第63案 | 欧彪峰Case 63 | Ou Biaofeng
欧彪峰，湖南省宁乡市公民活动人士、网络评论者与专栏作者，确切出生年份无公开记录。十多年里他以转发、记录与声援为业：2014年与同道剃头声援香港雨伞运动；2015年“709”大抓捕后持续为谢阳、余文生律师发声，声援李文足，长期声援谢文飞并祭拜李旺阳；2019年至2020年公开支持香港《苹果日报》与黎智英，并因声援许志永、常玮平于2020年3月与11月两度被传唤，维权网记有关方面“早已做好了抓捕欧彪峰的材料”。2018年7月董瑶琼在上海直播泼墨、被送入株洲市第三医院精神科之后，他成为此案最主要的民间记录者之一，持续跟进其父董建彪探访与聘请律师受阻的消息。2020年11月30日董瑶琼发布视频自述“被精神病”与严密监控、精神濒临崩溃，欧彪峰协助并转发；12月2日株洲四名警察到宁乡其住处，12月3日他发出最后一条公开推文，称自己被带到株洲市芦淞区公安分局等候见国保负责人；12月4日其妻魏欢欢证实他被以寻衅滋事行政拘留十五天、住所被搜查；12月18日行拘期满当日，他被转为以涉嫌煽动颠覆国家政权罪指定居所监视居住。2021年7月22日他被正式逮捕、关押于株洲市看守所，自选律师被拒，官派律师余良辉拒绝与家属见面和转交信件，看守所不许以其本名存款。2022年1月27日他在没有自选律师的情况下被秘密开庭；2022年12月30日被以煽动颠覆国家政权罪判处有期徒刑三年六个月，宣判在株洲市看守所内闭门进行，法院认定其为香港《明报》与《苹果日报》撰稿的稿费为“非法收入”，作出判决的法院名称无公开记录。2023年6月他被转入湖南赤山监狱，每日被迫从早上六点劳动至傍晚六七点。2024年9月16日刑满获释；获释后他披露，其被认定的“罪状”之一是声援与纪念“709”。其为之发声的董建彪已于2022年9月23日死于狱中（官方称糖尿病，家属称遗体带伤，终年55岁），董瑶琼本人自2021年2月第三次被送入精神病院后下落不明。Ou Biaofeng, a citizen activist, online commentator and columnist from Ningxiang, Hunan — his exact year of birth is not in the public record — spent more than a decade relaying, recording and speaking out: shaving his head with fellow activists in support of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement in 2014; speaking out persistently after the 2015 '709' crackdown for the arrested lawyers Xie Yang and Yu Wensheng, backing Li Wenzu, supporting Xie Wenfei over the long term and visiting the grave of Li Wangyang; publicly supporting Hong Kong's Apple Daily and Jimmy Lai in 2019–2020; and being summoned by police in March and November 2020 for supporting Xu Zhiyong and Chang Weiping — Weiquanwang records that the authorities had 'long since prepared the materials' for his arrest. After Dong Yaoqiong livestreamed her ink protest in Shanghai in July 2018 and was confined in the psychiatric ward of Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital, Ou became one of the principal citizen chroniclers of her case, following her father Dong Jianbiao's obstructed visits and lawyer-retention efforts. On 30 November 2020 Dong posted a video saying she had been falsely labelled mentally ill, remained under close surveillance since her release, and was on the verge of breakdown; Ou helped her send the message out and retweeted it. On 2 December four Zhuzhou police officers came to his Ningxiang home; on 3 December he posted his last public tweet, saying he had been taken to the Lusong District police station in Zhuzhou to wait for the domestic security chief. On 4 December his wife Wei Huanhuan confirmed he had been given fifteen days of administrative detention for 'picking quarrels' and their home searched. On 18 December, the day that detention expired, he was converted to residential surveillance at a designated location on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power. He was formally arrested on 22 July 2021 and held in Zhuzhou Detention Center, denied a lawyer of his choice; the appointed lawyer, Yu Lianghui, refused to meet his family or pass on letters, and the detention center would not accept deposits under his real name. He was secretly tried on 27 January 2022 without chosen counsel, and on 30 December 2022 sentenced to three years and six months for inciting subversion of state power, the sentence pronounced behind closed doors inside the Zhuzhou Detention Center; the court treated his fees from Hong Kong's Ming Pao and Apple Daily as 'illegal income,' and the sentencing court's name is not in the public record. In June 2023 he was transferred to Chishan Prison in Hunan and forced to labour from six in the morning until six or seven in the evening daily. He was released on completion of his sentence on 16 September 2024; afterwards he disclosed that one of the 'offences' held against him was supporting and commemorating '709.' Dong Jianbiao, for whom he had spoken, had died in prison on 23 September 2022, aged 55 — officials said diabetes, his family said his body bore injuries — and Dong Yaoqiong herself has been missing since her third committal to a psychiatric hospital in February 2021.
