Family of Jailed Chinese Pastor Escape to United States

Ben Kayser : Jul 21, 2014
Sooyoung Kim – China Aid News

"We were incredibly disturbed to hear of the absurd 12-year sentence handed down to Pastor Zhang Shaojie last week. Pastor Zhang is an innocent man whose only crime was to shepherd a thriving community of Christians who had worshipped peacefully in Nanle County for years." -Isaac Six, International Christian Concern

(China)—On July 4, 2014, the state-sanctioned Nanle County church pastor, Shaojie Zhang, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in China, charged with "fraud" and "gathering a crowd to disturb public order."

His daughter, Huixin (Yunyun) Zhang, together with her husband and one-year-old Sun Zhulei, escaped China to the U.S. on July 14, with the help from ChinaAid. Although Yunyun's visa appellation at the US Embassy in Beijing was rejected in April, since her father's imprisonment, her family has reportedly been given advance parole authorization by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The family is now in Dallas, Texas, where the First Baptist Church of Midland is providing support for them.

In China, meanwhile, after the Nanle County case raised international attention, the Nanle County government claimed that it had nothing to do with religious persecution.

Pastor Zhang's defense lawyers contest that Nanle County authorities, including the court that sentenced Pastor Zhang, have handled this case in a way that "continuously violated Chinese criminal procedure law." ChinaAid reports that "there have been several accounts of human rights lawyers and international media reporters being beaten, harassed and even been placed under administrative detention by Chinese authorities." Yue Lina, one of the Christians from Nanle Church, was forced into a mental hospital by local authorities.

Pastor Zhang's family has decided to bring an appeal to Puyang City, hoping for a better result in a higher court than at the county level.

Advocacy Director, Isaac Six, of the International Christian Concern (ICC) said, "We were incredibly disturbed to hear of the absurd 12-year sentence handed down to Pastor Zhang Shaojie last week. Pastor Zhang is an innocent man whose only crime was to shepherd a thriving community of Christians who had worshipped peacefully in Nanle County for years. The Chinese government has unceasingly harassed Pastor Zhang's church members, hired thugs to intimidate his defense counsel, and attempted to suppress media coverage of his case. Sadly, Pastor Zhang's case is not isolated. He now joins a growing list of imprisoned or detained Christian leaders that includes names like Alimujiang Yimti, Gao Zhisheng, and Bishop Thaddeus Ma. Today, we call on the government of China in the strongest possible terms to quickly right this egregious wrong and to immediately release Pastor Zhang as well as all other prisoners of faith or conscience."