Ying Yong (1957– )
Ying Yong is a cadre grown inside the political-legal system itself — police, political-legal commissions, discipline inspection, the presidencies of two provincial high courts, then Mayor of Shanghai — and is counted among Xi Jinping's New Zhijiang Army. On 13 February 2020, three weeks into the Wuhan lockdown, he succeeded the removed Jiang Chaoliang as Party secretary of Hubei and became the provincial top official of the lockdown's harshest phase: province-wide 24-hour strictest closed management of communities, Wuhan's dragnet screening missing not one person, and the centralised quarantine of the four categories all landed on his watch, until the lockdown lifted on 8 April. This file pins the timeline down: Li Wenliang's admonition (3 January) and death (7 February), the lockdown decision (23 January) and the first Fangcang hospital (5 February) all predate his arrival and are not entered under his name; entered under his name are the intensity of enforcement after 13 February, the lockdown abuses documented by human-rights organisations, the harassment of redress seekers, and the blank of zero investigations and zero accountability across his two years. In 2022 he transited through a vice-chairmanship of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee, became deputy procurator-general that September, and in March 2023 rose to Procurator-General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate — the lockdown's commanding official paid no professional price at all, and instead entered the very top of the national judicial system.
1. Xianju origins: a complete political-legal career, from police station to two provincial high courts
Ying Yong was born in November 1957 in Xianju County, Taizhou, Zhejiang. He began work in December 1976 and joined the Party in April 1979; his law credentials are from the China University of Political Science and Law and Hangzhou University, per his public biography. His start was at county level: Huangyan County's industry bureau and a local police station, then head of Chengguan town, then up the police and political-legal line — Taizhou's public security chief and municipal Political and Legal Affairs Commission secretary, then Shaoxing's public security chief and commission secretary in the same pairing. In 1995 he rose to the province as deputy head of the Zhejiang public security department, concurrently heading the provincial anti-drug office and its counter-terrorism work. In 2003 he moved to deputy secretary of the provincial discipline inspection commission and head of the provincial supervision department. The Zhejiang Party secretary of that period was Xi Jinping, and political observers accordingly count Ying among the so-called "New Zhijiang Army" — the cadre group Xi promoted during his Zhejiang years. That factional label, recorded here as observers' analysis, is a key to the two leaps he took after 2020.
In November 2006 he was appointed president of the Zhejiang Provincial High Court (some accounts date his formal assumption of the post to early 2007; this file uses "appointed November 2006, in post around the turn of 2007"); in January 2008 he moved to president of the Shanghai High Court. From police chief and political-legal secretary, through discipline inspection and supervision, to president of two provincial high courts, he had occupied almost every key chair on the political-legal line. Such a record is rare among provincial leaders: he was not an economics cadre but a man grown inside the political-legal system itself. In April 2013 he became a Shanghai standing-committee member and head of the municipal organisation department, in charge of cadres; in 2014 deputy Party secretary; and in September 2016 concurrently executive vice mayor — a pairing read at the time as the standard preparation for the mayoralty. On 20 January 2017 he was elected Mayor of Shanghai.
In three Shanghai years his public image was that of a low-key, pragmatic administrator of strong executive capacity. No major human-rights event centred on him personally entered the international record from the Shanghai tenure, and this file says so plainly, placing its weight on 2020: a mayor with a complete political-legal record, an organisation-work background and a reputation as a Xi confidant was parachuted into Hubei at the epidemic's most dangerous moment — and the centre chose him for exactly that record: a man who knew the political-legal system, knew organisational control, and could tighten a whole province's control machinery to its limit within days.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Ying Yong" (Chinese and English versions) and Xinhua's official biography of 11 March 2023 (born November 1957; work from December 1976; Party membership April 1979; the Huangyan, Taizhou and Shaoxing police and political-legal posts; deputy provincial police chief 1995; discipline-inspection deputy secretary and supervision head 2003; Zhejiang High Court president November 2006; Shanghai High Court president January 2008; organisation department head 2013; deputy Party secretary 2014; executive vice mayor 2016; Mayor of Shanghai 20 January 2017; the "New Zhijiang Army" label as observers' usage).
