第99案 | 丁元德Case 99 | Ding Yuande
清晨五六点，十多名执法人员冲进山东五莲县的一片茶园，把种茶的丁元德和马瑞梅夫妇带走，没有出示逮捕证。妻子12天后被取保放回家，警察随即上门把话挑明：你儿子在柏林喊得越响，你丈夫判得越重。丈夫在看守所里八个月见不到一个家人，最后被判三年——而判他的那份文书，公众至今没有见过一个字。八个月后，欧洲议会通过了一份以这个茶农姓名命名的决议；近三年后，他的三年刑期在纸面上已经届满，可他到底出没出狱，公开世界里没有一个人能确认。Between five and six in the morning, more than ten officers stormed a tea plantation in Wulian County, Shandong, and took away the tea farmers Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei — without a warrant. The wife was released on bail twelve days later, and police then called at her door to make the terms plain: the louder your son campaigns in Berlin, the heavier your husband's sentence. The husband spent eight months in a detention centre without seeing a single member of his family, and was sentenced to three years — in a judgment the public has never seen one word of. Eight months after the arrest, the European Parliament adopted a resolution bearing this tea farmer's name. Nearly three years later his three-year term has expired on paper, yet whether he has ever walked out of prison is something no one in the public world can confirm.
A couple who grew tea
The archive of Ding Yuande's case has to begin in a tea field in Rizhao, Shandong — because the most striking thing about this case is how ordinary the people at its centre are. He was not a public figure, not an activist by profession, but a farmer who grew tea with his wife in their village; his case reached the title of a European Parliament resolution not through his own fame but through his son in Berlin.
The framework facts that can be confirmed are these. Ding Yuande, of Yanjiazhuang village in Wulian County, Rizhao, and his wife Ma Ruimei were both Falun Gong practitioners who made their living from a tea plantation. Rizhao, on Shandong's south-eastern coast, is one of northern China's important green-tea regions; "Rizhao green tea" is a protected local product, Wulian County is one of its main producing areas, and the tea plantation was at once this couple's livelihood and their home. Motion for a resolution B9-0079/2024 in the European Parliament records that on 12 May 2023 police "stormed their tea plantation in the village of Yanjiazhuang in China's Shandong province" and arrested them; the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, a human rights organisation headquartered in Göttingen, Germany) describes Ding in its statement as a Falun Gong practitioner "from Wulian County, Rizhao City". Village and county thus align: Yanjiazhuang lies within Wulian County, which belongs to Rizhao — which also explains why his case was heard by the Wulian County People's Court rather than another court in Rizhao.
The limits of the record must be stated first. The couple's dates of birth appear only in Bitter Winter magazine's July 2023 interview feature on their son Ding Lebin: Ding Yuande born 19 October 1963, Ma Ruimei born 7 October 1967. Bitter Winter is a magazine based in Italy specialising in religious-freedom reporting; it is sympathetic to persecuted faith communities but is not run by the Falun Gong side. The information in that feature, however, came from the son's own account, so this page grades the two birth dates as "family account, published by Bitter Winter": on that basis Ding was 59 when arrested and 60 when sentenced, and Ma was 55 when arrested. Their education, the size of their tea operation, when they began practising Falun Gong, and whether they had previously been harassed or punished are all matters of no public record, and this page does not assemble them from fragments. The Falun Dafa Information Center, introducing the case, states that Ding was arrested "for possessing Falun Gong books and flyers" — that is the affiliated sources' account of the grounds for arrest, used here with its attribution; the Chinese authorities have never published any document in this case, and there is no way to check from outside what police actually carried away from the scene.
The family's third member is the key to the case's second half. Ding Lebin, the couple's son, left China for Germany in 2012 and has lived in Berlin ever since, for over a decade. A notice published by the German Falun Dafa Association on Minghui in January 2026 records that he had earlier studied at the Sino-German College of Tongji University in Shanghai and had submitted a statement to Minghui in 2005 resuming his practice of Falun Dafa — a detail appearing only in that notice, recorded here with its attribution. His present occupation is described inconsistently: the Falun Dafa Information Center calls him in its Geneva reporting "a law student in Berlin", and in another report "a human rights advocate and freelance China researcher". This page certifies neither title and records only what all sources share: he is a Berlin resident, a Falun Gong practitioner, and the international campaigner for his parents' case. As early as 2019, before anything had happened to his parents, the German newspaper Donaukurier had interviewed him about the persecution of Falun Gong in general. He can hardly have imagined that four years later the story he would be telling would be his own parents'.
The timing of the couple's arrest fell just before the most sensitive date in the Falun Gong calendar. The 13th of May is observed by practitioners as World Falun Dafa Day, marking the public introduction of Falun Gong in 1992. Motion B9-0067/2024 records that the arrest "was part of a mass arrest of roughly 70 Falun Gong practitioners in the Shandong province ahead of World Falun Dafa Day on May 13"; the Falun Dafa Information Center likewise states that about 70 practitioners were detained around Rizhao as part of "a province-wide mass arrest campaign" around that date. The provenance of the figure of roughly 70 must be stated plainly: it originates in Falun Gong-side counts, was relayed by European Parliament motion drafts with the attribution "according to Falun Gong sources", and does not appear in the resolution as adopted. This page accordingly grades "about 70" as a Falun Gong-affiliated figure relayed with attribution in motion drafts, not as a confirmed fact. What can be confirmed as a framework is that in the days around 12 May 2023 there was a sweep of some scale against Falun Gong practitioners in the Rizhao area, and that the Dings were two of those taken — a framework supported by the later record of concentrated trials in the same court, where 21 further Rizhao practitioners were tried and sentenced in December 2023 (see below).
Early morning, 12 May 2023: the arrest at the tea plantation
Between five and six in the morning on 12 May 2023, more than ten law-enforcement officers stormed the tea plantation of Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei and took both of them away. The detail of that scene comes from Bitter Winter's interview with their son: Ding Lebin said that in the early morning more than ten officers stormed his parents' tea plantation. Paragraph C of the adopted European Parliament resolution confirms the core fact of the arrest — "on 12 May 2023 Falun Gong practitioners Mr Ding Yuande and his wife Ms Ma Ruimei were arrested without a warrant". The words "without a warrant" stand in a formal resolution of the European Parliament; they are the first anchor of this case's procedural record. This is not a family's allegation but a statement of case fact adopted in a European legislative text. The discipline of the matter must also be stated: a resolution is a political and legal position document, and the factual paragraphs on which it rests derive mainly from the case materials relied on by the sponsoring members — materials whose origin can be traced back to family and Falun Gong-side reporting. But the resolution was adopted in the European Parliament's name and published in the Official Journal of the European Union (17 October 2024, C/2024/5726); its grade stands above that of any single media report, and this page presents the facts it confirms at the grade of "confirmed by the European Parliament resolution".
Of the arresting force, only the institutional level can be confirmed. A 2023 report by the Falun Dafa Information Center states that Ding Yuande was formally arrested on 20 July 2023 by the Donggang District Police Department of Rizhao City, and the same reporting mentions officers of the Donggang Police Station. In the geography of Chinese policing, Wulian County belongs to Rizhao, and the county public security bureau answers to the Rizhao Municipal Public Security Bureau; Donggang District is a municipal district of Rizhao itself. The appearance of a district-level department of the prefectural city in the position of formally arresting authority indicates that the case was handled at least at municipal coordination level rather than as a purely Wulian County action — which fits structurally with the "province-wide campaign" framing, though this page records only the structural observation and asserts nothing about the level of command. As to individuals: who the ten-plus officers were, who led them, and who signed the arrest order are all matters of no public record. In the archives of Falun Gong cases this is close to a constant: the executors appear in the form of institutions and vanish in a state of anonymity.
From the moment of the arrest, the family's timeline split into two strands, inside and outside the walls. Outside, Ding Lebin, on learning the news in Berlin, moved at once: he contacted human rights organisations, parliamentarians and media. On the Falun Dafa Information Center's account, the International Society for Human Rights — an organisation headquartered in Frankfurt with consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council — sent letters demanding the couple's release to the Chinese ambassador to Germany, to Chinese foreign-affairs offices, and to CCP officials at Shandong provincial and Rizhao municipal level; volunteers of the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong repeatedly telephoned the detention centre demanding their release. Inside the walls, the first news emerged against that background of pressure.
On 24 May 2023 Ma Ruimei was released on bail pending trial. That date is confirmed jointly by motions B9-0079/2024 and B9-0082/2024, and paragraph C of the adopted resolution itself confirms that she "was released on bail". She had been held for twelve days, from 12 May to 24 May. The Falun Dafa Information Center quotes Ding Lebin as saying that international attention "saved my mother". This page grades that causal judgment as it must: it is the son's attribution of cause, recorded as something he said, not independently confirmed as cause and effect — though the sequence is on the record, with the international letters and calls preceding the mother's release. Bail pending trial in Chinese criminal procedure does not end a case: the person released remains under a compulsory measure, must appear when summoned, and may not leave her city or county of residence without approval, and her case may still proceed to indictment and trial. What became of Ma Ruimei's case after her release — whether she was indicted, whether she was sentenced, whether the bail was ever lifted or altered — is to this day a matter of no public record, and this page leaves the blank exactly as it is.