First, remember what he did: a man who spoke for others
Ou Biaofeng's case has to start with a correct description of who he was. He was not the head of any organisation, not a lawyer, not a journalist, and not a relative of Dong Yaoqiong. He was an ordinary citizen of Ningxiang, Hunan, who wrote columns, posted on Twitter, and over more than a decade developed a habit that others found almost stubborn: when someone was arrested, he reposted it; when someone was tried, he reposted it; when someone's family cried out for help, he reposted that too. The profile maintained by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) summarises those ten years plainly: he spoke out for many human rights defenders and often provided details and updates on particular cases on social media. Among those he supported were the lawyers Xie Yang and Yu Wensheng, seized in the "709" crackdown, and he backed Li Wenzu through the years she campaigned for her husband Wang Quanzhang. He spoke for Xie Wenfei of the Southern Street Movement. He regularly visited the grave of Li Wangyang, the Tiananmen-era democracy activist who died in murky circumstances shortly after his release from prison in 2012. In 2014, during Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, he shaved his head with fellow activists in a gesture of support. In 2019 and 2020, as the authorities closed in on Hong Kong's Apple Daily and its founder Jimmy Lai, he declared his support publicly.
People like Ou have an informal name in China's citizen circles: chroniclers. They organise nothing; they make sure things are not forgotten. Their only weapon is a line of text that keeps an event present in public space after it happens. That line looks weightless. It is not treated as weightless — before Ou was seized in 2020, the stability-maintenance system had been keeping his account for a long time. The March 2021 edition of Weiquanwang's monthly report on political prisoners states it bluntly: in March and November 2020 he had been summoned by police for publicly supporting the prisoners of conscience Xu Zhiyong and Chang Weiping, and the authorities had let it be known more than once that "the materials for arresting Ou Biaofeng were long since prepared." That sentence deserves its own line in this file, because it explains the shape of everything that followed: a dossier waiting for a pretext. On 30 November 2020, Dong Yaoqiong's video supplied the pretext. And Ou — who knew the ledger existed — pressed "repost" anyway. That is the first key to understanding both the man and the case.
One more element of his identity needs to be recorded here, because it later became "evidence": his writing. The Dui Hua Foundation records that the court found he had earned what officials called "illegal income" from critical articles written for Hong Kong's Ming Pao and Apple Daily. PEN America registers him as a "columnist and online commentator" in its Writers at Risk database. In the official narrative, then, writing commentary for Hong Kong newspapers for a fee was part of the evidence of subversion. In a normal society, it is called writing. This page sets the two descriptions side by side not because they are comparable, but because the juxtaposition is the case in miniature: the whole of his "subversion," taken apart, consists of three things — posting, reposting, and writing articles.
The Dong Yaoqiong ink case: the family he chronicled
The source of this case is another person's case; readers should consult this site's separate file on Dong Yaoqiong (persecution/dong-yaoqiong). Only the parts directly bearing on Ou Biaofeng are set out here. In the early morning of 4 July 2018, Dong Yaoqiong, a 28-year-old Hunan woman, stood in front of the HNA Tower in Shanghai and livestreamed herself splashing ink on a portrait of Xi Jinping, saying she opposed the Communist Party's authoritarian tyranny and its persecution of her through "mind control." Hours after the stream ended she was taken away from her home. That evening her Twitter account posted a photograph of a gorilla, and then fell silent — she had vanished from public view. The facts were gradually assembled afterwards: she had been sent back to Hunan and confined in the women's psychiatric ward of Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital. Her father, Dong Jianbiao, told multiple media outlets that his daughter had no history of mental illness; he also said the authorities had put extreme pressure on Dong's mother to sign the committal papers. A person who had passed through no court and no independent medical assessment was thereby locked away as a "patient" for more than a year.
Dong Jianbiao then began years of campaigning, and Ou Biaofeng was one of the principal recorders and amplifiers of that campaign. According to contemporary reporting by media outlets and rights organisations, Dong Jianbiao retained a lawyer and demanded to visit his daughter and have the hospital release her; the visits were refused, and his appearances outside the hospital and at government offices were relayed onto Twitter by Ou and others, becoming almost the only window through which the outside world could follow the case. Ou's precise role should be stated carefully for the reader: he was not family and not counsel. What he did was carry each blocked visit, each refused lawyer's meeting, each of the father's public appeals, unchanged, into public space outside the Great Firewall. That carrying work looked trivial at the time. In retrospect it was crucial: the Dong Yaoqiong case later became the emblematic case in international discussion of China's practice of punitive psychiatry — "being made mentally ill" — and the early chain of facts cited in United Nations and rights-organisation documents was built in large part from these day-by-day repostings. A young woman locked in a psychiatric ward without even a telephone did not sink from view, because outside the walls a few people kept writing her name. Ou Biaofeng wrote it most diligently of all.
