Yang Rongli
Pastor Yang Rongli has been serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison term since 2009 for leading the 50,000-member Linfen Church in Shaanxi province. Yang is a 1982 graduate of the Linfen Normal College's Chinese department. Because of her excellent academic record, she was retained by the college to teach. She also worked as an editor and reporter. She and her husband, Wang Xiaoguang, were the leaders of the Jindengtai (Golden Lampstand) Church, a house church in Linfen, Shaanxi province. In 1998, they became the church's full-time clergy and in the following two decades, the church grew to 50,000 members. On September 13, 2009 at 3 a.m., the local Fushan county government dispatched more than 400 police officers and plainclothes police, led by government officials, to the meeting site of the Fushan Christians and the Gospel Shoe Factory, where they brutally beat Christians staying in a dormitory. More than 100 people were seriously injured. On September 23, armed police surrounded the main Jindengtai church building, and on September 25, Yang and six other church leaders were arrested while traveling to the provincial capital of Taiyuan to petition the government. On November 25, the Yaodu District Court convicted Yang and her husband of "illegal occupation of farmland" and "gathering a mob to create a traffic disturbance." Yang was sentenced to a seven-year prison term and fined 30,000 yuan (US$4,755); her husband was sentenced to a three-year term and fined 10,000 yuan (US$1,585). Yang is currently suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, and hepatitis, and despite her aliments, she has been denied medical assistance.
Pastor Yang Raongli has been RELEASED.
Updates:
- The Golden Lampstand church in northern China was demolished this week. Head pastor, Yang Rongli, had spent seven years in jail on charges of "assembling a crowd to disturb traffic order" and has been under police surveillance since her release in October 2016 (January 11, 2018, The Guardian)