2. January to 12 February 2020: what happened before he arrived — pin this line down first
In late December 2019 an unexplained pneumonia appeared in Wuhan. On 30 December 2019 Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, forwarded a suspected-SARS diagnostic report in a classmates' chat group, warning friends and family to take precautions. On 3 January 2020 the Wuhan Public Security Bureau summoned and admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet", and he signed the admonition letter; eight doctors in all were admonished in the same batch, on public reporting. Around 8 January Li was infected in the course of his work; in the early hours of 7 February he died, aged thirty-four, in a national storm of grief and anger. At 10 a.m. on 23 January 2020 Wuhan was locked down — the airport and railway exit channels closed, city buses and metro stopped — and the closure then spread to every city in Hubei. The lockdown decision was approved at the centre and executed by Hubei's and Wuhan's leadership of the time: Hubei Party secretary Jiang Chaoliang and Wuhan Party secretary Ma Guoqiang. Through late January and early February, Hubei's medical system was overwhelmed to collapse and news of patients unable to get care poured out; on 5 February Wuhan's first Fangcang hospitals (the Jianghan and Wuchang shelter hospitals) opened for mild cases. Around 6 and 9 February the citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin successively disappeared in Wuhan.
Compress the line once more: the decision to admonish Li Wenliang — 3 January 2020, Wuhan Public Security Bureau, under Wuhan and Hubei leaders Ma Guoqiang and Jiang Chaoliang; the lockdown decision — 23 January, the same hands; the creation of the Fangcang — 5 February, the same hands. Ying Yong was still Mayor of Shanghai. This file enters not one of those three accounts under his name. On 19 March 2020 the official investigation's conclusion was published and the Wuhan police revoked Li's admonition and apologised — by then Ying had been in post for over a month, and the revocation issued in the Wuhan police's name was a corrective act that occurred during his tenure; but the admonition's origins were not his, and this file records the two halves separately: the admonition is not charged to him; the revocation happened on his watch.
The line also protects accuracy in the other direction: his predecessors' faults do not cancel his account. The Hubei he took over on 13 February had been locked down for three weeks, its medical run unrelieved, its public fear at its peak. What he did after taking over, what he escalated, how the abuses happened and how the aftermath was closed out — those are the questions this page exists to answer.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Li Wenliang" (the 30 December 2019 forwarding; the Wuhan police admonition of 3 January 2020; death on 7 February 2020; the revocation and apology of 19 March 2020); the Oxford University Press timeline of the Wuhan outbreak (Xi Jinping's 22 January approval of closing the exit channels; the lockdown at 10 a.m. on 23 January; the first Fangcang hospitals opening on 5 February); Xinhua and Caixin records of Jiang Chaoliang's and Ma Guoqiang's posts at the time.
3. The 13 February reshuffle: the command he took over, and the first week's numbers
On 13 February 2020 the Party centre announced that Jiang Chaoliang would no longer serve as Hubei Party secretary and that Ying Yong would succeed him; that Ma Guoqiang would no longer serve as Wuhan Party secretary and that Jinan's mayor Wang Zhonglin would succeed him. The same day, Hubei's switch to clinical-diagnosis counting added 14,840 confirmed cases in a single day, the cumulative figures jumped, and the province's death toll climbed. International media (the Associated Press, Bloomberg and others) read the personnel move uniformly as dismissal by reshuffle: the centre, dissatisfied with Hubei's early suppression of information and slow response, removed the two chiefs and parachuted in Ying — a man of political-legal and organisational background — to take over the war. The Hubei he faced had been locked down for three weeks; the virus was still spreading in communities; hospital beds were in desperate shortage; and large numbers of suspected patients stranded at home were driving household-cluster infections.
The general line Hubei executed after his arrival was the centre's eight characters: "collect all who should be collected, treat all who should be treated" — every person in the four categories of confirmed, suspected, febrile and close-contact was to be centrally admitted or quarantined, none left at home. After his arrival the will to execute that line visibly hardened: in public remarks he demanded that no patient be left stranded at home, and a dragnet screening of the whole province followed. The line had a real epidemiological logic — isolating sources of infection — and this file does not deny it. What this file records is the manner and the cost of execution: when "not one may be missed" becomes a death-order to the grassroots, execution lands in the form of sealed doors, broken doors, forced removals and the untended left inside sealed houses. The choice and toleration of the manner sat at the provincial command level — his level.
