Shenzhen Legal Self-Media Creator and Legal-Education Blogger “Criminal Observer” Zhao Hongliang Has Been Compulsorily Summoned by Longhua District Police for More Than 24 Hours and Has Yet to Return

On August 13, 2026, this outlet learned that on August 10, 2026, Shenzhen legal self-media creator and Weibo influencer “Criminal Observer” Zhao Hongliang was taken away under compulsory summons by police from the Shangtang Police Station in Shenzhen’s Longhua District and has yet to return. Previously, on July 29, the Shangtang Police Station issued Zhao Hongliang a summons on the grounds of “suspected disruption of public order” (Shen Longhua Gong (Shangtang) Xing Chuan Zi [2026] No. 548), but Zhao Hongliang did not accept the summons. Zhao Hongliang has now been under compulsory summons for more than 24 hours and has still not returned; there is still no definitive information as to whether he has been detained.

It is reported that the direct trigger for the Shangtang Police Station’s summons of him for “suspected disruption of public order” may have been his posting on the rear window of his private car slogans of public appeal and rights defense directed at judicial authorities in another locality. The slogans included the words “Shangqiu judicial organs rule without recordings,” “Telephone threats—darkness without end,” and others.

In January 2026, dissatisfied with the police’s handling of the “decision not to impose administrative punishment and administrative reconsideration” concerning his case involving verbal abuse, Zhao Hongliang, as the plaintiff, also took the Shenzhen Longhua Public Security Sub-Bureau and the Shenzhen municipal government to court.

Recently, the Chinese Communist Party authorities launched a so-called “deepening special campaign to combat organized crime and eliminate local criminal gangs” lasting one year, officially defining the so-called new forms of organized crime as shifting from “offline to online” and from “hard violence to soft violence.” As “public-opinion extortion and malicious compensation claims” have been included within the scope of the campaign against organized crime, people are generally concerned that the campaign will be broadly applied in its implementation at the local grassroots level, resulting in normal consumer rights defense, civil speech, economic disputes involving private enterprises, and online appeals being labeled as “involving organized crime and gang-related crime,” and becoming a tool for the authorities to suppress public opinion and control society.

About Zhao Hongliang: Originally from Yongcheng, Henan Province, he normally resides in Longhua District, Shenzhen, Guangdong. A prominent self-media legal-education influencer, he has a large following on Weibo. Identifying as a “public-spirited person enthusiastic about the law,” he follows legal hot-button events and produces accessible yet highly professional legal analyses, attracting a large number of readers and making him one of the leading bloggers in Weibo’s legal-content network. In addition to pure legal theory, he often shares “invisible rules” or case-handling techniques from criminal-justice practice, which greatly helps ordinary internet users understand China’s criminal-justice system.

Zhao Hongliang worked continuously at Shenzhen Ping An Bank for approximately 21 years. In January 2023, he was criminally detained across provincial borders by Yongcheng police in Henan on the grounds of “jurisdiction based on the place where the result occurred,” after which he left the financial industry. He is still appealing the old “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” case. Although a retrial was decided in April 2025, he came into serious conflict with the collegial panel during three hearings in June of the same year over procedural disputes.