At the end of 2019 and into January 2020, Dong Yaoqiong was nominally released home. But "home" did not mean free: by her own later account and the records of several rights organisations, after discharge she lived under intensive surveillance, could not freely contact anyone — including her father — and had her movement, employment and social life comprehensively restricted; she had also visibly changed. On 30 November 2020 she posted a video on her own Twitter account — the first time in more than two years she had spoken directly to the outside world. In tears, she said she had never been mentally ill, yet had been sent to a psychiatric hospital; that since her release she had remained under close surveillance, placed in a controlled job, deprived of freedom of movement and contact; and that she was on the verge of a breakdown. She said she was no longer afraid. The video and several following tweets were deleted soon after they appeared; her account fell silent again, and she was believed to be back under the authorities' control. Voice of America's tracking report at the time was headlined, in effect: "Dong Yaoqiong speaks out again about 'being made mentally ill'; outside attention, official nerves." The official nerves would soon be demonstrated on Ou Biaofeng.
What Ou did in this episode is recorded with unusual consistency across sources: both CHRD and the Dui Hua Foundation record that he retweeted Dong's video and tweets and helped her send her message to the world — at a moment when she plainly could no longer speak freely herself. The nature of that act should be noted: he did not write the video's content and did not speak for her; what he did was relay and help publish her own account of her own situation. For that single act, within three days, the police were at his door.
Dong Jianbiao: the father who campaigned for his daughter and died in prison
This case has a side-story that cannot be skipped, because it runs parallel to Ou's fate and reached its end while Ou was still in prison. Dong Jianbiao, of Taoshui township, You County, Hunan, was a miner in his fifties. According to the chapter devoted to him in Safeguard Defenders' 2023 report on collective punishment in China, "Anxious Families," once his daughter had been locked in a psychiatric hospital this taciturn miner summoned the courage to record a video appealing for her release; he hired a lawyer and tried to persuade the hospital to let him see his daughter and set her free. The police response was harassment: he was detained for a time, placed under house surveillance, and given trouble at his workplace. During Dong Yaoqiong's brief release he saw what had happened to her: greatly increased weight, screaming at night, a dulled expression. In February 2021, on learning that his ex-wife had cooperated with the police in sending Dong Yaoqiong back to the psychiatric hospital for a third time, Dong Jianbiao in his fury threatened to burn down her house. She called the police and he was arrested. Safeguard Defenders' report states expressly that he harmed no one and damaged no property, yet was still sentenced to three years in prison. The specific charge is recorded inconsistently across public sources and is entered in this file as not in the public record; what is multiply sourced is the fact of the three-year sentence in 2021.
On 23 September 2022 Dong Jianbiao died in prison, aged 55. A date error that appeared in this page's commissioning brief must be corrected here: he did not die in November 2022 but on 23 September — Radio Free Asia's report of 26 September 2022, the Safeguard Defenders report, and Weiquanwang's news all agree. According to RFA, the family learned of the death through Weiquanwang, quoting Zhuzhou activist Chen Siming; the police told the family the cause of death was diabetes. What the family saw when they went to the morgue to identify the body was something else: the corpse was covered in signs of injury, with blood scabs on the back, and the eyes were still open; police would not allow photographs and hurried the family out of the room; staff said the body would be cremated in five days. A cousin of Dong Yaoqiong told RFA that the funeral had been held in the home village of Taoshui in You County, with roadblocks at every intersection and no one allowed in. The artist Hua Yong told RFA that Dong Jianbiao was strong-minded, stubborn and optimistic, that suicide could definitely be ruled out, and that — this being a man alone inside a high-security prison — the implication spoke for itself. And Chen Siming, who had spread the news of the death, was himself detained afterwards: even the fact "a man has died" needed someone willing to risk arrest to carry it out of the walls. One more cruel alignment of dates belongs in this section: when Dong Jianbiao died, Ou Biaofeng was sitting in the Zhuzhou Detention Center awaiting sentence. The father for whom he had spoken was dead, and this time he did not even have the chance to repost it.
And Dong Yaoqiong herself? According to a tweet by Hua Yong on 6 February 2021, she had been sent back to Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital for a third time in February 2021 (a report by Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch in its 2020 year-end survey of punitive psychiatry relays the same item; this file registers it with its source chain). After that, public news of her essentially ceased. Safeguard Defenders wrote in 2023 that, at the time of writing, still no one knew where Dong Yaoqiong was, or even whether she knew her father had died. Her full case is in this site's Dong Yaoqiong file. Only the point that locks into Ou's case is recorded here: the video he relayed remains, to this day, the last time Dong Yaoqiong spoke to the world in her own face and voice. Her silence since, the silencing of the man who relayed her, and the death of her father are three faces of one event.
3 December 2020: the last tweet
The process by which Ou Biaofeng lost his freedom happens to preserve the last public words he wrote himself. CHRD's profile records the days in sequence. On 2 December 2020, four Zhuzhou police officers came to his home in Ningxiang to take him back to Zhuzhou. On 3 December he posted his last public tweet, saying in substance that after lunch he had been taken to the Lusong District police station in Zhuzhou and was waiting to meet the chief of the domestic security (guobao) squad. With his years of experience he had been through this scene many times — "drinking tea," being taken "on vacation," being warned — and he probably thought this was one more routine talk after which he would go home. Later that day his wife, Wei Huanhuan, posted on Twitter that Ou had been summoned by police over his tweets about Dong Yaoqiong. On 4 December she posted again: he had been given fifteen days of administrative detention, under the label "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." According to Hong Kong Free Press's report of 31 December 2020, relaying Wei's tweets, police also searched their home.
