This article was originally published by Sight Magazine, https://sightmagazine.com.au/essays/essay-pastor-huang-yizi-is-the-latest-prisoner-of-a-regime-that-will-always-find-a-way-to-arrest-whoever-it-sees-fit/
On 26th June, public security officers took Protestant Pastor Huang Yizi and four other church members from various cities in China’s Zhejiang Province into custody. All five were placed in administrative detention the following day; two were released on bail a month later, while Pastor Huang remained in detention with the two others and another church member who was detained on 17th July.
As is common in China, the authorities kept Pastor Huang in administrative detention for the maximum period permitted under the country’s complex and convoluted Criminal Procedure Law (CPL). On 30th July he was told that his case had been reviewed two days previously, and that the prosecutor had approved his formal arrest on charges of “illegal business operations”.
Conflictingly however, CSW sources had noticed that Huang’s arrest had already been marked as ‘approved’ on the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of China’s official portal on 25th July, without any prior notice or documentation provided by the authorities.
If anything it seems that the outcome was predetermined – again as it so often is in cases such as these in China – that the authorities were always going to arrest Pastor Huang regardless of how arbitrary the charges against him are, because he has been both a thorn in their side and a direct target of their repression for over a decade.
Pastor Huang was first detained in 2014 for protesting a sweeping campaign of the forced demolition of church crosses across Zhejiang Province and specifically Wenzhou City where he was based. He was subsequently sentenced to one year in prison.
Less than a month after his release, on 12 September 2015, he was detained again, this time on charges of ‘endangering national security’. He was placed under a form of secret detention known as ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL), in which individuals are denied any access to their lawyers or family member and where torture is not uncommon, for almost five months.
He has faced police harassment ever since, likely in part due to the fact that his church has joined countless others in withdrawing from the government sanctioned Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). The so-called ‘illegal business operations’ he has now been charged with relate to him selling recordings of his sermons; essentially, in the eyes of the authorities, if Pastor Huang’s church is not affiliated with the TSPM it is not legal, and therefore any activities related to its operation can also be treated as such.
This is a logic the government has repeatedly applied to punish leaders of churches that refuse to operate under its restrictive purview. On 20th June this year authorities in Linfen, Shanxi Province finally sentenced Pastor Li Jie and Elder Han Xiaodong – both leaders of Linfen Covenant Home Church – to three years and eight months in prison, at this point almost three years after they were detained during a church summer retreat in August, 2022.
Both men were charged with ‘fraud’ in relation to their collection of tithes, which is, of course, a common and biblically mandated practice. A third church elder, Wang Qiang, who was detained in November 2022 for refusing to give false testimony against Li and Han, was sentenced to one year and 11 months in prison. This reflected time served from his detention until his release into RSDL in September 2024, and later on bail in March, 2025.
The trial was held under heavy security, with church members warned not to attend, the defendants’ wives intimidated and harassed, and their lawyers falsely led to believe that the sentences against Li and Han would not exceed three years on the condition that they agreed to enter the court without their personal laptops or phones and after thorough security checks.
Sadly, it is likely that a similar future awaits Pastor Huang. Now that he has been formally arrested, the CPL grants the authorities a maximum of 13-and-a-half months to bring him to trial, however the law also allows for the National People’s Congress – the highest organ of state power in China – to approve unspecified and theoretically indefinite extensions ‘when special circumstances make a particularly serious and complicated case unsuited for judgment for an extended period’.
As is clear from the case of Li, Han and Wang, the authorities will not hesitate to exploit this loophole. But the international community must not let them. States that value justice, democracy and rule of law must make it clear to the Chinese Government that it is not as clever as it thinks it is, that they know exactly what it is doing and why it is doing it, and that they will not allow the country’s considerable economic and geopolitical influence to intimidate them into silence.