Chinese-American pastor David Lin has been released from Beijing Number Two Prison and has flown home to be reunited with his family in Texas. The US State Department notified his daughter Alice Lin on Saturday 14 September that he had been released and would touch down next day in San Antonio, Texas. “No words can express the joy we have – we have a lot of time to make up for,” she said on her way to meet her father at the airport.

China Aid’s founder and president Bob Fu, a longtime supporter of the imprisoned pastor, shared a text message that Alice Lin sent him the day after her father’s release: “Praise God! We got the call late last night!!! Dad is free and over Alaska now.”

On Sunday 15 September a US State Department spokesperson said, “We welcome David Lin’s release from prison in the People’s Republic of China. He has returned to the United States and now gets to see his family for the first time in nearly twenty years.”

Pastor Lin was on a ministry trip to China in 2006 when he was arrested in Beijing after helping a house church to build a premises. In 2009 he was convicted of “contract fraud”, a charge he denies, and was sentenced to life in prison, later reduced to a scheduled release in April 2030. Since 2019 his family has been very concerned about his declining health.

The pastor’s release follows years of diplomatic efforts by the US State Department (which considers him “wrongfully detained”) and the California-based prisoner release advocacy organisation Dui Hua Foundation, and comes just weeks after US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi in Beijing. Commenting on the meeting, Alice Lin said, “I know that Jake Sullivan did raise my dad’s case.”

A US official (speaking anonymously because they are not authorised to speak on record about sensitive diplomatic negotiations) said: “The Chinese first agreed to release him in a meeting between Secretary of State Blinken and Wang Yi in Laos”. This meeting took place in July 2024 on the margins of an ASEAN-related ministerial.

On a visit to China in October 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom unsuccessfully pressed for the pastor’s release and was told by Chinese authorities that he would remain behind bars “through April 2029”.

 Read David Lin’s Prisoner Profile.

(Dui Hua, Politico, Texomas)

Photo Credit: Free Pastor Lin Committee