Release, in her case, was not the restoration of freedom but the beginning of a different form of control. Paragraph C of the adopted resolution states it precisely: after her release, Ma "was then intimidated by police because of a rescue campaign launched by their son abroad". Motion B9-0079/2024 adds two layers of detail: she was placed under secret surveillance, and she became a target of intimidation after Ding Yuande was transferred to the Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June. The Falun Dafa Information Center gives the intimidation a concrete scene: on 14 June 2023, two officers of the local Donggang Police Station came to Ma Ruimei's home and threatened to have Ding Yuande sentenced, and the stated reason was her son Ding Lebin's rescue campaign in Europe. The grading of this scene must be exact: the fact of intimidation carries the backing of the adopted resolution's text; the specific details — the 14 June visit, the two officers, the words of the threat — appear only in the Falun Dafa Information Center and are recorded here as single-source within the affiliated system, with their attribution. The scene deserves a pause in the archive: what the police said to a wife twelve days out of detention amounted, in substance, to this — the louder your son shouts abroad, the heavier your husband's sentence will be. If true, it is the operating manual of transnational repression in its barest form: pricing speech abroad against a hostage inside the walls.
Eight months without a family visit: from tea field to detention centre
Where Ding Yuande was taken after his arrest is the hinge of this case's middle timeline. Two dates can be anchored. The first: on 13 June 2023 he was transferred to the Rizhao City Detention Center — a date stated in motion B9-0079/2024 ("she became subject to intimidation after Ding Yuande was transferred to the Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June") and carried likewise in Bitter Winter's interview feature; both lines trace back to information supplied by the family, and this page grades the date as "consistently relayed by a motion draft and by Bitter Winter, originating with the family side". The second: on 20 July 2023 the Donggang District Police Department formally arrested him — a date appearing only in the Falun Dafa Information Center's reporting, single-source within the affiliated system. Between his being taken away on 12 May and his transfer to the detention centre on 13 June there is a full month: where he was held in that month, and under what compulsory measure (criminal detention is ordinarily executed in a detention centre, so what this gap signifies), is a matter of no public record, and this page marks the blank without speculation. The interval of more than two months between the initial seizure and the formal arrest is also visibly longer than the usual detention-plus-arrest-approval framework of China's Criminal Procedure Law; but with no public document on the conversion of measures in between, this page records only the measurable distance between the dates and draws no procedural conclusion on behalf of an absent file.
Paragraph D of the adopted resolution confirms the most painful single fact of that custody: "Mr Ding was detained with no family visits for eight months." From May 2023 to the sentencing in December — eight months — his wife was outside the walls and his son in Berlin, and no member of his family saw him once. Under the detention centres' ordinary rules, families indeed have no visiting rights during pre-trial custody and only lawyers may meet the detainee; but the phrase "ordinary rules" cannot sand down the substance of this fact: a 59-year-old tea farmer, before any conviction, was first cut entirely out of his family for eight months, during which his family had no way even to confirm his physical condition, his weight, or his state of mind. Who his defence lawyer was, whether the lawyer ever met him, and how often — all matters of no public record. The Falun Dafa Information Center reported in January 2024 that by then Ding had been held in the Rizhao City Detention Center for nearly nine months with no family member permitted to visit him — consistent with the resolution's "eight months" (counted to the sentencing in December 2023, after which he remained in the centre awaiting the next procedural steps).
How his case moved inside the judicial machinery during those eight months is something the outside world knows almost nothing about: when it was transferred for prosecution review, by which procuratorate it was indicted (the Wulian County People's Procuratorate would follow from the first-instance court's identity, but that is procedural inference, not public record, and this page flags it as such), and what facts the indictment alleged are all matters of no public record. The judgment has never been published, and no document in this case appears in the official China Judgments Online corpus. This page repeats the point because it determines the page's whole evidentiary structure: the Ding Yuande case contains not one page of public text from the Chinese official side — no judgment, no trial record, no police notice. What the record rests on is, at one end, a European Parliament resolution and EU institutional statements; at the other, family and Falun Gong-affiliated reporting, plus one independent human rights organisation's round-up of the same batch of cases. That structure is itself one of this case's facts: in a procedure that calls itself rule of law, a citizen was sentenced to three years, and the procedure left the public not a single page.
Article 300 and a judgment that was never published
This page gives the charge a section of its own, because it is the second field in this case most easily written wrongly and the one that may least be written wrongly. The conclusion first: the charge on which Ding Yuande was prosecuted and convicted is given, consistently, by Falun Gong-affiliated sources as Article 300 of the Criminal Law — "using a cult organisation to undermine implementation of the law"; the Falun Dafa Information Center states that the grounds of arrest were his possession of Falun Gong books and flyers. But the adopted European Parliament resolution names no charge anywhere in its text, none of the motion drafts names one either, and the Chinese authorities have never published a judgment or any other document in this case. This page therefore grades the charge as follows: consistently stated within the Falun Gong-affiliated source system, corroborated by no official or independent source, cited here with its attribution and not written as a fact established by an official text. That grading is not doubt; it is archival discipline. Article 300 is the overwhelmingly standard charge in Falun Gong cases since 1999, and it is highly likely that the Ding case follows the pattern — but between "highly likely on the pattern" and "established on a document" the archive must keep the seam visible.
Of the article's sentencing structure, this page pins down only what bears on this case's term — the fuller anatomy appears in this site's other Article 300 case pages. Whoever organises or uses a cult organisation to undermine implementation of the state's laws or administrative regulations faces three to seven years' imprisonment and a fine; where circumstances are minor, up to three years, detention, surveillance or deprivation of political rights. Ding's three years sits exactly on the seam between the two bands: if the court used the "minor circumstances" band, three years is its ceiling; if the basic band, three years is its floor. Because the judgment is absent, this site cannot know which band the court placed him in, what its sentencing reasoning said, or how the CNY 15,000 fine was calculated. Equally absent is the list of alleged facts: what conduct was said to constitute "undermining implementation of the law" — possessing books and flyers, passing them to others, or merely being a Falun Gong practitioner — is something the outside world has no way of knowing. One motion draft's accompanying framing and the Society for Threatened Peoples' statement both say that Ding was brought before the court "merely because of his religious affiliation" (the Society's words); his son said in November 2024: "My father was brought before the People's Court in Wulian solely because he follows the Chinese meditation movement Falun Gong. There was no legal basis for the trial at all." Those are the characterisations of the son and of a supporting organisation, recorded here with their attribution — but in a state of affairs where the judgment is missing and the alleged facts unknown, the official side has provided no material whatsoever with which to answer them.
The legal status of the "cult" label itself matches what this site has recorded in the Zhou Deyong page and its companions: no law in China's legal system lists which organisations count as cults, and Falun Gong's designation rests on administrative determination and judicial interpretation. The distinctiveness of the Ding case is that the European Parliament's resolution steps around the label dispute entirely and argues from constitutional and international law: paragraph A notes that Article 36 of the PRC Constitution stipulates that citizens enjoy freedom of religious belief, while the CCP has since 1999 persecuted Falun Gong systematically with the aim of eradicating the movement, religious freedom across the PRC is deteriorating, and technology-based censorship and surveillance are central to the repression. In the formal text of the European Parliament, in other words, Ding Yuande is not a "cult member" but a citizen whose freedom of belief is expressly promised by his own country's constitution and systematically stripped by his own country's regime.
28 November 2023 in court; 15 December, three years
On 28 November 2023 the Wulian County People's Court tried Ding Yuande's case. The trial date is stated consistently in two European Parliament motion drafts (B9-0079/2024 and B9-0082/2024) and in the Society for Threatened Peoples' statement. Of the hearing itself — whether it was public, whether family could attend, what the defence lawyer argued, what Ding Yuande said in court, what evidence the prosecution presented — there is no public record at all. This site found only his son's evaluative sentence about it (see the previous section); not one first-hand account of the proceedings survives in the public record.
On 15 December 2023 the Wulian County People's Court passed sentence: three years' imprisonment and a fine of CNY 15,000. The sentencing date, the term and the amount of the fine are confirmed directly by paragraph D of the adopted resolution, forming one of the highest-grade fact clusters in this case; the fine converts to roughly US$2,100 or just under €2,000 on the Falun Dafa Information Center's and Bitter Winter's conversions. For a farm household living from a tea plantation, a CNY 15,000 fine amounts to months, or more, of cash income — with the plantation still there, one of its two growers in prison and the other under surveillance, the real weight of that figure far exceeds its single line in the resolution's text. Whether the fine has been paid, and by whom, is a matter of no public record.