Fifteen days of administrative detention is, in China's stability-maintenance practice, a standard "hold the person first" device: it requires no procuratorate and no court — the public security bureau decides it itself — and it keeps a person lawfully in hand while the case officers decide the next step. Everyone assumed that after fifteen days he would either be released or moved into criminal detention, and the matter would come into the open. On 18 December 2020, the very day the administrative detention expired, what Wei Huanhuan received was not her husband but a notice: Ou Biaofeng had been converted to residential surveillance at a designated location, on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power. Hong Kong Free Press's headline captured the leap: an activist who had voiced support for the "Ink Girl" was now charged with inciting subversion. Wei's words, quoted verbatim in the report, were these in substance: Ou is only a powerless person — how could he subvert a country? Yet, as the notice showed, his track record of actions had earned him this "certificate." Those words were written by a wife on the first day of her husband's secret detention. This page reproduces their substance without adding a word of commentary — they are commentary enough.
The leap from administrative detention to RSDL, and from "picking quarrels" to "inciting subversion of state power," is the hinge of this case and its weight must be explained to the reader. Picking quarrels is the most commonly used catch-all label in public-order and minor-offence practice; fifteen days is the maximum administrative punishment under it. Inciting subversion of state power, Article 105(2) of the Criminal Law, is a heavy political crime carrying up to fifteen years; cases under it are led by the domestic security apparatus, lawyers' meetings require the investigating organ's permission, and trials are almost never public. The same set of tweets was characterised, within fifteen days, first as "provoking trouble" and then as "subversion" — the conduct did not change; the determination to punish did. Read together with Weiquanwang's note that the arrest materials "were long since prepared," the reasonable reading is that Dong Yaoqiong's video was only the trigger. The gun had been loaded for a long time.
RSDL: the seven months he vanished from public view
From 18 December 2020 Ou Biaofeng was under residential surveillance at a designated location. The measure means confinement not in a detention center but at a location never disclosed to the family; and because the suspicion involved state security, lawyers' meetings required the investigating organ's approval — approval that never came. CHRD's 2021 annual report on human rights defenders records the subsequent procedural nodes: he remained under RSDL on that charge until 22 July 2021, when he was formally arrested and transferred to Zhuzhou No. 1 Detention Center (another CHRD entry gives the Zhuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau Supervision Center Detention Center; the two formulations refer to the same custodial system and both are recorded here). Counting from 3 December 2020, he spent nearly eight months on no public register: not in the open detention-center system, no meetings, no letters, the family not knowing where he was held or how he was.
The family's side of those months rests on one person's Twitter account: Wei Huanhuan's. What she did was exactly what her husband had always done — record. Every notice, every negotiation, every refusal, she wrote up and posted. It is because of those day-by-day records that several key details of the family's treatment survive. First, the right to counsel: Ou was denied a lawyer of his own choice and was assigned one by the authorities. Second, according to Wei's tweet of 10 September 2021, that appointed lawyer, Yu Lianghui, refused to meet her to discuss the case and refused to pass letters to Ou — a man nominally defending the accused who would neither see the family nor carry a letter, whose only function in the procedure was to make the sentence "the defendant has a lawyer" true on paper. Third, when Wei went to the detention center to deposit money into Ou's personal spending account, so that he could buy food and daily necessities inside, the staff would not allow a deposit under Ou Biaofeng's real name. CHRD's profile raises the question this invites: was he being held under an alias? And if so, could he ever actually use the money deposited for him? Fourth, throughout the long period of secret and then formal detention, with meetings and family visits comprehensively blocked, the outside world had no news at all of his physical or mental condition; rights organisations' files, even after the December 2022 sentencing, could still only write that there was no news of his health.
Put together, these details show what RSDL actually did in this case — the same conclusion this site's other files reach repeatedly: it is not an investigative measure but a disappearance measure. Investigation needs evidence, and this case's "evidence" consisted of public tweets and publicly published newspaper columns, fixable within a day. Seven months of secret detention investigated not the facts but the man's will, and his family's endurance of the unknown. Wei Huanhuan's daily posting was a daily refusal of that arrangement: she turned every refusal into a public record, so that the disappearance itself left traces. That is why this file can exist, and why her name belongs in its header.
A secret trial and a closed-door sentence: tried 27 January 2022, sentenced to three and a half years on 30 December
On 27 January 2022 Ou Biaofeng was secretly tried without a lawyer of his choice — CHRD's record of the date and the circumstance is explicit. Where the trial was held, by which court, who appeared, and what exact list of his words was charged: none of this can be ascertained from public channels, and the indictment has never been published. After the hearing the matter dragged on for another eleven months, until 30 December 2022, when the verdict arrived: inciting subversion of state power, three years and six months, pronounced behind closed doors inside the Zhuzhou Detention Center. On CHRD's profile page the "Court" field is blank. The Dui Hua Foundation's 2023 prisoner update records the verdict's other notable content: the court found that the income Ou earned writing critical articles for Hong Kong's Ming Pao and the by-then closed Apple Daily constituted "illegal income." The same Dui Hua item notes that he had originally been detained for "picking quarrels" for retweeting Dong Yaoqiong's video, before step by step arriving at a subversion conviction.
