about being starved, and that guards watched the visits closely. In September 2016 she told US officials in Washington that her father was not permitted to read the Bible or any Christian literature in prison, and that a surveillance camera had been installed in his cell. She also alleged that the strict-supervision order had come down from higher-level officials; that specific attribution rests on the family alone, cannot be independently verified, and is marked unverified here.

In December 2019 the health problem changed shape. After a visit, the family reported that for about six months Zhang had been made to take a new medication that officials said was for high blood pressure, and that since starting it his mental state had deteriorated sharply: he had become uncharacteristically irritable, and his memory had problems. When his wife and sister visited on 13 December and urged him to find a way to stop the pills, he told them the prison doctor said his blood pressure was high and he had to take them. His wife, Wang Fengrui, told ChinaAid she could sense that he had become another person. USCIRF's database records his health concern as high blood pressure and explicitly logs reports of medical neglect. In July 2020, Zhang Huixin passed on better news: because of the pandemic the family could not visit, but her father had stopped taking the medicine that had been causing him problems, and when they spoke his voice and manner were normal and his mind much clearer than before. In October 2021 the family received a letter from him saying that he was in good spirit in the Lord and felt peace about his imprisonment. After that, public news of his condition inside largely stopped until his term ended.

The cost to his family: one daughter fled to America, another was locked in a soundproofed room

The price paid by this family has to be counted item by item. Zhang's parents were elderly; ChinaAid reported in early 2014 that both had been left disabled by earlier treatment at official hands, and his wife, Wang Fengrui, who walks with a cane, held the household together alone after his arrest. His eldest daughter Zhang Huixin's car was confiscated by the public security bureau, and officials kept telephoning her with threats. On 23 June 2014, Zhang Huixin, her husband Sun Zhulei and their one-year-old daughter Sun Jiexi were stopped at Beijing airport as they tried to board a flight to the United States, with security officials citing national security; officers of the Nanle County Public Security Bureau and the Henan provincial public security department were at the airport watching, and the family was taken back to Nanle, where, according to the Chinese Human Rights Defenders complaint, they were then held in an unofficial detention facility — a black jail. After their release the three of them went into hiding; in July 2014 they travelled overland to Bangkok, Thailand, and from there flew to Texas, where they settled. Her father's twelve-year sentence had been handed down barely two weeks before she fled. In the United States she spoke publicly for him under the name Esther, appearing at a Washington press conference alongside members of Congress in September 2014 and becoming one of the family voices in ChinaAid's prisoner-of-conscience campaign.

Those who stayed behind were not left in peace either. On 5 November 2014, more than twenty officials seized the younger daughter, Zhang Lingxin, and locked her in a soundproofed room for nine days, releasing her on 14 November — the very day officials went to the family home to try to force the eviction. His sister Zhang Cuijuan served her full eighteen months and was released on 31 May 2015; she described the prison as hell on earth afterwards, and noted that the lawyer who had represented her had been detained as well. In 2014 this family was first given three days to get out of its own home, and then pursued over a six-figure sum whose very nature the record cannot settle. When his daughter's family reached safety in America, Zhang sent out a message of thanks: the family and the church thanked the US government and the unnamed church leaders around the world who had helped them win a hard-fought freedom. The man sending the thanks was speaking from a prison cell, about a place he had never been.

International response

The sentence brought an immediate public response from the United States government. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said Zhang had been sentenced in retaliation for his peaceful advocacy on behalf of his church community, called on the Chinese authorities to release Pastor Zhang and to stop harassing his family members and congregants, and urged China to allow citizens to worship freely in accordance with China's own laws and its international human rights commitments. The British Foreign Office, answering a parliamentary question in July 2014, confirmed that the United Kingdom had raised Zhang's case directly with Chinese officials during the UK-China Human Rights Dialogue of 19–20 May that year. USCIRF entered Zhang in its religious prisoners of conscience database, and he was adopted under the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission's Defending Freedoms Project, successively by Representatives Mark Meadows and Vicky Hartzler and later by Senator Ted Budd. He was also included in ChinaAid's China 18 prisoners-of-conscience campaign. On 30 November 2017, members of the US Congress wrote to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking him to investigate Chinese officials connected with the reported mistreatment of Zhang in prison. USCIRF's web page misdates that letter to November 2019 — Tillerson had left office in March 2018 — while the Lantos Commission and Hong Kong Free Press both give 30 November 2017; this page follows 2017 and notes the discrepancy. On 2 April 2019, European Union officials raised Zhang's case with their Chinese counterparts at the 37th EU-China Human Rights Dialogue. On 16 October 2019, Chinese Human Rights Defenders formally submitted his case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and to the special rapporteurs on freedom of religion or belief and on torture, among others, arguing that his detention was arbitrary and asking the UN mechanisms to act. In the sources consulted for this page, the Chinese authorities have never publicly answered any of these interventions point by point.

16 November 2025: released at the end of the sentence; nothing on the record since

Twelve years, served in full. On 16 November 2025 Zhang Shaojie was released from prison — exactly twelve years to the day after he was tied up and taken from his church on 16 November 2013. USCIRF's database, the prisoner page of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and the prisoner profile maintained by Ireland's Church in Chains have all updated his status to released, with the same date, 16 November 2025. Three independent records agree, and that agreement is the basis on which this page states that he is out. He was 59 when he was released. He had been 47 when he was taken.

Of everything after that day, the outside world knows nothing. In research conducted in October 2026, this page found no reporting on which prison he walked out of, on who met him, on the state of his health, on whether he returned to his home in Nanle or was reunited with his eldest daughter in the United States, or on whether — like other religious prisoners of conscience released in recent years — he remains subject to surveillance, check-ins and restrictions on his movement. His daughter's public channels carry no new statement that this page could find. That absence is recorded here exactly as it stands: no public record, and no speculation offered in its place. What is certain is that the twelve years written in the judgement have been served. On this case's own record over the past decade and more, the end of a sentence has never by itself meant the end of control; whether that pattern holds for Zhang Shaojie is a question only future public reporting can answer.