One personnel sequel deserves keeping: Jiang Chaoliang, once removed, long held no public post before surfacing in sinecure-type positions such as a vice-chairmanship of the NPC Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee (on public reporting); Ma Guoqiang likewise faded. In other words, the centre's handling of the epidemic's early phase was completed by changing the men — the change itself was the accountability, with no public investigation to follow into who suppressed what news in January or who signed the admonition letters. That framework was set before Ying arrived, and he was its beneficiary-executor: his mission was to win, not to investigate. Only with that understood can one understand why, in his two Hubei years, no public investigation report into lockdown abuses ever appeared in Hubei.
Sources: Xinhua, 13 February 2020, on the adjustment of Hubei's principal leading posts (Ying Yong succeeding Jiang Chaoliang, Wang Zhonglin succeeding Ma Guoqiang); Bloomberg / Associated Press reporting of 14 February 2020 (the two chiefs removed; the clinical-diagnosis change adding 14,840 cases in a day); the Shenzhen Daily's Xinhua report of 14 February 2020.
4. Mid-February to 8 April: the strictest sealing landed on his watch
The lockdown's harshest phase was exactly his tenure. Wuhan's closed management of residential communities was first announced on 11 February (two days before his arrival, in a Wuhan command notice on closed management of housing compounds); after his arrival the sealing was pushed province-wide and to its extreme: in mid-February 2020 Hubei issued a notice imposing the strictest 24-hour closed management on every village group, community, compound and residential point in the province, urban and rural — no resident out except for medical care or epidemic work, supplies distributed centrally by the community; and around 17–19 February Wuhan ran a three-day concentrated dragnet screening, checking the four categories household by household under the official formula "not one household missed, not one person missed". Vehicle bans, locked stairwell doors, community checkpoints and grid workers registering temperatures door by door became the province's daily life. That repertoire was later called the prototype of Chinese-style lockdown; its full formation period was mid-February to early April 2020, its provincial top official Ying Yong and its Wuhan-level official Wang Zhonglin.
Centralised quarantine expanded in step. The Fangcang hospitals grew from the two that existed before his arrival to more than a dozen, with total beds past ten thousand; schools, hotels and stadiums requisitioned as quarantine sites reached their peak scale during his tenure. Putting mild cases together in gymnasiums had a medical rationale of isolation and triage, and this file records that function; it also records the other side of execution: the four categories included many people with only a fever or a contact history; the forced character of the removals, the conditions of the sites, and cases of the elderly and children taken away alone were extensively recorded in the social media of the time and in later accounts — but most individual cases cannot be verified one by one independently, and this file records them as a multiply-reported pattern of execution, without writing any single unverified case as a settled conclusion.
The lifting of the lockdown also fell in his tenure: on 10 March 2020 the last Fangcang closed; at midnight on 8 April the Wuhan exit channels reopened, ending a seventy-six-day lockdown. Hubei's official death toll froze during the lockdown in the low three thousands (official figures; on 17 April 2020 Wuhan revised its cumulative death toll upward by 1,290, to 3,869 — the revision occurred during his tenure, is recorded here on the official revised figures, with the note that outside estimates of the true death toll have long run higher than the official one and that no conditions for independent checking exist). After 8 April his role turned from lockdown command to "post-epidemic revival", but the institutional legacy of grid management, health codes and normalised testing was converted, during his tenure, from a wartime mechanism into an everyday one.
Sources: the Oxford University Press Wuhan timeline and Wikipedia on the Chinese government's Covid response (the 23 January lockdown, the first Fangcang on 5 February, Wuhan's reopening on 8 April); scholarly accounts of the Wuhan lockdown (closed management of communities and residences lasting to 8 April; the principle of centralised quarantine of the confirmed, suspected, febrile and close-contact categories; all Fangcang closed by 10 March); Hubei's and Wuhan's official notices of mid-February 2020 on closed management and dragnet screening, as relayed in public reporting; Wuhan's death-toll revision of 17 April 2020 (official figures).