Three errors in circulation are corrected in this section, item by item, because accuracy is an archive's first value. First, the date: the sentence was passed not in December 2021 but on 30 December 2022; during 2021 his status was formal arrest on 22 July and awaiting trial thereafter. Second, the charge: the final conviction was not picking quarrels — that label served only for the fifteen days of administrative detention in December 2020; what imprisoned him was inciting subversion of state power. Third, the court and venue: a claim in circulation attributes the verdict to the Shifeng District People's Court of Zhuzhou; this site has searched the records of CHRD, the Dui Hua Foundation, PEN America and contemporary media reporting, and no source supports it. The verifiable facts are only that sentence was pronounced behind closed doors inside the detention center and that the sentencing court's name is not in the public record; this page records exactly that and does not fill the blank with rumour. These three corrections contain a further facet of the case: in an inciting-subversion case, even the name of the court that passed sentence need not appear in the public record. The principle of open trials, in political cases, does not survive even as a formality.
From being taken away on 3 December 2020 to sentencing on 30 December 2022 is two years and twenty-seven days. Of that time, roughly seven months were secret detention and roughly seventeen months were detention-center custody awaiting trial, punctuated by one hearing, held in secret, and one sentencing, held behind closed doors. The three-and-a-half-year term had to be credited against those two-plus years already lost — which means that by the time he walked into Chishan Prison, most of his sentence was already behind him. That proportion is worth a reader's pause: pre-trial custody amounting to two-thirds of the total term means that in this case the trial was not the procedure that determined guilt; it was the paperwork that ratified a punishment already largely executed.
Chishan Prison: labour from six in the morning until six or seven at night
In June 2023 Wei Huanhuan disclosed to the outside world that Ou had been transferred to Chishan Prison to serve his sentence. Chishan Prison, on Chishan Island in Yuanjiang, Yiyang, Hunan, is a large, high-security prison in the province known for its labour regime. CHRD, relaying the family's news, records that at Chishan, Ou was forced to perform manual labour from six in the morning until roughly six or seven in the evening every day, and that at a visit he appeared very tired. The same prison had already entered the international record through two other prisoners: the Taiwanese activist Lee Ming-cheh, sentenced to five years for subversion in 2017, who reported long hours of forced labour and poor food and clothing conditions at Chishan; and Cheng Yuan of the Changsha public-interest trio, whose wife Shi Minglei campaigned publicly for years against the prison's forced labour and visit restrictions. Sending Ou Biaofeng to this prison needs no additional explanation — the testimony of his predecessors has already written its prospectus.
About six months separate the sentencing of 30 December 2022 from the transfer in June 2023; during that interval he remained in the Zhuzhou detention center. Whether family visits resumed after sentencing, how often he could write or be visited at Chishan, and what the long hours of heavy labour did to his health — the public record contains only the single item Wei Huanhuan disclosed in June 2023: twelve to thirteen hours of physical labour a day, and a man who looked exhausted. Everything beyond that is not in the public record. Following this archive's rule, the blank is registered as a blank: the testimony of Lee Ming-cheh and Cheng Yuan can establish the prison's general practice but cannot be used to write Ou Biaofeng's individual days for him. What can be established is only what his wife said after seeing him.
The impact on his family: one household's three years and nine months
The documented impact of this case on the family is concentrated on Wei Huanhuan. The role she played across those three years and nine months has been itemised above: when her husband was summoned, she posted it; when he was administratively detained, she posted it; when the fifteen days expired and instead of her husband there arrived a notice of RSDL for subversion, she posted it; when the state-appointed lawyer refused to meet her and refused to carry letters, she posted it; when the detention center would not let her deposit money under her husband's real name, that too entered the record of a rights organisation; and when he had been moved to Chishan Prison and was being worked twelve to thirteen hours a day, it was she who disclosed it. For the entire period of her husband's lost freedom, this family's connection to the outside world ran through one woman's account. Her tweets were cited by Hong Kong Free Press, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and others, becoming the principal source through which the international community tracked the case — and the most weighty sentence in Hong Kong Free Press's 31 December 2020 report was hers: how could a powerless person subvert a country?
The parts that are not in the public record are registered with equal care. Whether Ou and Wei have children, their ages, and whether their schooling was affected: not in the public record. The family's sources of income after his arrest, and whether Wei's own work was harassed: not in the public record. His parents' situation: not in the public record. This registration is not an omission; it is part of what such cases do to families. A spouse who stands up publicly bears exposure and pressure; family members who stay silent should not have names written into an archive by force. The one structural fact that can be confirmed is this: from 3 December 2020 to 16 September 2024, one of this household's two pillars was taken by the state in the name of "subversion," and during that time his wife had simultaneously to keep the household alive and to serve as her husband's spokesperson, recorder and petitioner — with no tools but a telephone and an account that could be deleted at any time.