Ding Yuande was not the only person in the dock of the Wulian court in those weeks. The Society for Threatened Peoples' statement of 28 November 2024 provides the panorama of the batch: in November and December 2023, in a wave of trials shortly before the EU–China Summit (held in Beijing on 7 December 2023), a total of 22 Falun Gong practitioners from Rizhao were convicted; beyond Ding's trial on 28 November and sentencing on 15 December, 21 further practitioners — among them Hong Meishuang, Guo Xin and Jiang Haipo — were tried in the same court on three consecutive days, 4, 5 and 6 December, and sentenced on 25 December 2023 to terms of varying length, with fines totalling CNY 228,000; Hong Meishuang received five and a half years and a fine of CNY 10,000, and Guo Xin four years and three months and a fine of CNY 30,000. The provenance of this data set is the Society for Threatened Peoples — a German human rights organisation independent of the Falun Gong system, whose statement plainly aggregates Falun Gong-side case information; this page grades it half a step above purely affiliated sourcing, as "published by an independent human rights organisation, with underlying case information originating on the Falun Gong side", and records the chain. The Falun Dafa Information Center calls this batch "show trials" staged ahead of the EU–China summit and counts 23 Rizhao practitioners scheduled for trial at the Wulian court between 28 November and 6 December 2023 — the difference between 23 and 22 (the number sentenced) is recorded side by side in this page: the number scheduled for trial and the number sentenced may legitimately differ, and no forced unity is imposed. On either count the picture holds: in under a month, a single county court processed and sentenced, in batches, the members of one faith community; Ding Yuande is the one among them whom the European Parliament named, while the overwhelming majority of the other twenty-one or twenty-two names survive only in human rights organisations' lists.
After sentencing, Ding Yuande appealed. Paragraph D of the adopted resolution confirms it in one clause: "he appealed the judgment." That is the only confirmable fact in the appeal chapter of this case. Which court took the appeal (under ordinary Chinese criminal procedure it would be the Rizhao Intermediate People's Court — procedural inference, not public record, and flagged as such), when it was heard, whether a hearing was held at all, and whether the outcome was affirmance, amendment or remand are all matters of no public record. This site's searching covered the Falun Gong-affiliated channels (Minghui and the Falun Dafa Information Center), Bitter Winter, the Society for Threatened Peoples' later statements, EU institutional China statements from 2024 to 2026, and UN Human Rights Council documents: in none of them is there any mention of the outcome of Ding Yuande's appeal. Affiliated channels ordinarily do not fail to report an appeal's dismissal and the affirmance of an original verdict — in comparable cases they record second-instance outcomes almost without exception — so the silence itself deserves recording; but silence is not any particular result. This page writes only "the outcome of the appeal is a matter of no public record", and asserts neither affirmance nor anything else. Equally unrecorded is how long he remained in the Rizhao detention centre after sentencing and when he was transferred to a prison to serve the term — the question the next section takes up.
Where is the prison: grading the Shandong Province Prison claim
This section deals separately with the place of imprisonment, because after the charge it is the second field in this case most easily written wrongly by reflex. The Falun Dafa Information Center states expressly, in one of its reports: "Since March 20, 2024, he is being illegally detained in the Shandong Province Prison in the City Ji'nan of Province Shandong." In relaying the EU Delegation's December 2025 statement, the Center likewise describes Ding as "imprisoned in Shandong Province Prison for practicing Falun Gong". Within the Falun Gong-affiliated source system, in other words, "Shandong Province Prison, transferred in on 20 March 2024" is a consistent and specific account, with an exact transfer date; it is not a vague guess.
But this site's checking conclusion must be stated as it stands: as of 30 October 2026, this site has found no official or independent source — not the European Parliament's resolution or its motion drafts, not the text of the EU Delegation's statement, not the Society for Threatened Peoples' statements, not Bitter Winter's reporting — that names the prison where Ding Yuande is serving his sentence. The original text of the EU Delegation's statement of 10 December 2025 (checked by this site against the EEAS text and member-state embassy republications) simply places his name in the list of those whose release the EU demands, without mentioning any place of detention; the words "Shandong Province Prison" appear in the Falun Dafa Information Center's own background gloss when relaying that statement, not in the statement itself. This site's ruling is therefore: place of imprisonment — Falun Gong-affiliated sources consistently point to Shandong Province Prison in Jinan and give a transfer date of 20 March 2024; this page records that pointer and its date, but, lacking corroboration from any independent source, grades the claim unverified, and it must not be written as established fact. The logic matches this site's handling of the equivalent question in comparable cases: internal consistency within the affiliated system proves only that the system so records it, not that anything outside the system has confirmed it. Shandong Province Prison is the province's principal prison for men serving heavy sentences and for "key" prisoners, and Falun Gong practitioners sentenced in Shandong are commonly sent there in comparable cases — that fit with the common pattern raises the claim's plausibility, but plausibility is not evidence, and in the archive it can only be written as unverified.
What is known about the family side of his imprisonment is equally thin. In the Society for Threatened Peoples' November 2024 statement, Ding Lebin is reported as saying that in prison his father was being subjected to brainwashing as a means of forcing him to renounce and denigrate his faith. The chain of that sentence is: the son's statement to media, relayed in the Society's statement as carried by Minghui — family testimony, twice relayed — and this page records it at exactly that grade, asserting no specific fact about his treatment in prison beyond it. Beyond that sentence, his physical condition after entering prison, whether his family has been permitted to visit him, whether his sentence has been reduced, and how the fine was discharged are all matters of no public record. The eight months without a family visit in the detention centre are attested by a resolution text; the two-plus years since he entered prison rest, so far as the outside world knows of his circumstances, on that single relayed sentence from his son.
This section closes by pinning down an arithmetic question, because it bears directly on how this page's status field is written. Ding Yuande was detained on 12 May 2023 and sentenced to three years; under the Criminal Law's rule that one day of pre-trial custody offsets one day of the term, if the appeal resulted in affirmance of the original judgment (this site repeats: the appeal's outcome is a matter of no public record, and the condition is stated for arithmetic purposes only) and absent variables such as sentence reduction or additional punishment, his nominal term would have run from 12 May 2023 and expired on or about 11 May 2026. The nature of that sentence must be stated as plainly as possible: it is an arithmetical result, not a news report. It does not prove that he walked out of a prison in May 2026 — release on a term's expiry requires factual material such as a release certificate or family confirmation, and this site has found no such material; nor does it prove that he is in prison today — this site has equally found no source in 2026 that clearly records his state of custody. The section below, "The 2026 search", sets out in full what this site searched in order to answer that question and the empty result of the search. The rule is fixed here first: wherever "May 2026" appears in this page, it refers only to the arithmetic expiry of the nominal term, never to a confirmed release.
Ding Lebin: a son's three years in Berlin
An archive of a persecution case that records only the prisoner is incomplete. The outside half of the Ding Yuande case happened in Berlin, and its protagonist is his son. That strand begins long before his parents' arrest — or rather, it was because he was already on that strand that it could run at full speed within days of their arrest.
Ding Lebin went to Germany in 2012 and has lived in Berlin ever since. In 2019 the Donaukurier interviewed him about the persecution of Falun Gong — at that time he was a young practitioner speaking for a community. When the news of his parents' arrest arrived on 12 May 2023, his role changed overnight into that of a family member. On the Falun Dafa Information Center's and Bitter Winter's accounts, he moved on several lines at once: appealing to the International Society for Human Rights and other organisations, which wrote to the Chinese ambassador in Germany and to Chinese officials at various levels demanding his parents' release; joining the German Falun Dafa Information Center's postcard and letter campaign, which urged the public to send rescue postcards to the Chinese ambassador to Germany and to Li Zaiwu, then Rizhao's municipal Party secretary; giving Bitter Winter a long interview about his parents' case; and protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The German Falun Dafa Association's notice of January 2026 on Minghui further records that at a protest outside the embassy shortly before 20 July 2025 he walked at the front of the group holding a sign demanding his parents' release — the notice's own context and stance are not developed in this page, but it establishes at least this: as late as the summer of 2025, he was still publicly acting on the premise that his parents had not been freed.
His campaign entered the agenda of European institutions in the second half of 2023. In July 2023 Bitter Winter published its long interview feature, "'Help Free My Parents': The Story of Ding Lebin", making his parents one of the cases in its "Target Falun Gong" series. That autumn, members of several political groups in the European Parliament tabled motions on the persecution of Falun Gong and the Ding case (this site verified four motion drafts: B9-0067/2024, B9-0074/2024, B9-0079/2024 and B9-0082/2024, whose wording and factual detail differ among themselves — see the Verification Note); the day-precise details in those drafts — release on bail on 24 May, transfer to the detention centre on 13 June, trial on 28 November — originate in the family's account and Falun Gong-side case materials, written into the texts by the sponsors' offices. On 17 and 18 January 2024 practitioners from France and Germany gathered outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Ding Lebin among them, telling arrivals his parents' story; on 18 January the resolution was adopted.
Adoption was not an end but the main line of his public activity for the three years that followed. On 22 January 2024, during the UN Human Rights Council's fourth-cycle Universal Periodic Review of China, he spoke at an NGO briefing at the UN Office in Geneva, recounting his father's warrantless arrest, his three-year sentence, and nearly nine months in the Rizhao detention centre without a family visit. On 28 November 2024 — the first anniversary of his father's trial — the Society for Threatened Peoples published its statement "Falun Gong practitioners still illegally imprisoned in China — Freedom for Yuande Ding!"; interviewed for it, he said: "My father was brought before the People's Court in Wulian solely because he follows the Chinese meditation movement Falun Gong. There was no legal basis for the trial at all." On the same occasion he spoke of his father being subjected to brainwashing in prison (see above). In December 2024 the Falun Dafa Information Center reported that international support was continuing, including further statements at European Parliament level and restatements of position by members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), with former MEP and former chair of the Parliament's China delegation Reinhard Bütikofer emphasising IPAC's stance. That report also preserved a sentence worth archiving: this was the first time in the history of the EU that the European Parliament had addressed the fate and safety of a Chinese farming family.
