Cao, born Cao Sanqiang in Changsha in 1959, spent more than two decades building schools for poor children in China before turning his attention across the border into Myanmar's Wa State. Beginning in 2014, he helped establish sixteen schools serving more than two thousand impoverished ethnic minority children there. In 2017, Chinese authorities arrested him along the China-Myanmar border. A year later, a court sentenced him to seven years in prison for "organizing illegal border crossings" in connection with that humanitarian work.
He was released from a prison in Kunming, Yunnan province, on March 3, 2024. But Chinese authorities have kept an exit ban on him ever since, withholding his passport and holding him, in effect, inside the country. His wife and sons are United States citizens waiting for him.
On August 16, 2026, ChinaAid and the American Center for Law and Justice launched a petition, "Help Bring Pastor Cao Home," calling on President Trump to personally raise Cao's case when he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24. By August 21, the petition had gathered more than thirteen thousand of a hoped-for one hundred thousand signatures. Organizers say Cao's cancer has metastasized, and time is short.
A Different Kind of Bondage
Now turn from Changsha to your own street, my friend, because the ache in this story is not confined to one prison or one nation. Every soul reading this knows something of confinement — a body that will not heal, a family kept apart, a door that will not open no matter how hard you push against it. Pastor Cao's exit ban is only the visible shape of a bondage the whole human race shares.
Scripture does not tell believers to look away from a brother in chains. It tells them to feel the chain as though it were on their own wrist.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
That is not sentiment. That is instruction. The early church that received that letter knew what prison smelled like — Paul himself wrote parts of the New Testament with a chain on his leg. He did not consider the chain proof that God had abandoned him. He called himself "the prisoner of the Lord," because he had already settled, before the door ever locked, that his life belonged to Christ and not to Rome, and not to any government that might come after Rome.
Pastor Cao built schools for children nobody else wanted to educate, and a government called that a crime. Men have always found ways to call obedience to Christ a crime, from the Sanhedrin to Beijing. But a passport is a piece of paper, and a government's grip on a man's body has never yet reached the part of him that is hid with Christ. Paul wrote from a cell, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." That is not despair talking. That is a man who has already walked out of the only prison that could ever really hold him.
The gospel does not promise an earthly rescue on any particular Tuesday. It promises something better than an open door in Changsha — it promises an open door that no government on earth can shut, because it was opened once for all at an empty tomb outside Jerusalem. Jesus Christ took the full weight of sin, judgment, and death upon Himself, was buried, and rose again the third day, so that everyone who trusts Him is set free in the part of themselves no exit ban can touch.
Pray for Pastor Cao and for men like him tonight. Pray for the officials who hold his passport, that mercy would move where policy has not. And examine your own heart while you are at it, because the chains that matter most are rarely the ones you can see. Whatever confines you tonight, whatever door won't open, take it to the One who said He came to set the captives free. He meant it further down than you think.
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32)