Liu Jian, born in 1972, is a former criminal-police officer of the Bengbu Public Security Bureau in Anhui Province who became a real-name whistleblower against corruption and case-file destruction inside his own bureau. He was detained in August 2022 and, according to monitoring records, sentenced in September 2023 to five years and six months.
This profile concerns the Bengbu police whistleblower detained in 2022. It is not the 1989 Xiangtan factory worker of the same name.
Background
Liu Jian, born in 1972 in Bengbu, Anhui, served in the People’s Liberation Army from 1990. After demobilization he joined the criminal police of the Bengbu Public Security Bureau in April 1994. In 2009 he took part in the Ministry of Public Security’s second aid-Tibet deployment and served as the team’s leader. He was honored as an “outstanding aid-Tibet cadre” by the Tibet Autonomous Region Public Security Department and as one of Bengbu’s “ten outstanding people’s police,” and was repeatedly commended as a fugitive-capture specialist, advanced individual, and outstanding Communist Party member.
The whistleblowing
In recent years, Liu Jian used the internet to make real-name reports alleging that the Bengbu Public Security Bureau had repeatedly destroyed case files without authorization, turning cases into unsolvable “headless cases” with no remedy for victims — and accusing bureau leadership of shirking responsibility, investigative inaction, and unlawful conduct. In 2020, after repeated online reports, he was assaulted inside the bureau by more than ten bureau leaders, who also destroyed evidence and refused to open a case; the bureau chief stood by watching, according to his account. In February 2020 he was summoned for a talk after reporting that bureau police “do not solve the problems the public raises, but solve the people who raise problems,” and was threatened with expulsion from the Party and dismissal. On March 11, 2022, he witnessed several criminal-police colleagues openly destroying case files at the bureau’s vehicle-washing yard and recorded it on his phone, publicly calling on the bureau leader in charge of criminal police to explain. According to the case records, the problems he reported were later verified by investigation teams sent by the central political-legal commission and the Ministry of Public Security, but only some of those implicated were lightly punished while the main leaders were unaffected — and Liu Jian himself was detained.
Detention, trial, and sentencing
On August 25, 2022, Liu Jian was placed under criminal detention by the traffic police branch of the Bengbu Public Security Bureau on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” He was held at the Bengbu Detention Center, then formally arrested and indicted. On May 16, 2023, his case went to trial at the Bengshan District Court in Bengbu. According to the monitoring record, he was prosecuted on three charges — picking quarrels and provoking troubles, illegal business operations, and illegal possession of state secret documents — and on September 17, 2023, was sentenced to five years and six months, with the term running through February 24, 2028. The record states he is serving the sentence at Bengbu Prison in Anhui.
One early report, published days after the detention, described the arrest differently — as an arrest by the Anhui provincial public security department on subversion charges. Later, more detailed case accounts give the detention-on-suspicion, three-charge indictment, and sentencing sequence described above. The discrepancy is recorded here; the underlying facts remain as reported by each source.
Current status
His sentence term runs through February 24, 2028. The most recent record places him at Bengbu Prison; no independently verified information about his current custody, condition, or release is available, and release is not asserted here.
Sources
The biographical and case details above come from a human-rights case database and from two monitoring/media records: a prisoner-concern organization’s case file and an independent rights-observation outlet’s 2022 report. The charges and proceedings are reported as the sources describe them; no court judgment document was independently reviewed.