This page owes Ding Lebin the same paragraph about multiple identities that the Zhou Deyong page owes Zhou You, because it determines this page's source ecology. He is at once a family member, a Falun Gong practitioner, and an advocate long active in European human rights circles. Nearly all of the case's detailed information entered Falun Gong media, Bitter Winter, human rights organisations' statements and European Parliament motion drafts through his account. That does not invalidate his words: his statements on the dates of arrest, release on bail, trial and sentencing match the adopted resolution item by item, and his account of his mother's intimidation is confirmed in summarised form by the resolution's own text. But it dictates this page's grading method: what the resolution's text confirms is written on the resolution; what exists only in his account and affiliated channels is written with its attribution; and what no source supplies — the appeal's outcome, the position in 2026 — is left blank, exactly as it is. This son spent three years carrying his father's name into the Official Journal of the European Union and into United Nations documents; what an archive can repay him with is placing every sentence he spoke in a position that can withstand checking.
18 January 2024: the European Parliament resolution
On 18 January 2024 the European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, adopted by a show of hands the resolution "The ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China, notably the case of Mr Ding Yuande" (procedure 2024/2504(RSP); adopted text P9_TA(2024)0037; published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 17 October 2024 as C/2024/5726). It is this case's anchor document, and this page records it after checking its text word by word.
The resolution's recitals run to four paragraphs. Paragraph A: since 1999 the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in systematic persecution to eradicate the Falun Gong movement; freedom of religious belief is deteriorating across the PRC; technology-based censorship and surveillance are central to this repression; and Article 36 of the PRC Constitution stipulates that its citizens must enjoy freedom of religious belief. Paragraph B: it is documented that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have died as a result of the CCP's persecution since 1999, and practitioners are frequently detained and reportedly subjected to torture, psychological abuse and organ harvesting so that they renounce their faith. Paragraph C: on 12 May 2023 Falun Gong practitioners Mr Ding Yuande and his wife Ms Ma Ruimei were arrested without a warrant; Ms Ma was released on bail, but was then intimidated by police because of a rescue campaign launched by their son abroad. Paragraph D: Mr Ding was detained with no family visits for eight months; on 15 December 2023 he was sentenced to three years in prison with a CNY 15,000 fine; and he appealed the judgment. This page's discipline in quoting paragraph B must be written out: "thousands have died", "torture, psychological abuse and organ harvesting" are the resolution's own attributed formulations — "it is documented", "reportedly" — and are cited here with that attribution intact. They are allegations adopted as formulations by the European Parliament as a legislature; this page records their existence and their wording and rewrites none of them into a finding independently verified by this site.
The operative part runs to six paragraphs, recorded one by one. Paragraph 1: the Parliament strongly urges the PRC to immediately end the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and other minorities, including Uyghurs and Tibetans, and demands the immediate and unconditional release of Mr Ding and all Falun Gong practitioners in China. Paragraph 2: it calls for the PRC to end domestic and transnational surveillance and control and the suppression of religious freedom, and urges the PRC to abide by its obligations under international law and its own constitution to respect and protect human rights. Paragraph 3: it calls on the EU Member States to suspend extradition treaties with the PRC. Paragraph 4: it stresses that respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law should be at the centre of the EU's relations with China; calls for the EU and its Member States to support and facilitate an international investigation into the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and to raise the persecution of religious minorities during all political and human rights dialogues with the Chinese authorities; and calls on the Member States and the EU Delegation to the PRC to monitor trials. Paragraph 5: it calls for the EU and its Member States to publicly condemn organ transplant abuses in China and to use the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime and national human rights sanctions regimes against all perpetrators and entities that have contributed to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China and abroad, stressing that EU measures should include refusing visas, freezing assets, expulsion from EU territories, criminal prosecution — including on the basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction — and bringing international criminal charges. Paragraph 6: it instructs its President to forward the resolution to the EU institutions, the governments and parliaments of the Member States, and the Government and Parliament of the PRC.
The resolution's procedural background is likewise part of the archive. Human-rights urgency resolutions in the European Parliament are typically produced by several political groups tabling separate motions that are then negotiated into a joint text; in this case this site verified at least four motion drafts, whose factual detail is richer than the adopted text. B9-0079/2024 carries the full detail chain — the tea plantation, Yanjiazhuang village, release on bail on 24 May, secret surveillance, transfer to Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June, trial at the Wulian County People's Court on 28 November. B9-0082/2024 carries the warrantless arrest, the threats after bail, the eight months without visits, the trial and sentencing dates and the fact that the judgment was appealed. B9-0067/2024 carries the mass arrest of roughly 70 practitioners ahead of World Falun Dafa Day and relays UN human rights experts' statements about detainees from minorities undergoing organ-matching medical examinations without free, voluntary and informed consent. B9-0074/2024 relays the figure of about 70 with the express attribution "according to Falun Gong sources". This site's rule for using the drafts is strict: a motion draft is a proposal text, not the Parliament's adopted position, and its details may be cited only at the grade of "recorded in a motion draft, originating in family and Falun Gong-side materials"; every detail that appears in a draft but not in the adopted text — the village name, the detention-centre transfer date, the trial date, the figure of 70, the charge — is presented in this page at that downgraded grade. In the debate, one of the sponsors, the German MEP Michael Gahler, said publicly that Ding Yuande and practitioners like him are innocent, that he has committed no crime, and that the only reason for his arrest is that he practises Falun Gong (as quoted by the Falun Dafa Information Center). The Italian MEP Fabio Massimo Castaldo used the debate to demand an international investigation into the organ trade and harsh sanctions against responsible officials (reported in Falun Gong channels). Those speeches are individual members' positions, recorded here with their attribution and not merged with the resolution's own text.
As to the resolution's place in the sequence, the Falun Dafa Information Center's characterisation is that it is the first European Parliament resolution in nearly twenty-five years devoted entirely to censuring the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong, and its spokesman Erping Zhang described it as the first text of its kind adopted by the institution. The Parliament had addressed Falun Gong before — in China resolutions and organ-transplant texts in 2006, 2013, 2016, 2022 and elsewhere — but a resolution whose whole subject is one faith community's persecution and whose title carries an individual prisoner's name is indeed a first; this site, having checked the public sequence, regards that as broadly accurate, while giving the precise formulation with the Center's attribution and not expanding it into an independent assertion of this page.
After the resolution: the international record, 2024–2026
After its adoption, Ding Yuande's name did not disappear from the international record. This section lists the verifiable follow-ups from 2024 to 2026 one by one, in time order and with each item's grade — because the blanket phrase "the international community continues to pay attention" has no value in an archive; records with dates, institutions and texts do.
22 January 2024: in Geneva, during the Human Rights Council's fourth-cycle Universal Periodic Review of China, the NGOs CAP Liberté de Conscience and Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) held a briefing at the UN Office at Geneva at which Ding Lebin was one of the speakers, presenting his father's case (reported in Falun Gong channels). In the same month, beyond the EU–China human rights dialogue's existing machinery, the resolution's fourth operative demand — that the persecution be raised in all dialogues — began to acquire sequels.
28 November 2024: the Society for Threatened Peoples issued its statement "Falun Gong practitioners still illegally imprisoned in China — Freedom for Yuande Ding!", calling for the immediate release of Ding Yuande and of all the Rizhao practitioners brought to court a year earlier merely for their religious affiliation, and setting out the panorama of the 22 Rizhao convictions (see above). Jasna Causevic, the Society's expert on genocide prevention, said in the statement that the Chinese government must end a persecution of Falun Gong practitioners that had by then lasted twenty-five years, and that "we stand with the Ding family and will continue to advocate for the freedom of Yuande Ding and the protection of his wife", who had been imprisoned in May 2023 and had meanwhile been released. The statement's value lies in its independence: among the sources this site examined, it is — apart from European institutional documents — the most complete text on this case produced by an independent human rights organisation.
Around 10 December 2024: the Falun Dafa Information Center reported continuing international support, including further statements at European Parliament level and IPAC restatements of position (see above); at the same Human Rights Day node, the Center's round-up recorded that members of parliament in several European countries had previously written to Wu Ken, the Chinese ambassador to Germany, and to responsible officials in China — letters whose existence the Center had already reported in 2023 (members of the European Parliament, the German Bundestag, the Berlin state parliament, and parliaments in Belgium and the Czech Republic all having written). This site did not retrieve the originals letter by letter, and records the matter in the Center's generalised form, without certifying each letter.