5. The abuse record under lockdown: what the human-rights organisations wrote, and where the boundary lies
Human Rights Watch, in its report of 30 January 2020 and its follow-up of January 2021, recorded a set of abuses committed in the lockdown's name: officials filmed sealing residents' doors shut to stop them leaving; people chained to metal posts for supposedly violating stay-at-home orders; residents filmed shouting in despair from their windows; and harms from the authorities' failure to ensure food, medical care and caregiving during quarantine — including the case of a teenager with cerebral palsy who died unattended while his family was in forced quarantine (that case occurred in Hubei at the end of January 2020, before Ying's arrival, and this file notes it on the timeline: it belongs to the lockdown pattern's abuses, not to the cases of Ying's tenure). Human Rights Watch also set out the standard: under international human-rights law, public-health restrictions must be lawful, necessary and proportionate, and during quarantine a government bears an absolute obligation to ensure food, water, health care and caregiving support. Measured against that standard, a substantial part of the lockdown's execution constituted abuse.
This file attributes those records in two layers. Layer one, the case layer: each case's place and ordering level differ, most cannot be traced to a provincial directive, and this file does not indict each case to Ying personally; those predating 13 February (such as the cerebral-palsy teenager) are expressly not charged to him. Layer two, the system layer: after mid-February 2020 the notices for the province's strictest sealing issued from the provincial command system he led; grassroots executors faced a death-order of "not one missed" under accountability pressure; sealed doors, forced removals and failures of care were the foreseeable results of that high-pressure execution; and during his tenure there was never any public correction, investigation or punishment for abusive execution. A provincial top official's responsibility for a pattern of execution lies not in his having sealed any door with his own hands, but in the pattern being set by his system, the abuses being executed by his system, and the silence afterwards being his system's. This file attributes at that layer, and states the layer's logic openly for the reader to judge.
Information control likewise continued on his watch: epidemic-related reporting and social-media content went on being deleted, and appeals for help and critical records vanished in quantity. Chinese Human Rights Defenders counted at least 325 netizens punished for supposed epidemic rumours by 31 January 2020 alone (that figure's period predates his arrival and is used here as background only, not counted into his tenure). The speech case that can be placed exactly in his tenure is on the citizen-journalist line: on 14 May 2020 Zhang Zhan, who had been recording the lockdown on the ground in Wuhan, was seized in Wuhan and later taken to Shanghai, where she was sentenced to four years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble — the seizure in Wuhan, in time inside his Hubei tenure, the trial in Shanghai. The disappearances of Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi fell in early February, before his arrival; Section 2 has already recorded them separately, and they are not mixed into his account.
Sources: Human Rights Watch, "China: Respect Rights in Coronavirus Response", 30 January 2020, and "China: Seekers of Covid-19 Redress Harassed", 6 January 2021 (sealed doors and chaining; the standards for quarantine obligations; the cases of Zhang Hai and Yang Min); the Chinese Human Rights Defenders tally (at least 325 netizens punished by 31 January 2020, via CIVICUS Monitor); public reporting on the Zhang Zhan case (seized in Wuhan on 14 May 2020; tried and sentenced to four years in Shanghai). The cerebral-palsy teenager case's timing (late January 2020) is per Human Rights Watch and contemporary reporting, before Ying's arrival.
6. The redress seekers and the silent aftermath: two years of accountability blank on his watch
After the lockdown ended, the real test was the aftermath. Wuhan resident Zhang Hai's father contracted Covid in hospital, where he had gone for a broken leg, and died; Zhang Hai spoke publicly and in April 2020 sued the Wuhan and Hubei authorities, arguing that had the government not downplayed the virus his father would not have been infected. Thereafter he was persistently harassed: followed in the street, his social-media accounts suspended, warned by police that he would be detained if he kept speaking out. Resident Yang Min's twenty-four-year-old daughter died of Covid contracted in hospital; after the reopening Yang protested in the street and petitioned government offices, demanding disclosure of what the government had known early on; police repeatedly blocked her, and community officials locked her compound's gates to stop her leaving. Those records come from Human Rights Watch's January 2021 report, and every date in them falls inside Ying Yong's Hubei tenure: the redress was sought in the Hubei he governed, and the machine harassing the seekers was the machine under him. As provincial Party secretary he never publicly answered a single claim, and never opened a single investigation.
