Pastor Lian Xuliang Walked Out of a Xi'an Detention Center on September 5, Four Years After the Police Took Him. Nobody Has Said Why. Nobody Has Said Whether His Father Is Still Inside.
The police came for the Church of Abundance on August 17, 2022. They took the founding pastor, Lian Changnian. They took his son Lian Xuliang, ordained the autumn before. They took a preacher named Fu Juan. Two days later the city's civil affairs bureau declared a congregation that had met since the early 1990s an illegal social organization.
For six months nobody outside could say where the three were. The charge, when the families finally heard it, was fraud. A house church had passed an offering plate, and the state called it a crime.
On September 5, 2026, Lian Xuliang went home. That is the whole of what can be confirmed. Weiquanwang, a Chinese rights monitor, learned of it on September 7 and published a notice a few lines long. ChinaAid carried it on September 10. Xi'an's police, prosecutors and courts have said nothing: not why he was let out, not whether the case is over, not a word about the two arrested with him.
His father is in his seventies and was under hospital treatment the last time officers came to the house. No one has been able to confirm that he came home too.
