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July 4, 2018: Dong Yaoqiong, 29, livestreamed herself on Twitter splashing black ink on a propaganda portrait of Xi Jinping in front of the HNA Building in Shanghai, denouncing his "dictatorial tyranny."

Hours later, she posted what appeared to be police at her door, then went silent.

She was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Zhuzhou, Hunan. Her family insisted she had no history of mental illness; the hospital restricted her freedom on the grounds she was a "political prisoner."

November 2019: released to her mother's custody. Friends said she had been drugged — slow to react, visibly anxious.

May 2020: detained again; July 2020: released.

November 30, 2020: Dong spoke out on video: "I don't want to live like this anymore." "Did I break the law?" "Is there really something wrong with my mind?" She described her government "job" as surveillance — every movement restricted, even cut off from her father.

September 23, 2022: her father Dong Jianbiao died in Chaling Prison, Hunan. Relatives saw his body covered in injuries; state security ordered cremation within 5 days. He had been repeatedly jailed for advocating for his daughter.

Today: Dong Yaoqiong's whereabouts remain unknown — missing or under tight surveillance.

Dong Yaoqiong was born in 1989 in Youxian County, Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, and grew up in Hunan. As an adult she left home to work in Shanghai, employed as an agent at a real-estate company. When the incident occurred in 2018 she was twenty-nine, a migrant worker making her own living in a big city, with no organizational background of any kind. Her Twitter account was 'feefeefly' — Twitter is blocked in China, and she reached it through circumvention software. At about 6:40 a.m. on July 4, 2018 — American Independence Day — she chose to act in front of the HNA Building in Lujiazui, Shanghai. What she said in the livestream shows this was no impulse: using her real name, she declared her opposition to Xi Jinping's dictatorial tyranny and to the CCP's 'brain-control oppression' of the people, and said she hated him to the bone.

Her form of protest has been discussed ever since: one bottle of ink, one phone, one livestream. She had nothing else — no organization, no companions, no way back. After the livestream she returned to her residence and posted a photograph of what appeared to be uniformed personnel outside her door, writing that there was a group of people in uniform outside, that she would come out after changing her clothes, that she had committed no crime, and that the people and groups who had hurt her were the guilty ones. It was the last message she sent the outside world as a free person.

On the day of the ink-splashing, Dong was taken away by Shanghai police and then sent back to Hunan and committed to the women's ward of Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital, a specialist psychiatric institution. When Radio Free Asia telephoned the hospital, the employee who answered said there was no record of a Dong Yaoqiong on the women's ward. But Zhuzhou rights activist Chen Siming confirmed to RFA that Dong was indeed an inpatient there, held in a private room under round-the-clock surveillance. Her father, Dong Jianbiao, rushed to Zhuzhou and was himself detained for a time when he tried to visit her; eventually he was allowed to see his daughter and speak with her. Dong Jianbiao — and her uncle, cousin, and aunt — all said the same thing: Dong Yaoqiong had no mental illness whatsoever; she was perfectly well.

According to her father's statements to the media, the authorities put extreme pressure on Dong's mother to sign the committal papers; it was the mother's signature that lent this forced detention a veneer of 'family consent.' The father also alleged that Dong was forcibly given psychiatric medication in the hospital — he named olanzapine — and suspected that the drugs' side effects were being used deliberately. In September 2018 the overseas website Boxun carried a claim that hospital staff had been ordered to poison Dong slowly so that she would die in hospital (this claim is unverified, corroborated by no other source, and is recorded here only as an open question). What can be confirmed is only this: a young woman with no history of mental illness, who had just publicly criticized the country's top leader, was confined for one year and four months as a 'psychiatric patient,' with no public judicial process and no court judgment of any kind.

On November 19, 2019, Dong was released into her mother's custody. On December 31, 2019, her father saw her for the first time since her release — and told Radio Free Asia that she had changed: once lively and outgoing, she was now withdrawn and said little; asked about her experiences in the hospital, she would say nothing. Her father believed the change was the result of forced medication. He said he now only wanted to help his daughter return to the way she had been. Supporter Ou Biaofeng said at the time that Dong appeared still to be taking several medications, which would account for the change in her personality, and that this was being done to frighten her into never speaking publicly again.

In May 2020 Dong was committed to Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital a second time, and released in July 2020. After her release the authorities assigned her a 'job' at a local government office. On November 30, 2020, at considerable risk, she recorded and released the video statement that remains the most important firsthand record of her situation. She said the so-called job was nothing but typing and phone calls — in substance, surveillance: her movements were restricted, her contacts were all inquired into, and even contact with her father was cut off; she said she had been driven to the brink of breaking down; she asked repeatedly: had she broken the law? Was there really something wrong with her mind? She also said that if the authorities sent her to a psychiatric hospital again, she might never be released for the rest of her life. The video and the related tweets were deleted the same day.