10 December 2025: the Delegation of the European Union to China issued its statement for International Human Rights Day, and in the list of persons whose immediate and unconditional release China is called upon to effect it named Ding Yuande once again — in company with Ding Jiaxi, Dong Yuyu, Gao Zhisheng, Peng Lifa, Xu Na, Xu Zhiyong, Zhang Zhan and several dozen others. This site checked the statement's full text as published by the European External Action Service and republished by member-state embassies, and confirms that "DING Yuande" stands in the list. This is the single most important follow-up record for the status part of this page: it means that as of December 2025 the European Union officially continued to list Ding Yuande as a prisoner whose release it demanded — a position that would be inexplicable in the EU Delegation's most important annual human-rights statement on China had he already been freed. On 11 December 2025 the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun answered the statement at a regular press conference, calling it a wilful distortion and a gross interference in China's internal affairs and judicial sovereignty, expressing strong condemnation and firm opposition and stating that stern representations had been lodged with the EU side (reported by Xinhua and the People's Daily). That is one of the very few verifiable public responses by the Chinese official side to the international calls in Ding's case; its content is a wholesale rejection of the statement and contains no specific word on Ding Yuande's individual case.
30 September 2025 (a collateral record): the Higher Regional Court in Dresden sentenced Guo Jian (rendered Jian Guo in reporting), a German national of Chinese origin and former assistant to a Member of the European Parliament, to four years and nine months' imprisonment for particularly serious espionage on behalf of China; the court found that between 2019 and 2024 he had passed internal European Parliament documents to Chinese intelligence handlers, among them details of the negotiations over the January 2024 resolution condemning the persecution of Falun Gong and naming Ding Yuande's case. This site's sourcing for the episode is as follows: the particulars are recorded both in the Falun Dafa Information Center's reporting and in the written statement submitted by the Society for Threatened Peoples to the UN Human Rights Council (September 2026; documents.un.org), the latter stating that Guo had "obtained and transmitted internal parliamentary documents — including the January 18, 2024 resolution on the case of the Chinese Falun Gong practitioner Mr. Ding Yuande — to Chinese intelligence". This site did not check the German judgment itself, and records the episode at the grade of "recorded in a human rights organisation's written statement to the United Nations and in Falun Dafa Information Center reporting", without expanding its details. Its place in this page is justified from an unexpected direction: it demonstrates the real weight the Ding case acquired in Europe — a resolution about a Shandong tea farmer became an object of foreign intelligence collection and transmission, and the collector went to prison in Germany for it.
2026: the written statement submitted by the Society for Threatened Peoples to the sixty-third session of the Human Rights Council (dated 7 August 2026; the session sat in September–October 2026) devotes a section to Ding Yuande, recording that the European Union and the German Federal Government had repeatedly called for his release since the resolution, and describing the accumulated actions as "an unprecedented international effort to secure the release of a Chinese farmer". Beyond that, this site's search of the public sources for 2026 (set out in full in the next section) found no new information about Ding Yuande's own situation: no report of a release, no report of a visit, no report of a sentence reduction, and no new statement by his family carried in international sources.
The 2026 search: an arithmetical expiry, and a piece of news that cannot be found
This section sets out, as a matter of archival obligation, the search this site conducted to answer the question "what is Ding Yuande's situation now?", the computation it rests on, and its final checking conclusion. This is not rhetoric. When the nominal term of a prisoner named by the European Parliament has expired and no one can confirm his state, the archive must write down, item by item, what it searched and what it failed to find.
The computation first. Ding Yuande was detained on 12 May 2023 and sentenced on 15 December 2023 to three years' imprisonment. Under Article 47 of the Criminal Law, one day of prior custody offsets one day of the sentence; if the appeal ended in affirmance of the original judgment (repeated here for emphasis: the appeal's outcome is a matter of no public record, and the supposition is made only as the premise of the arithmetic) and in the absence of variables such as reduction or addition, his term would have run from 12 May 2023 and expired on or about 11 May 2026. In arithmetical terms, at the date of this site's check, 30 October 2026, his three years had been complete for more than five months. The arithmetic was performed — and it ends there. No responsible archive may translate "term expired" into "the man has been released". In the actual operation of Falun Gong cases in China, more than one thing can happen on the day a term expires: an ordinary release; direct transfer on release into a brainwashing class or legal-education centre for continued confinement — a pattern documented in a large number of comparable cases, which this page notes as an institutional possibility only and does not assert in Ding's case; or an unknown variable, such as an amended second-instance judgment, making the real term different from the paper one. Without family confirmation, without a release certificate, without a single photograph of him walking out of a prison, this site chooses none of these.
The scope of the search was as follows. On 30 October 2026 this site systematically searched the public output, from January to October 2026, of: the Falun Gong-affiliated channels (Minghui in English and Chinese, and the Falun Dafa Information Center), a system that ordinarily reports the releases of imprisoned practitioners promptly — searching under "Ding Yuande" and under the Chinese name, this site found in 2026 only the German Falun Dafa Association's notice of 12 January mentioning Ding Lebin himself (see above), and no report of any release or status update for Ding Yuande; Bitter Winter — no 2026 follow-up reporting on Ding found; the Society for Threatened Peoples — its written statement to the United Nations of August 2026 still frames the case as ongoing persecution with the call for release still being made, a posture in itself incompatible with "the man has been freed", though the statement offers no fresh description of his state; EU institutions — no new statement naming Ding Yuande found in 2026 (the Delegation's annual Human Rights Day statement falls in December by custom, a node not yet reached at the date of checking); and Chinese official channels — which have never carried any public information about this case, in 2026 or at any time.
The conclusion of the checking is accordingly written into the status field and throughout this page in its most restrained form: as of 30 October 2026, whether Ding Yuande was released on the nominal expiry of his term in May 2026 is supported or contradicted by no independently verifiable public record; this site asserts neither that he has been released nor that he remains in prison. That "unknown" is complete only when set beside the nearest dated fact on the other side: as of 10 December 2025, the EU Delegation to China was still publicly demanding his release — the most recent record, with a date and an institution, that presents him as a prisoner. Between December 2025 and October 2026, this man's state, in the public world, is a blank — and he is a man whom the European Parliament wrote into the title of a resolution. The blank surrounding the other twenty-one or twenty-two Rizhao practitioners of his batch, who have no European Parliament resolution, can only be deeper.
Ma Ruimei's state is a second blank. After her release on bail on 24 May 2023, whether she was transferred for prosecution, whether she was tried alongside her husband, and whether the bail was long ago lifted or altered have been matters of no public record for more than three years. In his public statements in Europe, Ding Lebin has repeatedly used the formula "release my parents" (the Falun Gong sources' reports of his banners and speeches name both parents), but a slogan's "parents" cannot substitute for a record of the mother's individual procedural state: this site confirms only that she was released on bail on 24 May 2023 and thereafter subjected to surveillance and intimidation, and that after that there is no public record. A family of three: a son speaking in Berlin, a father's state a riddle from 2026, a mother's state a riddle from 2023. That is the true shape of this case's archive in October 2026.
Timeline
19 October 1963 (on the family's account as published in Bitter Winter's interview): Ding Yuande is born. Ma Ruimei is born on 7 October 1967 (same source).
From July 1999: the CCP bans Falun Gong and the systematic persecution of its practitioners begins — the background frame as recorded in recital A of the European Parliament resolution.
2012: Ding Lebin leaves China for Germany and thereafter lives in Berlin (consistently recorded in the German Falun Dafa Association's notice on Minghui and in Falun Dafa Information Center reporting).
2019: the German newspaper Donaukurier interviews Ding Lebin about the persecution of Falun Gong (recorded by the Falun Dafa Information Center).
Early morning, 12 May 2023, between 5 and 6 a.m.: more than ten law-enforcement officers storm the tea plantation of Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei in Yanjiazhuang village, Wulian County, Rizhao, and take both away without a warrant (warrantless arrest confirmed in the adopted resolution; the hour and the number of officers from Bitter Winter's interview). The arrest forms part of a mass arrest of roughly 70 Falun Gong practitioners in Shandong ahead of World Falun Dafa Day on 13 May (a Falun Gong-side figure, relayed with attribution in the motion drafts).
24 May 2023: Ma Ruimei is released on bail pending trial and thereafter placed under surveillance (bail and intimidation confirmed in the adopted resolution; the date and the surveillance from the motion drafts).
13 June 2023: Ding Yuande is transferred to the Rizhao City Detention Center (consistently relayed by motion B9-0079/2024 and Bitter Winter, originating with the family side).
14 June 2023: two officers of the Donggang Police Station call at Ma Ruimei's home and threaten that Ding Yuande will be sentenced because of her son's rescue campaign in Europe (recorded by the Falun Dafa Information Center, single-source within the affiliated system; the fact of intimidation itself is confirmed in summarised form by the adopted resolution).
20 July 2023: the Donggang District Police Department formally arrests Ding Yuande (recorded by the Falun Dafa Information Center, single source).
July 2023: Bitter Winter publishes its interview feature, "'Help Free My Parents': The Story of Ding Lebin".
28 November 2023: the Wulian County People's Court tries Ding Yuande's case (consistently recorded in two motion drafts and in the Society for Threatened Peoples' statement). Nothing about the hearing itself is on public record.
4–6 December 2023: 21 further Rizhao Falun Gong practitioners are tried at the Wulian County People's Court (Society for Threatened Peoples' statement).
15 December 2023: the Wulian County People's Court sentences Ding Yuande to three years' imprisonment and a fine of CNY 15,000 (confirmed in the adopted resolution). Ding Yuande appeals (the fact of the appeal confirmed in the resolution).