The international response: a name in the databases, and attention without sequel
The international record of Ou Biaofeng's case is less dense than that of the 709 lawyers, but the chain is complete, and it is registered here item by item. Among rights organisations: Chinese Human Rights Defenders maintains a dedicated prisoner profile for him and wrote his case into its 2021 annual report on human rights defenders as one of that year's emblematic cases of persecution for online speech. The Dui Hua Foundation's 2023 prisoner update records his sentencing and the verdict's characterisation of his Ming Pao and Apple Daily fees. PEN America lists him in its Writers at Risk database as a columnist and online commentator and updated his status to "released" after he came out. Human Rights in China (HRIC), in its 2025 long retrospective marking ten years since 709, treated him as a representative case among the 709 generation's supporters, recording his release and the "offence" he disclosed afterwards. Among media: Hong Kong Free Press reported the case on 31 December 2020, shortly after his conversion to RSDL; Radio Free Asia and Voice of America tracked Dong Yaoqiong's 30 November 2020 video and the chain of arrests it triggered, and RFA's long September 2022 report on Dong Jianbiao's death in prison carried the whole Dong Yaoqiong – Dong Jianbiao – supporters chain back before international readers; and Safeguard Defenders' 2023 report on collective punishment gave Dong Jianbiao an entire chapter, so that the family tragedy Ou had recorded and relayed entered the main text of international human-rights literature.
The practical results of all this attention are recorded as plainly as in this site's other files: his sentence was not shortened by a single day — 16 September 2024 was release on completion, not early release. The secret trial was held anyway, the appointed lawyer was imposed anyway, the labour at Chishan went ahead anyway. The function of international attention in this case is the function it serves across this archive: it lands, in the end, on the record. It ensures that the name of an ordinary citizen of Ningxiang is stored — under his real name, with his real case and his real timeline — in the databases of PEN America, CHRD, the Dui Hua Foundation and HRIC, as a standing counter-statement to the official narrative's "inciter of subversion." Whoever, in future, looks up what happened in Zhuzhou in December 2020 will run into these records first. And this is precisely the echo of what Ou himself did for others for a decade: the records he kept for other people were, in the end, kept for him as well.
16 September 2024: release on completion, and one disclosure afterwards
On 16 September 2024 Ou Biaofeng was released on completion of his sentence. The date comes from PEN America's Writers at Risk database, which records that he was sentenced to forty-two months for inciting subversion of state power and released on 16 September 2024 after serving his full sentence. HRIC's 2025 article likewise states that he was released from prison in September 2024. The two sources corroborate each other and this page follows them. A claim in the commissioning brief that he was released on 2 June 2024 is supported by no public source and is not adopted: the details of how the administrative detention, RSDL and pre-trial custody were credited against the term were never published by the authorities, and why the completion date fell in mid-September 2024 rather than earlier is likewise not explained in any public record — registered here as not in the public record, with no arithmetic speculation offered.
After his release, only one item about him has reached public channels, and it carries weight. According to HRIC's 2025 article marking ten years since 709, Ou disclosed after coming out that one of the "offences" held against him was his years of support for "709" and his writings commemorating it. Read alongside the never-published judgment, this single disclosure lets the reader assemble the outline of the evidence in this case: relaying Dong Yaoqiong's video was the trigger for the arrest; writing commentary for Ming Pao and Apple Daily for fees was the "illegal income" the verdict recognised; supporting and commemorating 709 was, by his own disclosure, among the counts. Three things — relaying, writing, commemorating — none of them outside the territory of speech. That is why this site separates his case out from the "collateral cases" of the Dong Yaoqiong affair: he was not a man who happened to fall because he brushed against one incident; he was systematically settled with because of ten years of recording and speaking out. The Dong case was the last straw, not the whole weight.
His post-release condition is registered here in its verifiable and its blank parts. Verifiable: he left prison on 16 September 2024, and after his release he was able to communicate with the outside world and disclose the detail above, which shows his personal liberty formally restored. Blank: whether he is still periodically summoned by domestic security, whether he is under an exit ban, whether a supplementary deprivation of political rights exists and for how long, and the state of his work and health — none of it is in the public record. This page will be updated in future checks. Until then, one sourced sentence closes the section: when he came out, Dong Yaoqiong, for whom he had spoken, was still missing, and Dong Jianbiao had been dead for a year and eleven months. That family's case is not over; the silence his recording work now faces is deeper than the one before.
Full timeline
- 2014 — During Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, Ou Biaofeng shaves his head with fellow activists in support of the Hong Kong democracy movement (per CHRD profile).
- After July 2015 — Following the "709" crackdown he speaks out continuously on social media for the arrested lawyers Xie Yang and Yu Wensheng and supports Wang Quanzhang's wife Li Wenzu; he also supports Southern Street Movement activist Xie Wenfei over the long term and repeatedly visits the grave of the late democracy activist Li Wangyang (per CHRD profile).
