On a recent overcast Sunday, a 70-year-old Taiwanese American man in a suit rose to his feet to worship in a high school auditorium in Torrance, California. Standing next to his wife, Cathy, and daughter, Alice, David Lin raised his arms and sang along with the young, casually dressed congregants of King’s Cross Church: “I’m gonna lift my hands / Till I can reach heaven.”
Though they appeared like any other close Christian family, the image belied the hardships each of them had recently endured. From 2006 to 2024, the Chinese government detained David as he served a life sentence on charges related to his missionary work in the country. Last September, the US government brokered a prisoner exchange that freed David and allowed him to reunite with his family.
After the service, Alice’s friends came over to shake David’s and Cathy’s hands, as they had asked God to grant David’s release for years. Pastor Russ Hightower expressed the privilege it had been to join the larger church body in praying for them and to see their prayers answered. “When you’re in the front-row seat to watch God do something so dynamic, it’s humbling. [It’s] joyful.”
David’s prison sentence left him emaciated, and it devastated his wife, daughter, and son. Yet while speaking over a meal of soup dumplings, David often laughed and joked, jumping into stories of miraculous healings and confessions of faith.
Had he ever questioned God during his nearly 20 years in prison? “I don’t have time for thinking about that,” said David. “I just follow God’s leading every day.” At times, he hinted at the horrors he faced inside the Beijing prison, but even then he pointed to God’s goodness. Alice noted that the family doesn’t know the full extent of the atrocities he experienced.
The one aspect David described as terrible was the toll on his family as they worried for his safety, dealt with the trauma of his imprisonment, faced the foreclosure of their home, and feared they would never see him again. Since his return, the family has been able to talk and laugh together again.
“I believe [that] without God’s permission I cannot go to prison, but God always protect[s] me,” David said. “I am very happy, even though I am suffering physically, that I see a lot of people go from nonbeliever to believer and a lot of people decide after [they leave prison] to become a pastor, become a teacher, and to preach the gospel.”
A call to China
Born in Taiwan, David and Cathy moved to California in the early ’80s, becoming US citizens and eventually settling in Huntington Beach, where David worked as a chemical engineer. Friends invited Cathy to church, and she and their two children began regularly attending. David, however, stubbornly resisted. He didn’t drink or gamble, he maintained, so he didn’t need God.
Then on Easter one year in the early ’90s, he watched the Christian film King of Kings with his family. He grew so upset that a perfect person would be crucified and die for people’s sins that he “cried out in my inside.” Unable to keep watching the movie, he went to bed early.
In the middle of the night, David dreamed that Jesus, Peter, John, and James came to him and taught him the Bible. A week later, Cathy’s pastor came to share the gospel with David. He told David that if he loved his family, he needed to worship the same God as them. David nodded in response, then suddenly felt the Holy Spirit descend on him, he later said.
As he began reading the Bible, he said the Holy Spirit granted him understanding of the text, and he began teaching and preaching the gospel to local Chinese immigrants. Within a year, he became less and less interested in his import-export business and started doing ministry full-time. When Cathy stressed about their lack of income, David responded that God would provide for all their needs. Alice said they lived frugally, eating cereal donated from church members and vegetables from their backyard garden. Eventually, Cathy took on a part-time job caring for the elderly.
“He has this faith, which is incredible, but a little scary if you’re his family,” Alice said.
In the mid-1990s, ministry donations funded David’s travel to China for about ten days every month to share the gospel. “Most people don’t know [what I am doing], including my family,” David said. “I know it’s a lot of risk, so when I go, I act like a businessman, but people don’t know I do missions.”
At the time, China was opening up to foreign countries, allowing Christians more room to evangelize. Through friends and contacts, he made connections in China, allowing him to share the gospel with military officers, high-level government officials, scientists, and school principals.
