Chinese authorities arrested Cao in 2017, accusing him of organizing illegal border crossings while he ran relief work and small schools for impoverished children in Myanmar's Wa region. A court sentenced him to seven years, and he was released on March 4, 2024, from a prison in Yunnan Province. He has not been allowed to leave China since. An administrative rule permits authorities to withhold a released prisoner's passport for up to three years, and Cao's renewed application, filed April 16, 2026, has produced no travel document yet.
Cao carries no social medical insurance in China, so donations from fellow Christians abroad are covering his treatment - androgen deprivation therapy followed by six rounds of chemotherapy spaced three weeks apart. His wife, his eldest son, and his son's fiancée flew from the United States to Changsha in late April and stayed at his bedside for ten days before work obligations called them home. His mother, nearly ninety years old, and an elderly sister have cared for him since. Advocacy attorneys with the American Center for Law and Justice have pressed Chinese officials on his behalf, noting Cao has now gone more than a decade without a reunion with the family he has spent his life apart from.
A Body Failing, A Passport Withheld
Every government that can lock a gate or hold a passport in a drawer eventually runs into a wall it cannot climb, and that wall is what a dying man does with the years he has left. Beijing can control Cao's papers. It cannot touch what is happening in that hospital bed in Changsha.
Here is a man who spent his strength feeding hungry children and preaching Christ across a mountain border, and the reward this world hands him back is a locked door and a spine full of cancer. If you have ever waited on an office, a doctor's report, or a reunion that keeps slipping further away, you know something of the weight Pastor Cao is carrying. A failing body is heavy enough to bear. Bearing it far from the people who love you is heavier still.
Scripture never tells a believer that suffering is fair, and it never asks him to pretend the pain is not real. It tells him something better - that the pain does not get the last word.
"For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;" (2 Corinthians 4:17)
Paul wrote those words as a man who had been beaten, shipwrecked, and jailed more than once - a man who knew exactly what it cost to call a life like his a "light affliction." He was not minimizing suffering. He was weighing it against something so much larger that the scales tipped every time he set them down. That promise is held out to Pastor Cao in that Hunan hospital room tonight, and it is held out to you, whatever wall you are facing this week.
The God of the Bible does not need a visa to reach a man in Changsha, and He does not stop at any border. He said as much to His own people long ago: "Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness" (Isaiah 41:10). Those words were written for people scattered far from home, and they still reach people scattered far from home.
A passport can be withheld. A body can fail. Neither one holds the final word over a man who settled his true citizenship long before any government stamped a paper, the day he gave his life to Christ. That is the hope Pastor Cao carries into his next round of chemotherapy, and it is the same hope held out to anyone still waiting, tonight, on a door this world refuses to open.