Reflections from Pastor John Cao is a series of poetry and writings from the recently released Chinese Christian prisoner of conscience exclusively published by ChinaAid. The piece below was written on April 23, 2024 and has been minimally edited for clarity. To read more of Pastor John Cao’s poetry, one can purchase the collection written while he was imprisoned, Living Lyrics: Poems from Prison.
It may seem that a person being convicted and sentenced is solely decided by the judge, but that is not the case. Based on my observations, in fact, there are at least five aspects of power involved in a case.
The first aspect of power is the judge who appears to play the leading role. After a person is sentenced to a term of imprisonment, the judge signs the verdict to indicate that the sentence was made by the judge. So the first aspect of power is the judge and the judge’s supervisors.
The second aspect of power is the convicted person themselves and their lawyer. Do they agree with the judge’s verdict? During my imprisonment, I met He Xueguang. Mr. He was a farmer, illiterate, and could only write his own name. At the age of 26, he was accused of murdering someone, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. But Mr. He insisted on his innocence. He entered Kunming Prison to serve his sentence, and after spending a full 26 years in prison, the court finally cleared his name, changed the verdict, and declared Mr. He innocent. So, we have to ask, was Mr. He innocent from the beginning? Or was he guilty all along until the day the court declared him innocent? Of course, he was always innocent. Therefore, the convicted person themselves is also an important aspect of conviction. During Mr. He’s imprisonment, there was a lot of pressure trying to force him to confess. Once he succumbed to the pressure and pleaded guilty, there would be almost no possibility of overturning the case. When Mr. He entered the prison, he was a young man with a head full of black hair, full of energy. By the time he was released, he had become an old man with white hair, walking with a limp.
A police officer in Kunming Prison told me that in his 20 years of service, he had only seen one case of wrongful conviction, and that was the He Xueguang’s case. I told the police officer that he had actually seen a second case of wrongful conviction, and that was my case. To this day, I absolutely do not agree with or accept the charges the court has given me.
In Kunming Prison, I know of at least 10 cases where the parties involved insist that they did not commit the crimes determined by the judge. In other words, 10 people have determined that they are victims of wrongful convictions by the judge. If there are 10 people in one prison who believe they are victims of wrongful convictions, and there are about 1,000 prisons in China, then there are probably about 10,000 people who believe they are victims of wrongful convictions.
The third aspect of power is the jury, or a group of people similar to a jury. In many countries, we can see the jury system. The jury system means that when a person is accused of a crime, whether or not the person has actually committed the crime is not up to the judge to decide, but rather a dozen or so randomly selected people in the local area who have nothing to do with the case make a judgment after learning about the case and decide whether the accused is guilty. China does not have a jury system, but the principles of the jury system are still valid in China, especially when it comes to religious cases. A religious case may have tens of thousands of onlookers at the least, and hundreds of thousands at the most. These onlooking crowds are a huge jury. Although they cannot influence the judge’s decision, each of them has a scale in their own heart and knows whether the accused in the religious case has actually committed a crime. In a country with such a large population like China, the number of people who believe I am guilty can probably be counted on ten fingers, while the number of people who believe I am innocent is the entire 1.4 billion people of China minus ten. Among those who come to see me, there are non-Christians, and after learning about my case, they all say that the judge who convicted me is insane. If my case were put on the platform of the whole world, the number of people who would determine me to be innocent would add another 1.4 billion. During the Cultural Revolution, there was a popular saying: “The eyes of the people are sharp.” Most of the popular sayings during the Cultural Revolution were absurd, but this one actually has some truth to it. Now they don’t dare to advocate this saying anymore.
The fourth aspect of power is history. Some people may say that I am engaging in metaphysical arguments here. In fact, that is not the case. The power of history means that a case will still be discussed and remembered decades, centuries, or even millennia later. Back in the day, the First Emperor of Qin had sufficient legal provisions to sentence those Confucian scholars to death, but more than 2,000 years later, people are still talking about those wrongful convictions. China’s history can be said to be a history of wrongful convictions. The vast majority of wrongful convictions have disappeared into the archives of history, but there are still many, many wrongful convictions that have been recorded. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, 550,000 intellectuals were persecuted, and 20 years later, they were all rehabilitated. Those judges who do not believe in ghosts and gods may lack a sense of history and say, “After I die, even if the floodwaters rage, what I care most about and what matters most is the present.” Even if they don’t have a sense of history, do the judges, police officers, and officials who commit wrongful convictions not fear that these cases will be redressed during their terms of office, thereby tarnishing their own careers?
It is not hard to imagine that some years later, when someone researches and writes about this period of Chinese history from 2015 to 2024, they will include cases like Pastor Wang Yi’s case, Pastor John Cao’s case, and several other similar cases in their book. Even if official history books do not record it, folk historians will not miss these events, just as one cannot find examples of book burning and burying Confucian scholars alive in the official archives of the First Emperor of Qin, but modern people still know that such things happened.
The fifth aspect of power is heaven. Chinese people all believe that “people do, heaven watches.” This heaven obviously does not refer to the sky, but rather the “Heavenly Lord” who can understand and intervene in human affairs. “Lord” means father. Therefore, the Heavenly Lord of the Chinese people is like the Heavenly Father in Christianity. Christians even more so believe that the Heavenly Father is in charge of all things. I have been convicted by a few judges, but not a single Christian believes that I have committed a crime, which I can take as evidence that the Heavenly Father considers me innocent. At the same time, I firmly believe that of the Christians involved in religious cases in China, apart from the judges who believe they are guilty, the Heavenly Father will not consider them to have committed any crimes. Moreover, the other parties, namely the grand jury, history, etc., will all determine that these Christians are innocent.
The ancient wisdom of China also believes that this Heavenly Lord will one day uphold justice. As the saying goes, “Good is rewarded with good, evil is rewarded with evil; if the reward has not yet come, it is because the time has not yet arrived; when the time arrives, everything will be repaid.” Here, I would like to kindly advise everyone, including myself, that it is better for a person to do more good deeds and fewer evil deeds.