25 December 2023: the batch of 21 is sentenced to terms of varying length, with fines totalling CNY 228,000 (Society for Threatened Peoples' statement).
18 January 2024: the European Parliament adopts in Strasbourg the resolution "The ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China, notably the case of Mr Ding Yuande" (2024/2504(RSP); P9_TA(2024)0037), demanding the immediate and unconditional release of Ding Yuande and all Falun Gong practitioners and calling for suspension of extradition treaties, sanctions against perpetrators and an international investigation.
22 January 2024: Ding Lebin speaks about his father's case at an NGO briefing at the UN Office in Geneva during the Universal Periodic Review of China (reported in Falun Gong channels).
20 March 2024: the Falun Dafa Information Center states that from this date Ding Yuande has been held in Shandong Province Prison in Jinan — graded unverified by this site, with no independent corroboration; see the text.
17 October 2024: the Ding Yuande resolution is published in the Official Journal of the European Union, C/2024/5726.
28 November 2024: the Society for Threatened Peoples issues its statement "Freedom for Yuande Ding!", setting out the panorama of the 22 Rizhao convictions; Ding Lebin, interviewed, speaks of his father being subjected to brainwashing in prison (family testimony, relayed in the statement and on Minghui).
July 2025 (per the Minghui notice of January 2026): at a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Berlin shortly before 20 July, Ding Lebin walks at the front holding a sign demanding his parents' release.
30 September 2025: the Higher Regional Court in Dresden sentences former MEP assistant Guo Jian to four years and nine months, finding that he had passed internal parliamentary documents, including the Ding Yuande resolution, to Chinese intelligence (recorded in Falun Dafa Information Center reporting and in the Society for Threatened Peoples' written statement to the United Nations).
10 December 2025: the EU Delegation to China's Human Rights Day statement names Ding Yuande again and demands his immediate and unconditional release — as of that date he remains, in the EU's official position, a prisoner. The following day, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun rejects the statement wholesale at a press conference, without touching the individual case.
On or about 11 May 2026 (estimate): the approximate date of the nominal expiry of the three-year term counted from detention on 12 May 2023. An arithmetic estimate by this site under the custody-offset rule — not an officially announced date, and still less a confirmed release.
7 August 2026: the Society for Threatened Peoples submits its written statement to the sixty-third session of the Human Rights Council, devoting a section to the continuing persecution in the Ding Yuande case and recording that the EU and the German Federal Government have repeatedly demanded his release since the resolution.
30 October 2026 (date of this site's check): the appeal's outcome, the prison, and his state during 2026 are all matters of no independently verifiable public record; whether he has been released cannot be established from the public record — see the checking conclusion in the text.
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case rests only on this case's own facts. Those facts are dense enough; no borrowed force is needed.
First: a warrantless arrest, beginning in a tea field. The first case fact the European Parliament wrote into its resolution was not the sentence but the arrest "without a warrant". In the small hours of the morning, more than ten men stormed a farming couple's tea plantation and took them away — and that opening determined the character of every procedure that followed: the case afterwards completed the full set of forms, arrest, indictment, trial, appeal, but no completeness of forms can cover the blank on the first page. Our first sentence is therefore this: the procedural defect in the Ding Yuande case is not a failure at some one link; from the first minute, procedure was form only, with force first and paperwork afterwards — which is exactly how the words "handling cases according to law" operate in cases of this kind.
Second: the intimidation of the wife is the moment in this case that must not be passed over lightly. Twelve days after she was released home on bail, police called at her door and made the meaning plain: the harder your son campaigns in Europe, the heavier your husband's sentence. The European Parliament wrote that fact into its resolution — intimidated "because of a rescue campaign launched by their son abroad". Notice the structure of the scene: what it punishes is not the wife's own conduct but the son's speech; the lever it uses is the husband's sentence. That is no longer law enforcement but pricing — every decibel of protest in Berlin raising the tariff in Rizhao. With the imprisoned father as the price tag on the overseas son, and the released wife as the courier of the price, this case is therefore not only a religious-persecution case but a textbook specimen of transnational repression: the arm of repression reaches along the bonds of family into Berlin, and draws back again along the intimidation into Rizhao. The Chinese authorities habitually accuse foreign forces of "interfering in internal affairs"; the direction of the facts recorded in this case is precisely the reverse — it was Rizhao police who first reached into the freedom of speech of a Berlin resident, with his father's freedom as the stakes.
Third: three years for a tea farmer, and the absence of a judgment. The whole of Ding Yuande's alleged criminality, on the affiliated sources' account, is the possession of Falun Gong books and flyers and the practice of Falun Gong. That is all. A man who grew tea was sentenced, for his faith and a few books, to three years and fined CNY 15,000, after eight months in a detention centre without seeing his family once. And the document that sentenced him has never been seen by the public, not one word of it. Our view is that the absence of the judgment is not a technical detail but part of this case's very characterisation: a regime confident that its judgments can bear inspection has no reason to make a county court's judgment a blank of state-secret proportions; the document is blank because the moment its reasoning section were shown — the moment the derivation from "possessing books" and "practising a discipline" to "undermining implementation of the law" were set down on paper — it would become the part of this judiciary least fit to be seen. In a sense the European Parliament's resolution wrote that judgment for the Wulian court: it wrote the other side's version, listing the warrantless arrest, the barred visits and the intimidation of the family item by item, and published it in the Official Journal of the European Union, archived permanently.
Fourth: the resolution's weight and its limits must both be stated plainly. Its weight is this: the name of a Shandong farmer entered the title of a legislative document of the European Union; the resolution set out a concrete package — suspension of extradition treaties, sanctions against perpetrators including extraterritorial prosecution and international criminal charges, an international investigation, and the monitoring of trials; two years later, in December 2025, the EU Delegation to China was still naming him in its annual statement and demanding his release; and even the Chinese intelligence operative who spied on that resolution was sentenced in Germany to four years and nine months. All of that shows the case was not a one-off gesture but a standing entry in EU policy toward China. The limit is equally plain: nearly three years after the resolution, Ding Yuande did not leave prison one day early because of it, and of the international investigation, the sanctions lists and the extradition suspensions it demanded, not one has any public record of implementation. This page records both faces — it writes the resolution neither as a victory nor as empty words. Its real function was to turn a county-court case that was destined to vanish in silence into an international file with a procedure number, an Official Journal citation, an intelligence service's attention and an annual diplomatic naming. That is what persecution fears most: not being denounced, but being recorded.
Finally, a word about the date in May 2026. This page sets out the arithmetic of the nominal expiry, sets out the process of its search, and sets out the words "we do not know", because that not-knowing is itself the newest fact in this case, and the heaviest. A man whose name the European Parliament wrote into the title of a resolution has, since the expiry of his sentence, a fate — dead or alive, released or transferred — that the public world cannot confirm. If even Ding Yuande's whereabouts can sink into blankness under so many eyes, then what will happen on the day their terms expire to the other roughly sixty-nine people taken in the May 2023 sweep, and to the other twenty-one sentenced at the Wulian court in December, is something no eyes at all are watching. The whole purpose of this page is that at least here, the eyes stay open: this page will wait, and when any verifiable piece of news appears — a release certificate, a word from the family, a visit record, an official document — it will be entered into the status field. Until then, the status field of this page states it in plain words: of his life, his death and his whereabouts there is no public record. Those words are not this site's failure. They are the answer this system gives.
Verification Note
This site's characterisation: this is a religious-persecution case whose core fact is the Falun Gong faith of the person concerned, and it meets this site's inclusion standard for the persecution archive. The evidentiary structure of this case is the reverse of most, and must be explained first. The anchor source is not a US official body but a first-hand legal text of the European institutions — the European Parliament resolution of 18 January 2024 (2024/2504(RSP); adopted text P9_TA(2024)0037; Official Journal C/2024/5726), whose full text (recitals A to D and operative paragraphs 1 to 6) this site checked word by word; second to it stands the EU Delegation to China's statement of 10 December 2025 for International Human Rights Day (checked against the EEAS text and member-state embassy republications, with Ding Yuande in the release list). The detailed sources fall into three layers: the motion drafts tabled by the Parliament's political groups (proposal texts, never separately adopted, graded below the resolution itself); the statements and UN written submissions of the Society for Threatened Peoples, an organisation independent of the Falun Gong system whose case information nonetheless derives in part from family and Falun Gong-side records; and the Falun Gong-affiliated source system (Minghui; the Falun Dafa Information Center; and the family interview published by Bitter Winter — Bitter Winter is not run by the Falun Gong side, but the reporting in this case originates in the son's account, and this page treats it as a vehicle of family testimony). Under the grading rules set for this case: facts supported only by the affiliated system are presented throughout with attribution; family testimony is attributed to Ding Lebin personally; and details recorded in motion drafts are flagged as motion-draft material throughout and never merged with the adopted text.
