(Minghui.org) A 63-year-old woman in Feng County, Shaanxi Province was sentenced to three years and three months in prison on March 26, 2025, for her faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Li Dongyin is currently under residential surveillance at home after she was found to have a brain aneurysm (a bulge in the wall of brain blood vessel) last year. It’s not clear if the authorities plan to take her back into custody to serve time.
Ms. Li was arrested at home at around 3 p.m. on December 28, 2022. The five arresting officers accused her of distributing Falun Gong informational materials, and turned her place upside down. Her 14 Falun Gong books, a laptop computer, two media players, three cell phones, 50 Dafa informational cards, 11 memory cards, dozens of of printouts, and over 1,000 yuan in cash with information about Falun Gong printed on the bills were confiscated. Due to strict information censorship in China, many Falun Gong practitioners produce informational materials at home, including printing information on paper bills, for distribution.
Ms. Li was taken to the Feng County Police Department and interrogated from 5 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. She was released after her son-in-law paid a 10,000-yuan bail bond.
The police summoned Ms. Li and her son-in-law to the police department at around 4 p.m. on December 29, 2022, and ordered her to sign the list of confiscated items. They threatened to get her son-in-law suspended from his job if she didn’t comply. Because his night shift was about to start and he hadn’t slept the night before, Ms. Li didn’t want to hold him any longer at the police station and signed the list.
A day later, December 30, the police called Ms. Li’s son-in-law again and forced him to sign paperwork that listed him as a witness for the prosecution in Ms. Li’s case.
In early March 2023, officer Cai Shuilin of the Feng County Domestic Security Division submitted Ms. Li’s case to the Feng County Procuratorate, which in August 2023 forwarded it to the Jintai District Procuratorate in Baoji City, which oversees Feng County.
Ms. Li’s two lawyers asked that the case against her be dropped, since she had broken no law by practicing Falun Gong. Prosecutor Wang Lei of the Jintai District Procuratorate still indicted her and forwarded her case to the Jintai District Court. Her lawyers proceeded to file complaints against the Feng County Police Department, the Jintai District Procuratorate, and the Feng County Procuratorate for persecuting her for her faith.
Ms. Li was taken back into custody at the Fufeng County Detention Center in Baoji on October 18, 2023, then transferred to the Qishan County Detention Center around January 2024.
Ms. Li was tried on March 12, 2024. Her lawyers argued during the trial that no law in China criminalizes Falun Gong, and demanded her acquittal. Judges Bai Mingying, Wei Wei, and Liu Yan sentenced her to three years and three months in prison with a 13,000-yuan fine on March 26, 2025.
As Ms. Li was found to have brain bleeding due to an aneurysm in July 2024, she was released on residential surveillance. Her two daughters are now taking care of her.
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