However, Wang Quanzhang has not been allowed to be reunited with his family at their home in the capital, Beijing.
Instead he has been escorted to the city of Jinan, 250 miles (400km) away in Shandong province, his wife Li Wenzu says.
She said he had been told to spend 14 days in quarantine as a precaution against the coronavirus.
Ms Li said she feared her husband would be placed under de-facto house arrest and put under surveillance.
Mr Wang was detained along with more than 200 others in a notorious crackdown on Chinese activists in 2015.
He had defended political campaigners and victims of land seizures, as well as followers of the banned spiritual Falun Gong movement.
For more than three years, Mr Wang’s family did not know whether he was dead or alive. He was finally put on trial early last year and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.