Facts verified across sources or confirmed in a primary text: the arrest without a warrant of Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei on 12 May 2023 (resolution, recital C); Ma's release on bail and the subsequent police intimidation of her because of her son's rescue campaign abroad (recital C); Ding's detention for eight months with no family visits (recital D); the sentence of three years' imprisonment and a CNY 15,000 fine on 15 December 2023 (recital D); the fact that he appealed the judgment (recital D); the systematic persecution of Falun Gong since 1999 aimed at eradicating the movement, and Article 36 of the PRC Constitution on freedom of religious belief (recital A — the resolution's position and background framing); the whole of operative paragraphs 1 to 6 (an immediate end to the persecution; the immediate and unconditional release of Mr Ding and all Falun Gong practitioners; an end to domestic and transnational surveillance and suppression; suspension by Member States of extradition treaties with the PRC; support for an international investigation, raising religious minorities in all dialogues, and monitoring of trials; public condemnation of organ transplant abuses and the use of the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime and national regimes against perpetrators, with measures to include visa refusals, asset freezes, expulsion, criminal prosecution including on the basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction, and international criminal charges) (resolution text, checked word by word by this site); the EU Delegation to China's statement of 10 December 2025 naming Ding Yuande for release (full text checked); and the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman's wholesale rejection of that statement on 11 December 2025 (reported by Xinhua and the People's Daily — an official Chinese public position).
Matters recorded in resolution motion drafts, originating in family and Falun Gong-side materials and presented in the text at that downgraded grade: the storming of the tea plantation in Yanjiazhuang village on 12 May 2023 (motion B9-0079/2024); Ma Ruimei's release on bail on 24 May and her placement under secret surveillance (motions B9-0079/2024 and B9-0082/2024 — the fact of bail itself also carries the adopted resolution's backing; the date and the surveillance detail come from the drafts); Ding Yuande's transfer to Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June 2023 (motion B9-0079/2024, also carried by Bitter Winter); and the trial at the Wulian County People's Court on 28 November 2023 (motions B9-0079/2024 and B9-0082/2024, consistently recorded also in the Society for Threatened Peoples' statement).
Matters from the Falun Gong-affiliated source system alone or within it, presented in the text with their attribution: the grounds of arrest as possession of Falun Gong books and flyers and the charge as Article 300 (Falun Dafa Information Center; the charge is also the affiliated system's consistent description of comparable cases, but in this case it is corroborated by no official document, and the text presents it as "consistently given by affiliated sources"); the formal arrest on 20 July 2023 by the Donggang District Police Department (Falun Dafa Information Center); the particulars of the 14 June 2023 threatening visit by two Donggang Police Station officers (Falun Dafa Information Center); the transfer to Shandong Province Prison in Jinan on 20 March 2024 (Falun Dafa Information Center, graded unverified — see below); advocacy details including the International Society for Human Rights' letters, the repeated telephone calls by volunteers of the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, the German Falun Dafa Information Center's postcard campaign, and letters by parliamentarians in several European countries to Ambassador Wu Ken and to officials in China (Falun Dafa Information Center); the count of 23 Rizhao practitioners scheduled for trial at the Wulian court between 28 November and 6 December 2023 and the characterisation "show trials" (Falun Dafa Information Center); and the detail that Guo Jian passed on material about the Ding Yuande resolution (Falun Dafa Information Center reporting, also recorded in the Society for Threatened Peoples' written statement to the United Nations; this site did not check the German court's judgment).
Matters published by an independent human rights organisation whose underlying case information derives in part from Falun Gong-side records: the total of 22 Rizhao practitioners convicted in November–December 2023, of whom 21 were tried at the Wulian court on 4–6 December and sentenced on 25 December with fines totalling CNY 228,000, including Hong Meishuang's five and a half years and Guo Xin's four years and three months (Society for Threatened Peoples, statement of 28 November 2024); the Society's earlier statement of 27 December 2023 on the Rizhao mass arrests and trials (as relayed in the same system); and its continuing record of the case in a written statement to the Human Rights Council (statement dated 7 August 2026, UN documents system). This site's grading of the Society is: its organisational independence stands, and its statements may serve as a second source, but where dates and figures are concerned its information chain is noted in each case.
Family testimony, presented with its attribution: the couple's dates of birth and the early-morning details of the arrest at the tea plantation (Ding Lebin's account, published in Bitter Winter's interview feature of July 2023); the causal judgment that international attention "saved my mother" (Ding Lebin's words, quoted by the Falun Dafa Information Center); the statement that his father "was brought before the People's Court in Wulian solely because he follows the Chinese meditation movement Falun Gong" and that the trial had no legal basis (Ding Lebin, interviewed in November 2024, relayed in the Society's statement and on Minghui); and the statement that his father is subjected to brainwashing in prison to force him to renounce his faith (Ding Lebin, through the same relay chain). All of the above are statements of the family side: this site confirms that they were made and does not independently confirm their details.
Discrepancies between sources and this site's handling of them. First, the figure of "about 70". The Falun Dafa Information Center reports roughly 70 practitioners detained around Rizhao in a province-wide operation; motion B9-0067/2024 gives "roughly 70 Falun Gong practitioners in the Shandong province"; motion B9-0074/2024 relays it expressly "according to Falun Gong sources". The resolution as adopted does not use the figure. This page presents it as "a Falun Gong-affiliated figure, relayed with attribution in motion drafts", never as a confirmed fact. Second, the size of the trial batch: the Falun Dafa Information Center gives 23 practitioners scheduled for trial; the Society for Threatened Peoples gives 22 convicted (Ding plus 21). The counts measure different things (scheduled for trial versus actually sentenced) and are recorded side by side. Third, the village name: the English-language sources transliterate the village of the arrest as Yanjiazhuang; the Chinese form used in this page's Chinese text is the corresponding place name as known to this site, and both are recorded with the transliteration and attribution side by side; should an authoritative Chinese-language document emerge, the document governs. Fourth, Ding Lebin's occupation: the Falun Dafa Information Center calls him in one place a law student in Berlin and in another a freelance China researcher and human rights advocate; this page records both and certifies neither. Fifth, corrections to the commissioning brief, placed on the record: the brief listed "transfer to Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June 2023" and "trial at the Wulian County People's Court on 28 November 2023" among the facts of the adopted resolution — on checking the adopted text word by word, neither detail appears in it; both originate in motion draft B9-0079/2024 and companion drafts, and the text of this page presents them at the motion-draft grade accordingly. Likewise, the brief's statement of the charge as Article 300 appears in neither the adopted resolution nor any motion draft; the text has been rewritten to "consistently given by Falun Gong-affiliated sources, corroborated by no official document", and the correction is recorded here. Sixth, a name: the International Society for Human Rights (headquartered in Frankfurt) is recorded in the text under its full English name; variant renderings in some affiliated reporting do not affect the facts.
Matters graded unverified: Ding Yuande's prison — Falun Gong-affiliated sources consistently point to Shandong Province Prison in Jinan and give the transfer date of 20 March 2024, but this site found no corroboration in any official or independent source (the European Parliament's resolution, the original text of the EU Delegation's statement, the Society for Threatened Peoples' statements and Bitter Winter's reporting all omit the place of imprisonment; the words "imprisoned in Shandong Province Prison" in connection with the December 2025 statement appear in the Falun Dafa Information Center's background gloss on that statement, not in the statement itself), and the text accordingly grades the claim unverified; the court that heard the appeal (the Rizhao Intermediate People's Court follows by procedural inference and is corroborated by no source; the text flags it as inference); and the indicting authority as the Wulian County People's Procuratorate, likewise a procedural inference flagged in the text.
Matters of no public record, each flagged where it arises in the text: the outcome of the appeal and everything about any second instance; the full text of the judgment, the indictment and any trial record; the defence lawyer's name and the history of lawyer access; the payment and enforcement of the CNY 15,000 fine; the place of custody and the conversion of compulsory measures between 12 May and 13 June 2023; the length of his stay in the detention centre after sentencing; his physical condition in prison, visits and any sentence reduction (other than his son's brainwashing statement, recorded as family testimony); Ma Ruimei's case status after her release on bail; the couple's education, the details of their tea business and their history of practice; and the names of the officers who carried out the arrest and of whoever signed the orders. The nominal expiry "on or about 11 May 2026" is this site's arithmetic estimate, counting three years from detention on 12 May 2023 under the custody-offset rule, and its estimated character is flagged repeatedly in the text and timeline: it is not evidence of a release. This site found no independently verifiable report of a release in 2026, and equally no independently verifiable report that he remained in prison during 2026; the text and the status field therefore record only the checking conclusion and make no assertion about his state.
The three-musts check: time and place confirmed (arrest, bail, trial and sentencing are anchored at several levels — the adopted resolution, the motion drafts and an independent human rights organisation's statement); cross-verification completed (five layers kept strictly separate — European institutional primary texts, motion drafts, an independent human rights organisation, the Falun Gong-affiliated system and family testimony — with discrepancies within and across systems itemised above); visual evidence: the Falun Dafa Information Center and Bitter Winter carry a pre-arrest photograph of Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei together and photographs of Ding Lebin campaigning outside the European Parliament and the Chinese Embassy in Berlin, and Minghui carries photographs of Ding Lebin at the Strasbourg gathering — this page records only the existence and provenance of those photographs and does not relay unverified visual detail.
