Bishop Stephen Yang Xiangtai, the retired leader of the Handan diocese, died on October 13 at the age of 99, after a long illness.

Bishop Yang was arrested in 1954 and again in 1966, and served more than a decade in labor camps before being released in 1980. He became Bishop of Handan in 1999. In 2011 he consecrated his successor, Bishop Joseph Sun Jigen, secretly, to avoid a ceremony led by a bishop who had been consecrated illicitly.