- 4 July 2018 — Dong Yaoqiong livestreams herself splashing ink on a portrait of Xi Jinping in Shanghai and is taken away the same day, then confined in the psychiatric ward of Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital; Ou becomes one of the principal citizen chroniclers of the case, following Dong Jianbiao's blocked visits and lawyer-retention efforts (for the full case, see this site's Dong Yaoqiong file).
- 2019–2020 — He publicly supports Hong Kong's Apple Daily and Jimmy Lai; in March and November 2020 he is summoned by police for publicly supporting the prisoners of conscience Xu Zhiyong and Chang Weiping (per Weiquanwang's monthly reports on political prisoners).
- Late 2019 – January 2020 — Dong Yaoqiong is nominally released home but kept under intensive surveillance, her freedom of movement and contact restricted.
- 30 November 2020 — Dong Yaoqiong posts a video on Twitter stating that she has no mental illness, remains under close surveillance since her release, and is on the verge of breakdown; the video and tweets are soon deleted and she is again brought under control. Ou retweets the video and helps her send her message to the world.
- 2 December 2020 — Four Zhuzhou police officers come to Ou's home in Ningxiang to take him back to Zhuzhou.
- 3 December 2020 — Ou posts his last public tweet, saying that after lunch he has been taken to the Lusong District police station in Zhuzhou and is waiting to meet the domestic security chief; his wife Wei Huanhuan confirms on Twitter the same day that he has been summoned over his retweets of Dong Yaoqiong.
- 4 December 2020 — Wei Huanhuan posts that Ou has been given fifteen days of administrative detention for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble"; police search their home (per Hong Kong Free Press relaying her account).
- 18 December 2020 — On the day the administrative detention expires, Ou is converted to RSDL on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power; Wei Huanhuan, on receiving the notice, speaks out on Twitter.
- February 2021 — Dong Jianbiao is arrested after threatening to burn his ex-wife's house, having learned that she cooperated with police in sending Dong Yaoqiong into a psychiatric hospital for a third time; Dong Yaoqiong is herself committed for a third time the same month (per Hua Yong's tweet, relayed by Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch). Dong Jianbiao is later sentenced to three years.
- 22 July 2021 — Ou is formally arrested on the charge of inciting subversion of state power and transferred to Zhuzhou Detention Center.
- 10 September 2021 — Wei Huanhuan posts that the government-appointed lawyer Yu Lianghui refuses to meet her to discuss the case and refuses to pass on letters. Separately, the detention center will not allow deposits into Ou's account under his real name, raising the question whether he is held under an alias (per CHRD profile).
- 27 January 2022 — Ou is secretly tried without a lawyer of his choice.
- 23 September 2022 — Dong Jianbiao dies in prison aged 55; officials say diabetes, the family says the body bore injuries and blood scabs on the back; the body is cremated five days later and the funeral is held in Taoshui, You County, with roadblocks at the intersections. Chen Siming, who spread the news of the death, is subsequently detained.
- 30 December 2022 — Ou is sentenced to three years and six months for inciting subversion of state power, the sentence pronounced behind closed doors inside the Zhuzhou Detention Center; the verdict treats his income from writing for Ming Pao and Apple Daily as "illegal income" (per the Dui Hua Foundation); the name of the sentencing court is not in the public record.
- June 2023 — Wei Huanhuan discloses that Ou has been transferred to Chishan Prison in Hunan, where he is forced to labour from six in the morning until six or seven in the evening daily and appeared exhausted at a visit (per CHRD profile).
- 16 September 2024 — Ou is released on completion of his sentence (per PEN America's Writers at Risk database; HRIC's 2025 article likewise records a September 2024 release).
- 2025 — HRIC's article marking ten years since 709 relays Ou's post-release disclosure that one of the "offences" held against him was supporting and commemorating "709."
- October 2026 — This page's check: no public record of renewed detention, movement restrictions, or a return to public speech; no independently verifiable news of Dong Yaoqiong's whereabouts.