Lay out the accountability blank in full: for the early suppression of information, no public investigation (only Jiang Chaoliang and Ma Guoqiang changed out); for Li Wenliang's admonition, an investigation that stopped at the Wuhan police level, closing with the admonition's revocation; for abuses in the lockdown's execution, no public investigation, punishment or compensation mechanism of any kind; for the death toll, no channel for independent verification of outside doubts was ever opened. Ying was not the blank's originator — no investigation was the general line set at the centre — but he was the blank's executor and maintainer in Hubei: in his two years the province's official narrative held only "heroic people, great anti-epidemic struggle", and any attempt to point the camera at the cost was pressed down by the propaganda and stability systems under him. At the national anti-epidemic commendation conference of September 2020, Hubei's and Wuhan's epidemic fight was frozen into a victory narrative; he himself rose steadily thereafter. This file records the causal chain as it stands: the man who executed the harshest phase of the lockdown paid no professional price at all, and instead entered the top of the national judicial system because of it.
Sources: Human Rights Watch, 6 January 2021, "China: Seekers of Covid-19 Redress Harassed" (Zhang Hai's April 2020 suit against the Wuhan authorities and the harassment that followed; Yang Min blocked in her protests and her compound gates locked); the official investigation conclusion of 19 March 2020 revoking Li Wenliang's admonition (National Supervisory Commission investigation team); public reporting of the national anti-epidemic commendation conference of 8 September 2020.
7. Late Hubei and departure: from wartime secretary to an NPC committee
From the second half of 2020 to March 2022 Ying remained Hubei Party secretary (concurrently chairman of the provincial people's congress standing committee, elected June 2020), governing post-epidemic revival and normalised prevention and control. In that period Hubei executed the nationally uniform dynamic zero-Covid policy; mass testing, health-code passage rules and localised lockdowns became routine — and the prototype of that normalised machinery was exactly the wartime machinery whose formation he had directed from February to April 2020. This file's record of the period stays brief: no major new event centred on him personally entered the international record, but the institutional continuation is itself the record.
On 29 March 2022, for reasons of age (the official formula), he ceased to serve as Hubei Party secretary, succeeded by Wang Menghui. On 20 April 2022 he became a vice-chair of the Constitution and Law Committee of the Thirteenth National People's Congress — the "NPC sinecure" step mentioned in the assignment brief and in some reporting, here verified as accurate. Barely four months later, on 2 September 2022, the NPC Standing Committee appointed him deputy procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (minister rank) and a first-level chief procurator; in October he was elected to the 20th Central Committee. The turn from an NPC committee to the SPP's number-two chair shows that the April arrangement was only a transit: a sixty-five-year-old lockdown commander was placed back into the political-legal system he came from, and into the antechamber of the Procurator-Generalship.
Sources: Wikipedia (Chinese), "Ying Yong" (ceasing as Hubei Party secretary on 29 March 2022; vice-chair of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee on 20 April 2022; deputy procurator-general and first-level chief procurator on 2 September 2022; 20th Central Committee member); Xinhua, 29 March 2022, on the Hubei adjustment; Caixin Global, 5 September 2022 (deputy procurator-general and deputy Party secretary of the SPP).
8. 2023, at the head of the Supreme People's Procuratorate: the lockdown commander becomes Chief Procurator
On 11 March 2023 the first session of the Fourteenth National People's Congress elected Ying Yong Procurator-General of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, succeeding Zhang Jun, who moved to preside over the Supreme People's Court. He became Chief Procurator, rose to deputy-state rank, and entered the ranks of the Party-and-state leadership. In office he set the procuratorate's public agenda around "handling every case with high quality and efficiency". On the curriculum vitae the step fits his early political-legal record seamlessly: police, political-legal commissions, discipline inspection, courts, and now the procuratorate — of the four political-legal houses he had headed three at provincial level, and now he sat at the national top of the fourth.