Chinese Christians started inviting David to preach in house churches, Three-Self churches, and missionary-led congregations. He baptized people, prayed for them, and saw God heal the sick. One time, he prayed for a scientist with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next morning, she felt her symptoms relieved. Soon after, she and her husband became Christians. Another time, he baptized a government official in the bathtub of his hotel room, and the two became close friends.
David recorded sermons—first on cassette tapes, then on CDs—and over the years brought hundreds of them into China to hand out. Chinese Christians made their own copies and shared them with others.
Yet with greater influence came scrutiny. In 2002, two police officers followed David into his hotel. “You are a good person,” they told him. “We already listen to your tapes, but don’t preach the gospel here.” David made no promises—and gave them more tapes.
But the increased surveillance worried Cathy, who asked him to end his trip and come home. Yet David responded, “Don’t worry. God knows what he’s doing. God needs me to be there. There’s so many people who need to know his Word.”
Capture in China
In early 2006, David applied for an official ministry license from the Chinese government. Local authorities responded by asking him to come to the police station during a trip to Beijing in June.
During the meeting, David learned that the police knew of all the places he had visited and people he had met with during his trips to China. Afterward, they held him under house arrest for months at a hotel, where they continued to question him.
The government accused him of contract fraud for renting a building in Beijing in the ’90s to start a training center for local Christians. (Human rights activist John Kamm of Dui Hua Foundation, who worked closely with the Lin family, noted that this charge is often used to target people of faith.) At the time, the Chinese government approved of his plan and allowed him to apply for a license. “Later on, I realized that was their trap,” David said.
He believes the real reason for his arrest was that too many people listened to his sermons and came to Christ. Later, police told him that they had received a directive from the Public Security Bureau to arrest him. Even the judge assigned to his case asked him to appeal his conviction at a higher level court, because there was nothing she could do.
While under house arrest, David called his wife and family to tell them the government was holding on to his passport due to a misunderstanding, that he was fine and just needed some prayer. He’d come home soon.
Yet days turned into weeks turned into months. In 2007, the US Embassy called Cathy to say that David had been arrested and was going to court.
“We were completely blindsided,” Alice said. Up until then, they hadn’t realized the seriousness of the situation.
For the next two years as David’s case went through China’s judicial system, authorities held him in Beijing No. 1 Detention Center and did not allow him to communicate with his family. When David first arrived, he was so disturbed that prisoners were treated “like pigs” that he couldn’t eat for a week. Prison guards would whack the cell door with their batons and slide meager steamed buns or watery rice porridge through a slot in the door.
According to a foreign man who was held at the same detention center in 2009, each 25-by-15-foot cell housed 12 to 14 men. Half the room was “the board,” a raised platform that stretched from wall to wall, where the prisoners sat during the day and slept at night. Besides meals, short periods of free time, and viewings of the Communist Party–run news, most of the day was spent sitting on “the board.”
“But when I go there, I see the opportunity,” David said. “I forget what my pain is. I see the other people don’t know the Lord. So I just keep preaching for all the men.”
He claimed that every cell he stayed in, he’d pray and preach with the men, mostly other foreigners or white-collar Chinese criminals. Ninety percent of the inmates in his cell would become Christians, he said. Guards would then transfer him to another cell where inmates were fighting, and he’d continue to minister until that became an “outstanding room.”
A family torn
Meanwhile, back in California, Cathy feared what had become of her husband.
“When he was here, she could lean on him. He was her foundation,” Alice said. “Without him, she was lost.” (Cathy did not want to be interviewed for this article.) In her anxiety, Cathy became fearful, which caused conflicts with those around her. Her mental health deteriorated. “Of all the people in my family, the person who suffered the most is my mom,” Alice said.
Cathy took on more hours at her job, but she struggled to make ends meet. Not wanting to bother her children, she took out short-term loans to cover the mortgage, and as she fell behind on payments, debt collectors banged on the family’s door. Alice, who by then was working in another city, moved home to help care for her mom. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on their home, and Cathy ended up living with a church friend for several years.