Sources
- European Parliament resolution of 18 January 2024 on the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in China, notably the case of Mr Ding Yuande (2024/2504(RSP)); adopted text P9_TA(2024)0037, published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 17 October 2024 (C/2024/5726); EUR-Lex, CELEX 52024IP0037: recitals A–D (systematic persecution since 1999 aimed at eradication; Article 36 of the PRC Constitution; documented thousands of deaths and the attributed formulations on torture, psychological abuse and organ harvesting; the warrantless arrest of 12 May 2023 and the intimidation of Ma Ruimei after her release on bail; eight months without family visits, the sentence of three years and CNY 15,000 on 15 December 2023, and the appeal) and operative paragraphs 1–6 (end the persecution; immediate and unconditional release; end domestic and transnational surveillance and suppression; Member States to suspend extradition treaties; support for an international investigation and trial monitoring; condemnation of organ transplant abuses and sanctions under the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime and national regimes, with measures including visa refusals, asset freezes, expulsion, criminal prosecution including on the basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction, and international criminal charges; forwarding of the resolution to the PRC). The anchor source for this case, checked word by word by this site.
- Motion for a European Parliament resolution B9-0079/2024: police storming the tea plantation in Yanjiazhuang village on 12 May 2023; Ma Ruimei released on bail on 24 May and placed under secret surveillance, becoming a target of intimidation after Ding Yuande's transfer to Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June; trial on 28 November at the Wulian County People's Court and the sentence of three years and CNY 15,000 on 15 December; a call for access to medical services and legal counsel in custody. A proposal text, not separately adopted; graded below the adopted resolution.
- Motion for a European Parliament resolution B9-0082/2024: arrest without a warrant; Ma Ruimei released on bail on 24 May and threatened by Rizhao police because of her son Ding Lebin's rescue campaign abroad; eight months without family visits; trial on 28 November and sentence of three years and a CNY 15,000 fine on 15 December; the judgment was appealed. A proposal text.
- Motion for a European Parliament resolution B9-0067/2024: the May 2023 arrest as part of a mass arrest of roughly 70 Falun Gong practitioners in Shandong ahead of World Falun Dafa Day on 13 May; relaying UN human rights experts' statements on detainees from minorities undergoing organ-matching medical examinations without free, voluntary and informed consent. A proposal text.
- Motion for a European Parliament resolution B9-0074/2024: relaying, expressly "according to Falun Gong sources", the detention by the district police department in Rizhao City of Ding Yuande, Ma Ruimei and approximately 70 other practitioners on 12 May 2023; Ma Ruimei released on 24 May 2023 but remaining under surveillance and monitoring; Ding Yuande sentenced on 15 December 2023 to three years and a fine of approximately CNY 15,000 (about €2,000). A proposal text.
- Statement of the Delegation of the European Union to China on International Human Rights Day, 10 December 2025 (EEAS website and member-state embassy republications, full text): the list of persons whose immediate and unconditional release the EU calls for includes Ding Yuande (DING Yuande), alongside Ding Jiaxi, Xu Na, Xu Zhiyong and others; the statement also records the fortieth EU–China Human Rights Dialogue held in Brussels in June 2025. The name's presence in the original list was checked by this site.
- Xinhua and People's Daily reporting, 11–12 December 2025: Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, at a regular press conference, responding to the EU Delegation's Human Rights Day statement as a gross interference in China's internal affairs and judicial sovereignty, expressing strong condemnation and firm opposition and stating that stern representations had been lodged. An official Chinese position; it does not address the Ding Yuande case individually.
- Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker), press release "Falun Gong practitioners still illegally imprisoned in China — Freedom for Yuande Ding!", 28 November 2024 (as carried by Minghui in English): 22 Rizhao practitioners convicted in the wave of trials of November–December 2023 shortly before the EU–China Summit; Ding Yuande tried on 28 November 2023 at the Wulian court and sentenced on 15 December to three years and a CNY 15,000 fine; 21 others tried on 4, 5 and 6 December, sentenced on 25 December 2023, with fines totalling CNY 228,000 — Hong Meishuang five and a half years, Guo Xin four years and three months; the statement of expert Jasna Causevic; and Ding Lebin's interview statements (his father tried solely for his faith; subjected to brainwashing in prison). An independent human rights organisation whose case information derives in part from family and Falun Gong-side records.
- Society for Threatened Peoples, written statement to the sixty-third session of the UN Human Rights Council, 7 August 2026 (UN documents system, documents.un.org): a dedicated section on the Ding Yuande case; the record that Guo Jian was sentenced by the Dresden Higher Regional Court on 30 September 2025 to four years and nine months and that the internal parliamentary documents he transmitted to Chinese intelligence included the resolution of 18 January 2024 on Mr Ding Yuande's case; and the record that the European Union and the German Federal Government have repeatedly called for Ding's release since then.
- Bitter Winter, July 2023, "Target Falun Gong. 3. 'Help Free My Parents': The Story of Ding Lebin" (an interview feature on Ding Lebin): the birth dates of Ding Yuande (19 October 1963) and Ma Ruimei (7 October 1967); more than ten officers storming the tea plantation between 5 and 6 a.m. on 12 May 2023; Ma Ruimei's release on bail on 24 May; Ding Yuande's transfer to Rizhao City Detention Center on 13 June; and the relayed account of the police intimidation visit of 14 June. Bitter Winter is a religious-freedom magazine not run by the Falun Gong side; the information in this feature originates in the family's account.
- Bitter Winter, January 2024, "The European Parliament Condemns China for Persecuting Falun Gong, Mentions Organ Harvesting Again": the adoption of the resolution and a summary of its text and of the Ding couple's case. A religious-freedom magazine.
- Falun Dafa Information Center, 2023, "Chinese Police Threatening to Sentence Father of Berlin Resident for Son's Advocacy Efforts Overseas": Ding Yuande formally arrested on 20 July 2023 by the Donggang District Police Department of Rizhao City; about 70 practitioners detained in Rizhao in a province-wide operation on 12 May; the 14 June visit by two Donggang Police Station officers threatening Ma Ruimei; the International Society for Human Rights' letters; telephone calls by volunteers of the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong; letters by parliamentarians in several European countries to Ambassador Wu Ken and to officials in China; and the German Falun Dafa Information Center's postcard rescue campaign. A Falun Gong-affiliated source.
- Falun Dafa Information Center, January 2024, "EU Passes Landmark Resolution to Investigate and Punish the CCP for Persecution of Falun Gong": the resolution's adoption on 18 January 2024; Ding Yuande arrested for possessing Falun Gong books and flyers and sentenced on 15 December to three years with a fine of about US$2,100; MEP Michael Gahler's statement that Ding is innocent, as quoted; and spokesman Erping Zhang's characterisation of the text as the first resolution of its kind in nearly twenty-five years. A Falun Gong-affiliated source.
- Falun Dafa Information Center, "International Support for Father of Berlin Resident Sentenced in China Continues": Ding Yuande held since 20 March 2024 in Shandong Province Prison in Jinan (graded unverified by this site); Ma Ruimei still under strict surveillance and at risk of re-arrest after bail; the European Parliament resolution of 18 January 2024 and continuing support including IPAC and Reinhard Bütikofer; and the statement that this was the first time in EU history that the European Parliament had addressed the fate and safety of a Chinese farming family. A Falun Gong-affiliated source.
- Falun Dafa Information Center, report on the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China and new mass arrests: relaying the EU Delegation's statement of 10 December 2025 demanding the release of Ding Yuande and Xu Na and describing Ding as "imprisoned in Shandong Province Prison" — checked by this site against the statement's original text, the place of imprisonment is the Center's own background gloss, not the statement's wording, and is flagged as such. A Falun Gong-affiliated source.
- Falun Dafa Information Center, "Surveillance State Victims, Show Trials, Canada Apology" (the Rizhao trials portion): 23 Rizhao practitioners scheduled for trial at the Wulian County People's Court between 28 November and 6 December 2023, all of them among the roughly 70 detained in May 2023; Ding Yuande and Ma Ruimei arrested in the early morning of 12 May on their tea farm outside Rizhao; Ding Lebin described as a law student in Berlin. A Falun Gong-affiliated source.
- Minghui, 10 December 2024, "Germany: Human Rights Organization Condemns CCP's Persecution of Falun Gong" (carrying the Society for Threatened Peoples' statement of 28 November 2024, item 8 above); and Minghui's January 2024 Geneva reporting (Ding Lebin speaking at the NGO briefing during the Universal Periodic Review; his father held for nearly nine months without a family visit). Falun Gong-affiliated sources.
- Minghui, 12 January 2026, "Notice Regarding Ding Lebin (Germany)" (German Falun Dafa Association): Ding Lebin's earlier study at Tongji University's Sino-German College and his move to Germany in 2012 and residence in Berlin; his position at the front of a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Berlin shortly before 20 July 2025 holding a sign demanding his parents' release; his parents' arrest on 12 May 2023, his mother's release and his father's three-year sentence. A Falun Gong-affiliated source; the notice's own context is not developed in this page, and only its checkable factual elements are used.
- European Parliament Delegation for relations with China, official web summary of the resolution of 18 January 2024 (europarl.europa.eu): members demanding the immediate and unconditional release of Mr Ding Yuande and all Falun Gong practitioners, Member States to suspend extradition treaties with the PRC and to use sanctions regimes; the text adopted by a show of hands. An official EU institutional summary.