The video contained another detail: on November 29, 2020, a flooding accident occurred at the Yuanjiangshan coal mine in Leiyang, Hunan; her father Dong Jianbiao was caught in it and narrowly escaped with his life — and Dong Yaoqiong knew nothing of it. It was the supporter Ou Biaofeng who passed the news to her. A person under such tight surveillance that word of her father's near-death in a mine had to reach her through an outsider: that, she made clear, was part of why she broke down in the video. After the video appeared, Ou Biaofeng was taken away by Zhuzhou police in early December 2020 for reposting it and appealing to the outside world on her behalf — see 'The Price Paid by Supporters' below.

In February 2021 Dong Yaoqiong was committed to a psychiatric hospital for the third time. From then on, her family received no news of her at all: applications to visit her were blocked, and officials would say only that she was 'doing fine,' and nothing more. In September 2022 a source familiar with the matter told Deutsche Welle that the family knew nothing of her condition, that the last news of her was more than a year old, and that against the authorities' obstruction the family was powerless. Since February 2021 there has been no independently verifiable public information about Dong Yaoqiong herself — no photograph, no video, no record of a lawyer's visit, no account relayed by family. Nothing. Her last public appearance was the video of November 30, 2020; and what she said in it became a prophecy: if she were sent in again, she might never come out for the rest of her life.

In 2024, six years after the ink-splashing, the magazine Bitter Winter published an article asking: is Dong Yaoqiong alive or dead? Remembering, it said, may be the only way to keep her alive — unless she is already gone. In 2025, on the seventh anniversary, the rights organization Safeguard Defenders published an open letter addressed to Dong Yaoqiong, recalling her act on the morning of July 4, 2018, and noting that no one had heard from her since she was forcibly committed for the third time around January–February 2021; the letter had no address to send it to, because no one knows where she is. Neither the CCP nor the Chinese government has ever made any public statement about Dong Yaoqiong's whereabouts.

Dong Jianbiao was the most dogged figure in his daughter's case. A Hunan miner by trade, he ran everywhere for her after she was put in the psychiatric hospital: in 2018 he rushed to Zhuzhou, was detained when he tried to visit, and after seeing her confirmed to the outside world that she was lucid and being held alone under surveillance; at the end of 2019, after her release, he told the media how forced medication had changed her; in August 2020, after visiting her at her mother's home, he told Deutsche Welle that her emotional instability — sometimes crying out or raving — was caused by the authorities' restrictions on her: she was not allowed to leave the locality, and the space of her freedom had shrunk to almost nothing. In his lifetime he also said publicly that Xi Jinping had made himself an emperor. He was probably the only family member in this case who spoke under his real name from beginning to end.

After his daughter's third commitment in February 2021, Dong Jianbiao argued with his former wife over the matter. According to Deutsche Welle's September 2022 reporting, he took gasoline and threatened to burn his former wife's house; he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison (on an arson-related charge), and held at Chaling Prison in Hunan. The context belongs on the record: his arrest came after his daughter's third secret commitment, when the family was being refused even a visit; the Rights Defence Network and overseas reports generally regard him as a man driven to desperation by what was done to his daughter. This site passes no judgment on the distance between the formal charge and that context; it sets both side by side.

In late September 2022, news of Dong Jianbiao's death emerged. Hunan dissident Chen Siming posted on September 24 that Dong had died in Chaling Prison and that relatives viewing the body in the morgue had found it covered in injuries. Deutsche Welle confirmed with a knowledgeable source that the family had been notified by Chaling Prison that he had died in custody; the prison said he had died of illness; relatives viewing the body in the morgue found bruising on his body and bleeding from the anus; the family was forbidden to bring phones into the morgue and could only look once before being made to leave. State security demanded cremation within five days, but in fact the family was made to sign on September 24 and the body was cremated the same day; officials then sent people to the Dong home requiring burial on September 26 and forbidding local citizens from coming to mourn. Chen Siming, who had released the news of the death, was himself reportedly taken away by police. The Rights Defence Network reported the date of death as September 23, 2022. The injuries on the body are the eyewitness account of relatives, carried by Deutsche Welle, RFI, and other outlets; the contradiction between the prison's claim of death by illness and the condition of the body has never been independently investigated.

After Dong Jianbiao's death, there was no family member left in China who spoke publicly about Dong Yaoqiong's case. Her mother has never appeared publicly, and other relatives have cut off contact with the outside world — according to Deutsche Welle's source, outsiders cannot contact the Dong family, because whenever anyone does, the authorities immediately come to make trouble for them. A girl who splashed ink lost her freedom; the father who spoke for her lost his life; the remaining family was forced into silence. Every link of that chain is documented in public reporting.