In December 2009, a Beijing court ruled that David was guilty of contract fraud and sentenced him to life in prison.
The US Embassy told Alice that she could raise awareness about her father but it was risky, as it could anger the Chinese government and escalate the situation. Soon after David’s sentencing, China executed a British citizen on drug-smuggling charges, despite relatives’ claims that he struggled with mental health issues. Alice ultimately decided to stay quiet.
David didn’t seek an appeal, as he doubted it would make a difference—China has a nearly 100 percent conviction rate, and overturned decisions are extremely rare. Alice tried anyway, flying to China to find a lawyer to take on her father’s case. Despite Alice gathering, translating, and notarizing evidence to prove her father’s innocence, the court denied the appeal in 2010.
“I just had to accept there’s nothing else I could do,” Alice said. “We had to let go of that control and trust that God was going to take care of him [and] take care of us.”
In 2010, authorities moved David to Beijing No. 2 Prison, a facility for foreign detainees. Initially, the prison guards told David he couldn’t evangelize. Yet because he was fluent in both Chinese and English, they needed his help translating, giving him opportunities to speak with his cellmates about gospel.
He also spent his time in prison translating the King James Bible into Chinese. (His family sent him several Bibles, as well as a biblical Greek dictionary and an archeological encyclopedia.) It took seven years for him to finish the New Testament. He also wrote evangelism tracts for non-Christians. The prison guards took his Bible away from him three times, but each time they ultimately gave it back.
Matthew Radalj, an Australian inmate who spent five years in the same prison, told the BBC this year that inmates tried to reduce their sentences by reading Communist Party books or working in the factory. Yet they received infractions for “hoarding or sharing food with other prisoners, walking ‘incorrectly’ in the hallway by straying from a line painted on the ground, hanging socks on a bed incorrectly, or even standing too close to the window.” Punishments included food deprivation, restriction of calls to families, and solitary confinement.
David also suffered from malnutrition. Every month, the US Embassy officers would visit him, and he said they would cry when they saw how thin he had become. Nine of his teeth fell out.
In 2017, things took a turn for the worse. Inside the prison, David sensed China restricting the religious freedoms the prisoners had once enjoyed. Prison guards stopped allowing Muslims to fast for Ramadan. David could no longer pray or hold small worship gatherings on Sundays. Typically, around Christmas, the staffers David had befriended would allow him to lead a celebration with his fellow prisoners for two hours and would buy the prisoners hot cocoa and candy. But that year, they not only banned the celebration but also barred any mention of Christmas.
In December 2018, Alice received three urgent calls from her father. David worried authorities would confiscate his Bible translation, so he asked the US Embassy to mail his Bible, along with hundreds of handwritten pages of the translation and letters from his family, back to the US.
When Alice saw the Bible arrive at their doorstep, she realized it was her father’s way of crying for help.
“When he sent home his Bible—which was like a man in the desert sending home his one water bottle—we realized we needed to do something,” Alice said.
Fighting for her father’s release
A scientist by training, Alice didn’t know how to advocate for her father’s release. Yet through a well-connected friend, she met people who could help her: experts in Chinese law, human rights advocates, and government officials. Through church connections, Alice was able to get a letter about her father into the hands of then–vice president Mike Pence. In April, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom adopted David as a prisoner of conscience, raising public awareness of his case.
A month later, Alice met with Kamm of Dui Hua Foundation, an organization that advocates for clemency and better treatment for detainees in China. He looked up David’s case on a Chinese database and found that unbeknownst to the State Department, David’s sentence had been commuted to 19 and a half years in 2012. There had been two subsequent sentence reductions. He would be released in April 2030.
Alice was shocked.
For the first time in years, Alice had hope. “I didn’t know the [Chinese] system was … not an impossible wall to scale. There’s holes in the wall. There are footholds, when before I thought it was a sheet of marble,” she said.
