Cao, a Protestant pastor in his sixties, was arrested in March 2017 near the China-Myanmar border and convicted in 2018 of "organizing illegal border crossings" for work he had done building schools and delivering aid in Wa State, Burma. He had helped establish sixteen schools there serving thousands of children. A Chinese appeals court upheld the conviction in 2019. Cao completed his sentence in March 2024, but authorities have withheld his passport ever since, leaving him unable to rejoin his wife and family in the United States.
ChinaAid founder Bob Fu says Cao now has metastatic prostate cancer and needs treatment his family fears he cannot get where he is. The American Center for Law and Justice has joined the campaign, and Fu was interviewed by Lara Trump about the case last week. The groups argue the case is a straightforward test of whether Beijing will honor its own sentencing terms for a man who has already served his time.
What Cao is asking for is not amnesty. He served his sentence. He is asking for a piece of paper that would let him go home and see a doctor and hold his wife's hand. A government that will not hand over a passport to a sick man who has already paid what it demanded of him is not enforcing law anymore. It is holding a hostage.
What a Cage Cannot Hold
There is an old, ugly instinct in every government that has ever grown too fond of its own power: keep the man who will not bow, keep him even after the sentence runs out, because his freedom is worth more to the state as a lever than as a mercy. China has run this instinct on pastors, lawyers, and dissidents alike. It ran it on Cao seven years ago, and it is running it still, three years past his release date, with cancer now doing what handcuffs could not — hurrying the man toward the end of his strength.
My friend, watch what Cao actually did to earn this. He built schools. He fed children. He crossed a border to bring relief to people a government did not want relieved. That is the entire offense. There was no bomb, no bribe, no plot — only a man who read his Bible and took it as instructions rather than decoration, and went and did what it said to do for "the least of these."
Scripture does not pretend prison is a small thing or that chains do not hurt. But it insists, again and again, that no government's wall reaches as high as it thinks it does.
"For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him." (2 Chronicles 16:9)
That is not a slogan for a petition drive, though the petition drive is a good and right thing to do, and every name on it is a neighbor loving a neighbor he has never met. It is a plain claim about who is actually watching the cell where Cao sits tonight. Caesar can hold a passport. Caesar cannot hold the eyes of the Lord away from a servant's suffering.
Paul wrote some of his sturdiest letters from a Roman cell, and he did not write them as a man defeated. "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Timothy 1:12). That is the confidence a Christian carries into a cell, an occupation, a diagnosis, or a border crossing that costs him everything. Not that the government will relent — governments are fickle and often will not — but that the One who numbers his days already knows the number, and no magistrate in Beijing gets a vote on it.
If you have never had to choose between comfort and obedience, you may not yet know which one you would pick. Cao already knows. He picked obedience once, at a cost most of us will never be asked to pay, and he would likely pick it again. The least the rest of us can do is say his name, sign what can be signed, and remember that the God who kept Daniel in a den full of hungry lions is not too small to keep one tired pastor waiting on a passport.