Let’s get the sequence clear first.
Media reports on September 19 said Zheng Shuai, the person in actual control of Shanghai Maisi Technology, was seized by police from Shaoyang County in Hunan in 2024 in a cross-province operation. Investigators said they opened the case because software he developed had functions to bypass the internet firewall and was suspected of involving related crimes. The report described this kind of out-of-province arrest as “ocean fishing”-style law enforcement.
Zheng Shuai’s family said Yin Xiangfeng, then deputy county head of Shaoyang County and head of its Public Security Bureau, personally told them that if Zheng could come up with 100 million yuan, he could be put under residential surveillance at a designated location, then released on bail pending trial, and later the case could even end without prosecution. The family said Zheng raised the 100 million yuan and paid it, and he was then granted bail pending trial.
But that was not the end of it. The report also said he was confined for months in a hotel in Shaoyang County. Later, case handlers allegedly said that if bail was to be arranged for other people tied to the same case, more money would have to be transferred. Zheng Shuai did not keep paying, and audio recordings of the back-and-forth, along with surveillance video, later spread online.
The accountability steps came later, against the backdrop of a wider clean-up campaign. In March 2025, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security launched a special campaign targeting “ocean fishing”-style enforcement. Then in July 2025, the Standing Committee of the Shaoyang County People’s Congress voted to remove Yin Xiangfeng from his posts as deputy county head and police chief. Tang Zhanxiong, a deputy head of the county Public Security Bureau, was removed as well.
The case itself is still not over. The Shaoyang County court has already held a hearing in Zheng Shuai’s case, but there is still no verdict. Zheng has now been held for nearly 1,000 days. This year, the Shaoyang County procuratorate twice sent the county court formal notices to correct the problem of excessive detention beyond the legal time limit, but the case is still being processed. When people talk about this kind of thing, they usually do not go into big principles. They just say one thing: once it drags on this long, the person involved and the whole family suffer badly.