This file must place that step on the same page as 2020, because that juxtaposition is exactly why he is listed in the people files: from February to April 2020 he was the top official of the province executing China's harshest lockdown, with the lockdown's abuses on record, the harassment of redress seekers on record, and the accountability blank on record; three years later he became the top official of the national procuratorial system — the organ whose statutory duties include, precisely, supervising administrative law enforcement, protecting citizens' rights, and receiving accusations and petitions. A man who never opened a single investigation into lockdown abuses now sits at the top of the system that receives the nation's petitions. That is not this file's rhetoric; it is a juxtaposition of facts of office, and readers will judge for themselves.
How the procuratorial system under his procurator-generalship has handled petitions connected with the 2020 lockdown is a matter of no public record, and this file records it as such.
Sources: Xinhua, 11 March 2023 (Ying Yong elected Procurator-General of the SPP; official biography); the Chinese government portal's English report of 11 March 2023; the SPP's official leadership list (Ying Yong as Party secretary, Procurator-General and Chief Procurator).
9. Sanctions check: no public sanctions record
The finding is: no public sanctions record. As of this file's checking, no designation of Ying Yong personally was found in the public lists of OFAC, the EU, the UK or Canada. International accountability debate over Covid concentrated on origins tracing and WHO cooperation, and never issued in personal sanctions against any Chinese provincial lockdown official. Abroad judicially, no court in any country is recorded as having accepted a case against him personally: no public record. Jiang Chaoliang, Ma Guoqiang and Wang Zhonglin, who share the 2020 chain of responsibility with him, likewise have no sanctions or judicial record of any kind — the only difference is in career: the first two faded; he rose.
Sources: checking of the public sanctions lists of OFAC, the EU, the UK and the Canadian government (as of October 2026: no personal designation of Ying Yong found).
10. Our assessment: a change of commanders is not accountability, and promotion is even less
This site's assessment of this page begins by repeating two boundaries, because this page is the easiest to misread in both directions. Read too heavily: Li Wenliang's admonition was not signed by him, the lockdown decision was not made by him, the first Fangcang was not opened by him — charging those to him would write off Jiang Chaoliang, Ma Guoqiang and the Wuhan police, and this site will not do it. Read too lightly: he was "only executing central policy" — but many places executed the same central policy, and the place where execution became "the strictest 24-hour sealing of a whole province, dragnet screening missing not one person, abuses on record with zero investigation and zero punishment" was the Hubei of his tenure. An executor bears an independent responsibility for the intensity of execution and for the silence afterwards, and that responsibility does not dissolve because the policy came from the centre.
The assessment, tied to the facts, is this. First, the core fact of his page is not any single order but one complete line: the strictest sealing took shape in his tenure (February–April 2020); the abuse record occurred in his tenure (Human Rights Watch's documentation); the harassment of redress seekers continued in his tenure (the April 2020 suit, the warnings that followed); the accountability blank was maintained in his tenure (not one investigation in two years); and the promotion was paid out on his person (Procurator-General in 2023). Five links, every one of them on public record, every one of them with his office present. Second, that line demonstrates the system's standard way of handling disaster responsibility: for the early failures, replace the men instead of investigating; for the executors, substitute a victory narrative for scrutiny; for the victims, substitute stability maintenance for compensation. The three together guarantee that when the next disaster comes the machine will run the same way — and indeed, in Shanghai's 2022 lockdown the full repertoire of grids, sealed doors and centralised quarantine was replayed exactly, by then nothing to do with him, yet descended from the prototype whose formation he directed. Third, on his heading of the SPP this site records only the juxtaposition of offices, without imputation of motive: that the system's supervisor should be its most successful executor tells us, in itself, that in this system thorough lockdown execution was never a stain; it was a credential.
Ying Yong is still in the Procurator-General's office today. More than six years have passed since the Wuhan lockdown, and no official document has ever answered the most basic questions: who suppressed the news in January; how many non-Covid patients died inside the lockdown; what happened behind the sealed doors. This site records his name and that complete line so that those questions remain attached, in the archive, to one concrete tenure: 13 February 2020 to 29 March 2022, Party secretary of Hubei, Ying Yong.
