[6] In September 2004, Hao sued the Dongcheng District Taxation Bureau for its inaction in dealing with his complaint against the then Beijing Railway Administration’s refusal to issue tax receipts for purchases he made on trains.
[11]: 131 Numerous central government media organizations including CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, and people.com.cn gave positive coverage to Hao's efforts.
[14][17] He was formally arrested on 17 January 2020 upon the approval from the local prosecution with two charges, adding ‘libel’ (Chinese: 诽谤; pinyin: Fěibàng) besides the already accused ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’.
[20][21] On 20 July 2023, after being detained on remand for over 1,300 days, Hao was convicted of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ and ‘fraud’ by the Dingxiang County People’s Court and was given a concurrent sentence of fixed-term imprisonment for nine years, with a fine of 350,000 Chinese yuan.
[5][22][23][24] In separate terms, the court found him guilty of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ for his reposts and comments on several social media platforms that deemed ‘containing false information’ and ‘being widely spread over the internet, causing a large number of views, reposts, and comments’, which ‘obscured the facts’; the court found him guilty of ‘fraud’ for the concealment of his non-practising lawyer status in his past two provisions of legal consultancy services in 2013 and 2017.
[5][23] Hao’s judgement was not proclaimed in public, which is an explicit violation of Article 202 of the Criminal Procedure Law,[iii] nor was it sent to his family or published on the internet, which is noted by some media to be the ‘new normality’ in mainland China.