Letters and Visits System · Full chronicle and history

The human rights organization Safeguard Defenders has released a new edition of the book 'The People's Republic of the Disappeared.' It includes first-hand accounts of secret detention under the 'Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location' (RSDL) system from Chinese rights lawyers, journalists, NGO workers, as well as Michael Kovrig, Cheng Lei, and Lee Ming-che, and offers a free PDF download.

The trial of Shenyang petitioner Fu Youling, charged with the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, has opened; the prosecution recommended a fixed-term prison sentence of two years.

The Ministry of Justice, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the National Health Commission, and the National Disease Control and Prevention Administration jointly issued standards defining the scope of serious illnesses and criteria for identifying inability to care for oneself for temporary execution of sentences outside prison.

Netizen Cyberxinfang said that last year he received petition materials from Yanhu District, Yuncheng, Shanxi. The petitioner alleged that local gangsters colluded with government officials in the long-term gang rape of her granddaughter, and that she was threatened with lifetime imprisonment if she petitioned again. She has since gone missing, and he is now publicly soliciting information about the case.

On September 17, it was circulated online that the Justice Bureau of Puan County, Guizhou Province, issued a notice requiring local lawyers, when handling cases related to cracking down on organized crime, to report to the county justice bureau for study and obtain approval before they can present defense arguments that involve changing the characterization of a crime, and demanding that all law firms strictly enforce this.

On August 12, 2026, Li Wenzhang, Director of the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration, wrote an article in Study Times, on the one hand calling for correcting local interception and blocking, and on the other hand emphasizing a severe crackdown on troublemaking and disruption of order, as well as persistent petitioning and making a scene, resolutely achieving the goal of not letting conflicts be passed upward.

On August 4, 2026, rights defense petitioners in Jiangsu Province found that when logging into the official online complaint platform of the Jiangsu Provincial Letters and Calls Bureau, the system repeatedly prompted that the phone number did not exist or the verification code was invalid, accused of setting up technical barriers to obstruct petition appeals.

In August 2026, prominent criminal defense lawyer Chen Youxi publicly pointed out that in multiple cases involving fallen officials, the case-handling authorities appointed legal aid lawyers to crowd out the lawyers retained by family members, effectively depriving the parties of their right to defense.

On July 29, 2026, 28 depositors of Henan village banks went to the Zhejiang Provincial Letters and Calls Bureau to collectively defend their rights, asking Zhejiang officials to help coordinate with Henan departments to resolve the issue of deposits being frozen for five years, and requesting the provincial-level written certification documents needed for petitioning in Beijing.

On July 8, 2026, the public interest organization Asia Lawyers Network released a report disclosing that the crackdown on lawyers in China has extended to the civil and commercial sectors, with lawyers frequently facing criminal prosecution by authorities using criminal charges to replace civil litigation when handling civil and commercial disputes.

The new petition regulations that the CCP will implement from July 1 stipulate that when members of the public go to the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration and relevant central ministries and commissions to report problems, they must hold relevant written materials issued by provincial-level authorities.

After the case was accepted, it remained unhandled for a long time; Lin attempted suicide by slashing his or her wrist shortly afterward, and his or her lawyer says Lin was subsequently diagnosed with severe depression by a hospital.

In late June 2026, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress released the draft amendment to the Lawyers Law, with new clauses explicitly requiring practicing lawyers to support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist rule of law, and mandating that law firms establish grassroots Party organizations in accordance with the Party Constitution.

The National Petition Bureau has introduced new regulations, requiring the public to cross their own level or the next higher level of agencies to petition in Beijing; they must have written or electronic documents from a provincial-level agency, otherwise registration will not be accepted.

On June 16, in front of the Supreme People's Court petition reception office and Yongdingmen West Street in Beijing, a large number of petitioners queued in heavy rain, with some denouncing the root causes behind the frequent occurrence of social revenge incidents.

On June 10, 2026, Chinese independent feminist and human rights activist Li Qiaochu sent an inquiry letter, legally filing an administrative reconsideration against the Shandong Provincial Prison Administration for its inaction on the marriage application of Xu Zhiyong, who is incarcerated.

Videos that surfaced in late May 2026 show that several-meter-high isolation iron fences have been installed along the south moat outside the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration; The Epoch Times says the move is intended to prevent desperate petitioners from jumping into the river, and officials have not explained it.

China's Ministry of Justice announced the results of a crackdown on local law enforcement violations, saying it identified and corrected more than 66,000 problems and recovered economic losses of 30.7 billion yuan for businesses.

From July 9, 2015, Chinese police (Public Security) carried out large-scale arrests, summons and detentions of over a hundred rights lawyers, rights defenders and their relatives across 23 provinces, an event known as the 709 crackdown.

In May 2011, the Xia Junfeng case entered the Supreme People's Court's death penalty review; afterward, academics and netizens launched a "stay the execution" solidarity campaign, though the exact launch date and the scale of hundreds of thousands of participants could not be verified.

On June 16, 2009, the court of Badong County, Hubei, found Deng Yujiao guilty of intentional injury in the first-instance ruling, but, taking into account such circumstances as excessive self-defense and voluntary surrender, exempted her from criminal penalty.

The night after the Yang Jia case occurred, his mother Wang Jingmei was first taken to the Datun Police Station in Chaoyang District, and was then sent by Shanghai and Beijing police to the Ankang Psychiatric Hospital of the Beijing Public Security Bureau in Shunyi District and forcibly detained. Her family only learned of her whereabouts four months later, and legal professionals pointed out that there was no regulatory basis whatsoever for sending her to a psychiatric hospital.