The list of victims in Dong Yaoqiong's case is longer than father and daughter. Performance artist Hua Yong was among the first to speak up for her; he described her plight publicly, was detained, and later went into exile in Thailand. In 2020 he told Radio Free Asia that Dong had been forcibly fed psychiatric medication during her confinement, traumatizing her in body and mind, and that the matter had long gone beyond freedom of speech. Zhuzhou rights defender Ou Biaofeng paid a heavier price: he followed the case for years, and after Dong released her video on November 30, 2020, it was he who passed her appeal for help to the outside world. On December 2, 2020, four Zhuzhou police officers came to his home in Ningxiang and took him back to Zhuzhou; on December 3 he sent his last public message from the Lusong District police station; on December 4 he was given fifteen days' administrative detention for 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble'; on December 18 the administrative detention was converted into designated-location residential surveillance under the charge of 'inciting subversion of state power'; on July 22, 2021, he was formally arrested and held at the Zhuzhou detention center. On December 30, 2022, a Zhuzhou court announced its verdict behind closed doors inside the detention center: Ou Biaofeng was sentenced to three years and six months for 'inciting subversion of state power.' The man who reposted a video for the ink girl served three and a half years.

Looking further back, the copycat protests that appeared in several places after the 2018 ink-splashing — mud and ink thrown at leaders' portraits — were likewise swiftly seized and silenced. And when news of Dong Jianbiao's death came out in September 2022, Chen Siming, who published it, was taken away by police; Chen was the very person who, in 2018, first confirmed to the outside world that Dong Yaoqiong had been put in Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital. Almost no one who helped this girl came through unscathed. That list is itself testimony: what the authorities set out to seal away was not only a girl, but any attempt to make her case seen.

Dong Yaoqiong's fate is not an isolated case but the best-known instance of China's practice of forced psychiatric commitment of dissenters — being 'made mentally ill.' Human Rights Watch documented as early as 2002, in its report Dangerous Minds, the authorities' use of psychiatric hospitals to confine dissidents. A 2016 briefing by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders noted that forced commitment remains a common means of punishing activists and critics, with thousands of people sent by the government into psychiatric hospitals every year. China's Mental Health Law, in force since May 1, 2013, in principle requires that treatment of mental disorders be voluntary, and permits involuntary hospitalization only where a person has harmed, or is about to harm, themselves or others — after splashing the ink, Dong was lucid and coherent, no public evidence has ever shown that she met that standard, and her commitment was ordered by no court and supported by no diagnosis ever made public.

In 2022 the rights organization Safeguard Defenders published a dedicated report on China's abuse of psychiatric detention against dissenters, systematically documenting petitioners, activists, and dissidents forcibly hospitalized and forcibly medicated; Dong Yaoqiong was among its emblematic cases. Neither the United Nations nor any government has issued a formal statement on Dong's individual case — unlike Ding Jiaxi or Yu Wensheng, whose cases are backed by organized support networks, she had no team of lawyers and no family in exile, only a father who is now dead in prison. That is the other face of her case: the more defenseless a person is, the more completely she disappears. International media — Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Asia, RFI, Hong Kong Free Press, the South China Morning Post, Bitter Winter — have kept asking questions for eight years; none of those questions has ever received any response from the Chinese authorities. The hospital's line back in 2018, 'we have no record of this person,' remains one of the rare official utterances this case has ever produced.

As of October 2026, the last status of Dong Yaoqiong this site can confirm is: committed to a psychiatric hospital for the third time in February 2021, and missing since. Whether she is alive, where she is held, and the state of her health are all beyond verification. She is thirty-seven this year. She was twenty-nine when she splashed the ink; more than eight years of her life since then have been spent in psychiatric hospitals, under surveillance, and in disappearance. Her father is dead; those who spoke for her have been imprisoned, exiled, or silenced. The two questions she asked in her video of November 30, 2020 — 'Did I break the law?' 'Is there really something wrong with my mind?' — have never received any official answer. There is only continuing silence, and in this case silence is not an absence; silence is the method of disposal itself.

The limits of this record must be stated plainly: every claim about Dong Yaoqiong after February 2021 — whether she is alive or dead — cannot be independently verified by this site, and is therefore neither adopted nor repeated here. What an archive can do is fix in place every verifiable step before February 2021, and note here: this woman was taken away by the state in February 2021, and the state has never accounted for her to the world since.

The method used in Dong Yaoqiong's case deserves separate record, because its cruelty lies in dispensing with trial altogether. For Ding Jiaxi and Yu Wensheng, the authorities at least went through the motions of arrest, indictment, and verdict; for Dong Yaoqiong even the motions were skipped. One committal form, signed by a family member under pressure, turned a person into a 'patient' — after which confining her required no charge, no sentence, no judgment, and her release depended on the needs of 'treatment,' as defined by the people confining her. Psychiatry was used here as a perfect weapon: it first strips the victim of standing to speak — nothing you say counts, because you are 'ill' — and then strips the family of standing to question: the father who said his daughter was not ill became a troublemaker, and ended up dead in prison. A bottle of ink thrown at a portrait is, under any law, at most a minor act of vandalism; the authorities answered it with eight years and the destruction of a family, which is precisely proof of why that bottle of ink had power: what it struck was not a portrait but the rule that the leader may not be criticized. In the end this case leaves one question unanswered: where is a thirty-seven-year-old Chinese citizen now, and is she still alive? The institutions that could answer it have been answering a different question all along — we have no record of this person.