The Dui Hua Foundation raised David’s case to the Chinese government 28 times and received several responses. US officials, including then–secretary of state Antony Blinken, California governor Gavin Newsom, and former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, also brought up David during meetings with their Chinese counterparts.
Every week, Alice sent out a prayer list for David’s supporters, which she looks back on as “a long list of how God kept providing and opening doors [as] miracle after miracle happened.” At times, she wondered if she should have tried advocating for her father ten years earlier when he was first arrested. Yet advocates and State Department officials told her that it wouldn’t have had the same effect, as the Levinson Act, which created the procedure to bring home unjustly held hostages, had only recently passed, and the political climate was different. “You can see that this was orchestrated by God, not man,” Alice noted. “There was no way I could have done it on my own.”
In the midst of her advocacy, Alice was diagnosed with cancer. She leaned on the support of her friends at King’s Cross. “There’d be times where I would be talking [to Alice] on the phone and she would say, ‘I just don’t know,’” said her friend Cherise Kaiser. “It felt like God really called us together in our friendship, and I said, ‘You don’t have to have the faith today. We’re going to have the faith for you.’”
The tumultuous US–China relationship caused additional stresses, as many times it seemed as if China was close to releasing her father only for the dynamic between the two superpowers to go cold.
Then on the night of September 14, Alice and her own family were visiting her mom in Orange County when she received a phone call from her contact at the State Department. “I have someone here who wants to talk to you,” the official said.
Tears streamed down her face as she recognized her father’s voice on the other end of the line. “I’m okay now,” he said, speaking to her from an airplane on the tarmac at the Beijing airport, a free man for the first time in 18 years. Alice handed the phone to her mom, who was sitting on the couch next to her.
Through private negotiations, the US had been able to secure David’s release in exchange for an unnamed Chinese national imprisoned in the US.
“It was a miracle that we never thought was going to happen, and it happened for us,” she recalled.
David’s immediate family booked the next flight to San Antonio to meet him as he arrived at a US military base. US officials kept quiet about his release, a stipulation from the Chinese government to help guarantee prisoner exchanges for three other wrongly detained American prisoners, according to Alice. (They were later released in November.)
Standing on the tarmac, Alice and her family watched as the plane carrying her dad landed. His gaunt frame appeared as he stepped off the plane and walked down the stairs.
Alice couldn’t believe it was her father. After nearly two decades, she worried about how he may have changed and was concerned that their interactions would be awkward. But once he reached them, he gave them a big hug, and they started talking and joking. “He’s still the same!” Alice remembers her mother saying, breaking the tension.
David then met his son-in-law and elementary school–aged grandson for the first time.
The following Sunday, David knew what he wanted to do: preach. So he went onstage at the First Assembly of God San Antonio, a church that had been praying for him, and preached his first sermon from the pulpit in nearly two decades.
Courtesy of Alice LinFamily restoration
Since returning home, David has been to the dentist to get fitted for dentures for his missing teeth and has started a fundraiser on GoFundMe for his personal expenses, as his long detention left him ineligible for full social security benefits.
Yet in many ways, he has picked up where he left off. He’s guest-preached at churches around the country that have been praying for him. He’s created a website for his ministry, Great King Ministry, and uploaded his sermons as podcasts to share with Chinese-language speakers around the world.
In June, David met with Kamm in San Francisco. Kamm described it as an “exceptional occasion.”
“After all he had been through, he wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t angry. ‘It was all God’s plan’ kind of thing—just amazing,” Kamm said.
Alice, whose cancer is now in remission, said that since her father returned, a cloud has been lifted. She’s able to hear her dad’s laugh again and receive his gifts of dragon fruit every time they meet up. Her greatest joy has been seeing her mom restored. Cathy and David are enjoying the little things together: eating dinner, taking walks, and teasing each other. Her mom recently jokingly complained that “now I have a full-time job taking care of your dad.”
“My life is complete,” Alice said. “To see things become whole again is such a privilege and a miracle to witness.”