Full timeline

• 30 December 1965 — Zhang Shaojie is born (date per the 2019 Chinese Human Rights Defenders submission to the UN).
• January 2010 — The Nanle County government notifies the church that its building is dangerous (per church members' account).
• 2010 — A congregation member whose son died in a workplace accident asks Zhang for help pursuing compensation; he helps, without success. The episode later becomes the factual basis of the fraud charge.
• 2012 — The county government agrees to sell the church land for a new building; the church completes the paperwork and pays 200,000 yuan (per church members' account), but the land is never delivered.
• November 2013 — Congregation members travel to Beijing in three groups to petition over the land; the operation escalates after the second group returns.
• 15 November 2013 — Several church members are detained on their way to raise the issue with local authorities.
• 16 November 2013 — Zhang is tied up and taken from the church during a meeting with public security chiefs, without documents being shown; family and members protesting at the bureau are dispersed with injuries, and more than ten are detained.
• 17 November 2013 — More than two hundred government personnel guard the church and install surveillance; about twenty-three members are detained and church funds are frozen.
• 22 November 2013 — Zhang is formally arrested for gathering a crowd to disrupt social order and obstructing official business (USCIRF records formal charges on 23 November).
• 12–13 December 2013 — Lawyers supporting the church are attacked in succession outside the detention center, at their guesthouse and outside the procuratorate; Liu Weiguo's head is injured, Jiang Tianyong's clothes are torn, and Sky News journalists are besieged with them.
• January 2014 — After two months held incommunicado, Zhang is allowed to meet a lawyer for the first time; prosecutors recommend adding fraud to the charges — the point at which the fraud charge appears.
• April 2014 — The case is heard at the Nanle County court; the defence application to call ten witnesses is refused; the hearing concludes at the end of April.
• 23 June 2014 — Eldest daughter Zhang Huixin and her family are stopped at Beijing airport on national-security grounds, taken back to Nanle, and held in an unofficial detention facility.
• 4 July 2014 — The Nanle County People's Court sentences Zhang to twelve years in prison and a 100,000-yuan fine for fraud and gathering a crowd to disrupt public order.
• July 2014 — Zhang Huixin's family flees via Thailand to Texas, United States.
• 21 August 2014 — The Puyang Municipal Intermediate People's Court rejects the appeal and upholds the verdict; the lawyers were not told the date and were not permitted to attend.
• 9 September 2014 — Sister Zhang Cuijuan is sentenced to eighteen months; preacher Zhao Junling receives a one-year suspended sentence.
• October 2014 — Zhang is transferred to Henan No. 2 Prison in Xinxiang; on 23 October the court notifies the family that their home will be auctioned to satisfy the fine, ordering them out by 26 October.
• 5–14 November 2014 — Younger daughter Zhang Lingxin is seized and held in a soundproofed room for nine days; on 14 November officials attempt to enforce the eviction and withdraw when mother Mei Xian threatens self-immolation.
• December 2014 — Authorities withdraw several million yuan of church building funds from the church account (a figure of four million yuan appears in one account), remove the church's cross and block its entrance.
• 31 May 2015 — Zhang Cuijuan is released on completion of her sentence.
• September 2016 — Zhang Huixin tells US National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice that her father may not read the Bible in prison and that a camera has been installed in his cell.
• 2017 — After Zhang applies to petition against his conviction, he is placed under strict supervision, with reported starvation and sleep deprivation; after a 7 July visit his sister describes him as skin and bones.
• 30 November 2017 — Members of the US Congress write to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking for an investigation of officials connected with his reported mistreatment.
• 2 April 2019 — The European Union raises Zhang's case at the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue.
• 16 October 2019 — Chinese Human Rights Defenders submits his case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and other special procedures.
• December 2019 — The family reports a sharp deterioration in his mental state after months on a new drug said to be for high blood pressure; he improves after stopping it by July 2020.
• 8 January 2021 — Zhang is transferred to Zhengzhou Prison to serve the remaining five years or so; in October 2021 the family receives a letter from him reporting that he is at peace.
• 16 November 2025 — Zhang is released on completion of his twelve-year sentence; three international bodies update his status to released on that date.
• After November 2025 — No public record of his health, residence, or whether he remains under surveillance.

Our Take

Our Take rests on this case's facts alone. First, the most damning of them is the identity of the man who was sentenced. Zhang Shaojie was not an outsider: he chaired the county Three-Self committee, sat on the county political consultative conference, and led a church the state itself had licensed. If even he could be tied up in his own church and jailed for twelve years for taking his congregation's grievance through the petitioning channel the state itself maintains, then what legally registered churches and the promised freedom of religious belief actually protect is answered by this case: they protect obedience, not faith. Second, the timing of the fraud charge says everything about how the case was made. It did not exist at the arrest; it surfaced two months later, after the lawyers had been beaten away, and it rests on a victim who never accused him, never appeared, and could not be found. A charge that can bear scrutiny does not need two months to be thought of, and does not need its only witness to be absent. Third, the bill for this case was never paid by one man. His sister served eighteen months, his younger daughter was locked in a soundproofed room, his eldest daughter escaped across an ocean with a one-year-old baby, his parents' home was nearly auctioned from under them, and his church's building fund was emptied in a single withdrawal. The judgement says twelve years for one person; what was executed was twelve years for an entire family and a congregation of more than a thousand. In the dispute that started it all, the authorities lost nothing — not the land, not the money, not the building. They lost only a pastor's life, and the face of their own law.