On 24 July, at the Guiyang Intermediate People’s Court in Guizhou province, Elder Zhang Chunlei was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and two years for “fraud”. A combined sentence of five years’ imprisonment is to be served until 16 March 2026. The court also ordered the recovery of ￥14,400 yuan (€1,833) in relation to the “fraud” charge, imposed a fine of ￥5,000 yuan (€636) and sentenced Elder Zhang to three years’ deprivation of political rights. The case will be appealed.

Elder Zhang (60) leads Guiyang Ren’ai (Love) Reformed Church, an unregistered house church that has suffered heavy persecution including repeated raids since it was banned in 2018. He has been in detention since March 2021 and was tried in 2022 but has been waiting since then for the court to issue a sentence.

The charge of “inciting subversion of state power” relates to his leadership of an unregistered church, while the “fraud” charge relates to free-will offerings collected from church members. Chinese authorities often make false accusations of fraud against leaders of unregistered house churches, based on the collection of tithes and offerings, as a way to have them imprisoned. Ren’ai Church operates strict financial oversight and none of the so-called “victims” in Elder Zhang’s case has ever made a police compliant – in fact, China Aid reports that some investigating officers have said that this case should not constitute fraud.

In late 2023 Elder Zhang was hospitalised for over a month with cholecystitis (gall bladder inflammation) and was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis. His defence lawyer applied for bail but earlier this month it was reported that Guiyang Intermediate People’s Court had rejected the application.

Christians denied access to courtroom

Some Christians who hoped to attend the hearing were blocked at the court’s security checkpoint on the morning of the trial. A Christian woman who had entered the courtroom was pushed outside and a police line was set up. Only Elder Zhang’s wife Yang Aiqing (pictured with her husband) was allowed to enter the courtroom but she was not permitted to bring in her phone and had to leave it in a locker outside.

After the hearing she commented, “If you don’t want to publicly announce a verdict for a case, but regulations require it to be public, what do you do? You just need to choose a smaller courtroom and find people to occupy the seats in advance. A small courtroom with twenty seats, seventeen of which were filled early by confused-looking actors posing as observers. The court has many ways to manipulate the law, but who knows the consequence in the end.”

Verdict

The court verdict made three rulings:

1. The defendant Zhang Chunlei is found guilty of inciting subversion of state power and sentenced to three years and six months imprisonment, with deprivation of political rights for three years; guilty of fraud and sentenced to two years imprisonment with a fine of ￥5,000 yuan. For multiple crimes, the decision is to execute a combined sentence of five years imprisonment, deprivation of political rights for three years, and a fine of ￥5,000 yuan. (The sentence is calculated from the date of execution of the verdict, with each day of pre-trial detention counted as one day of the sentence. The imprisonment ranges from March 17 2021 to March 16 2026.)
2. The ￥14,400 yuan obtained by the defendant Zhang Chunlei through fraud is to be recovered according to law and returned to the victims.
3. The criminal tools seized by the public security organs, including two Huawei phones, four removable hard drives, seven USB drives, two card readers, two memory cards, illegal church study notebooks, and church financial statement-related materials are to be confiscated according to law.

Read Zhang Chunlei’s Prisoner profile.

(China Aid)