Sources: this section is this site's assessment on the facts cited in the body; the facts are at Section 2 (the pre-arrival timeline), Section 4 (the strictest-sealing period), Section 5 (the abuses and the Zhang Zhan case), Section 6 (the redress seekers and the accountability blank) and Sections 7–8 (the departure, the NPC post and the rise to the SPP).
Sources
- Xinhua and the official biography: the 11 March 2023 report of Ying Yong's election as Procurator-General of the SPP (born November 1957; work from December 1976; Party membership April 1979; 20th Central Committee member); the Chinese government portal's report of 11 March 2023; the SPP's official leadership list.
- Wikipedia, "Ying Yong" (Chinese and English versions): Xianju birth; law degrees from the China University of Political Science and Law and Hangzhou University; the Huangyan industry bureau and police station; Chengguan town head; the Taizhou and Shaoxing public-security chief and political-legal secretary posts; deputy Zhejiang police chief from 1995, concurrently anti-drug and counter-terrorism head; discipline-inspection deputy secretary and supervision head from 2003 (during Xi Jinping's Zhejiang Party secretaryship; the "New Zhijiang Army" label as observers' usage); Zhejiang High Court president November 2006; Shanghai High Court president January 2008; Shanghai organisation department head April 2013; deputy Party secretary 2014; executive vice mayor September 2016; Mayor of Shanghai 20 January 2017.
- Wikipedia (Chinese), "Ying Yong": Hubei Party secretary from 13 February 2020; provincial people's congress standing-committee chairman from June 2020; ceasing as Hubei Party secretary on 29 March 2022 (age reasons); vice-chair of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee on 20 April 2022; deputy procurator-general and first-level chief procurator on 2 September 2022; Procurator-General on 11 March 2023, succeeding Zhang Jun.
- Xinhua, 13 February 2020: the adjustment of Hubei's principal posts (Ying Yong succeeding Jiang Chaoliang, Wang Zhonglin succeeding Ma Guoqiang); Bloomberg / Associated Press, 14 February 2020 (the two chiefs removed; 14,840 cases added in a day on the clinical-diagnosis change); Xinhua, 29 March 2022, on the Hubei adjustment.
- Oxford University Press, "A chronology of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan" (2024): approval on 22 January 2020 of closing the exit channels from Wuhan and Hubei; the lockdown at 10 a.m. on 23 January; the first Fangcang hospitals (Jianghan, 1,600 beds; Wuchang, 800 beds) opening on 5 February, among other nodes.
- Wikipedia, "Li Wenliang": the 30 December 2019 forwarding of the diagnostic report; the Wuhan Public Security Bureau admonition of 3 January 2020; death on 7 February 2020; the Wuhan police revocation of the admonition and apology of 19 March 2020; the posthumous May Fourth Medal.
- Wikipedia on the Chinese government's Covid response, and scholarly lockdown studies: the 23 January lockdown and strict quarantines; the large temporary hospitals of 5 February; closed management of communities and residences lasting until Wuhan's reopening on 8 April 2020; the principle of centralised quarantine of the confirmed, suspected, febrile and close-contact categories; all Fangcang hospitals closed by 10 March.
- Human Rights Watch: "China: Respect Rights in Coronavirus Response", 30 January 2020 (the lawfulness, necessity and proportionality standards and the obligations during quarantine; discrimination against Hubei residents and information leaks); "China: Seekers of Covid-19 Redress Harassed", 6 January 2021 (the sealed-door and chaining records; Zhang Hai's April 2020 suit and the harassment that followed; Yang Min blocked in protesting and her compound gates locked; the official winning narrative suppressing accountability).
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders tally (via CIVICUS Monitor): at least 325 netizens punished over epidemic speech by 31 January 2020 (administrative detentions of three to fifteen days and other penalties).
- Caixin Global, 5 September 2022: Ying Yong named deputy procurator-general, deputy Party secretary and first-level chief procurator of the SPP (Procurator-General Zhang Jun at the time).
- Public reporting on the Zhang Zhan case: travel to Wuhan in February 2020 to record the lockdown; seized in Wuhan on 14 May 2020; sentenced in Shanghai to four years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
- Public sanctions lists of OFAC, the EU, the UK and the Canadian government, checked October 2026: no personal designation of Ying Yong found.
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