Verification note
The core facts of this page — the Zhuzhou police visit to the Ningxiang home on 2 December 2020; the last tweet from the Lusong District police station on 3 December; fifteen days of administrative detention for picking quarrels from 4 December; conversion to RSDL for suspected inciting subversion on 18 December; formal arrest on 22 July 2021; the refusal of a chosen lawyer and the appointed lawyer Yu Lianghui's refusal to engage the family; the refusal of deposits under his real name; the secret trial of 27 January 2022; the closed-door sentencing to three years and six months inside the Zhuzhou Detention Center on 30 December 2022; the June 2023 transfer to Chishan Prison and its long hours of forced labour; and his decade of support for the 709 lawyers and the Hong Kong movements — are corroborated by two or more independent sources, principally CHRD's individual profile and its 2021 annual report on human rights defenders, and Hong Kong Free Press's report of 31 December 2020, together with Weiquanwang's monthly reports on political prisoners. The verdict's "illegal income" characterisation of his Ming Pao and Apple Daily fees, and the arrest trigger of retweeting Dong Yaoqiong's video, come from the Dui Hua Foundation's Prisoner Updates 2023 #2. The release date of 16 September 2024 comes from PEN America's Writers at Risk database, with HRIC's 2025 article as corroboration of a September 2024 release. The Dong Jianbiao material — arrest in February 2021, a three-year sentence, death in prison on 23 September 2022, the official diabetes explanation, the family's account of injuries, and cremation five days later — is corroborated by Radio Free Asia's report of 26 September 2022 and Safeguard Defenders' 2023 report on collective punishment. Four corrections to this page's commissioning brief are registered item by item: (1) the brief stated he was "sentenced for picking quarrels" — incorrect; picking quarrels served only for the fifteen days of administrative detention, and the final conviction was inciting subversion of state power; (2) the brief placed the sentencing in December 2021 before the Zhuzhou Shifeng District Court — no public source supports this; the verifiable facts are a closed-door sentencing inside the Zhuzhou Detention Center on 30 December 2022, with the sentencing court's name not in the public record, and this page does not fill the blank; (3) the brief placed Dong Jianbiao's death in November 2022 — incorrect; it was 23 September 2022; (4) the brief gave Ou's release as 2 June 2024 — no public source supports this; this page follows PEN America's record of release on completion of sentence on 16 September 2024, with the crediting details of the term not in the public record. Other divergences and choices: (a) his post-arrest place of custody is given by CHRD in one place as "Zhuzhou No. 1 Detention Center" and in another as the "Zhuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau Supervision Center Detention Center"; both formulations are recorded; (b) the specific charge on which Dong Jianbiao received three years is recorded inconsistently across sources and is entered as not in the public record; (c) Dong Yaoqiong's third committal in February 2021 originates in Hua Yong's tweeting, relayed by Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch's annual survey, and is registered with that source chain; (d) Ou's exact year of birth, his children's circumstances, and his post-release surveillance status were searched for and not found, and are each registered as not in the public record. Evidence grading: international rights-organisation files and databases are grade one; wire-service and mainstream-media contemporary reporting is grade two; specialist rights-media accounts are grade three; single-source details are used only as attributed or not at all. This page does not use unattributed social-media rumour.
Our Take
Our Take is tied to the facts of this case alone. First, look at what he "subverted." Take the indictment apart, piece by piece: he relayed a video in which a young woman locked in a psychiatric hospital said she was not ill; he wrote commentary for two Hong Kong newspapers and was paid fees; he spoke for arrested lawyers and commemorated 709 every year. That is the entire "criminal conduct" of a man convicted of inciting subversion of state power. Article 105 of the Criminal Law is written with a threshold — inciting others to subvert state power. Applied to Ou Biaofeng, the threshold was planed flat: you let the public know what we did not want the public to know. If a regime were confident that Dong Yaoqiong's committal was lawful and Dong Jianbiao's death innocent, its strongest answer would be to publish the medical file, open the trial, and publish the judgment. The answer it chose was to lock up the man who relayed the news, hide the judgment, and hide even the name of the court that sentenced him. The more that is hidden, the more this verdict reads, in the archive, as a confession. Second, look at the complete shape of the disposal chain: the woman who splashed the ink was put in a psychiatric hospital; her father campaigned for her, was sentenced to three years, and died inside — and the news of his death had to be carried out by another activist at the risk of arrest, who was then detained for carrying it; the chronicler who relayed this family's news was sentenced to three and a half years. At every link of the chain, what was punished was not violence or fraud but "letting the outside know." When a system fears knowledge more than it fears any tangible harm, it has in effect admitted that these facts themselves are what it fears most. Third, look at one small procedural detail: the detention center would not let a wife deposit money for her husband under his real name. If even his name could not exist under its real form in the custodial system, then this man's three years and nine months of disappearance are not a metaphor but a literal description — first the man vanished from his home, then his name vanished from the system, and finally even the sentencing court's name vanished from the public record. What this page does is precisely to fill those three vanishings back in: the man is called Ou Biaofeng; the case was about relaying and writing; the dates run from 3 December 2020 to 16 September 2024. Fourth, record his wife's words. On 18 December 2020, the first day of his secret detention, Wei Huanhuan wrote: how could a powerless person subvert a country? Six years on, this site completes the second half of her sentence for her: he could not — which is why the man imprisoned was never a "subverter" at all, only a chronicler. And when a state deploys its domestic security apparatus, RSDL, a secret trial and three and a half years in prison against a chronicler, recording that fact is the most durable judgment on the practice that exists.
Sources
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), individual profile of Ou Biaofeng (opened October 2021, updated June 2023): charge and term; the full custodial sequence from 2 December 2020 to 30 December 2022; the last tweet; appointed lawyer Yu Lianghui; the refusal of deposits under his real name; the June 2023 transfer to Chishan Prison and the hours of forced labour; his decade of support work.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders, "Zero Tolerance for Human Rights Defenders in the Year of 'Zero COVID': Annual Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders in China (2021)" (March 2022): the annual-summary record of the December 2020 seizure, administrative detention, RSDL and the formal arrest of 22 July 2021.
- The Dui Hua Foundation, "Prisoner Updates 2023 #2": the December 2022 sentencing recorded alongside the Guo Quan case; the progression from picking quarrels; the court's treatment of his Ming Pao and Apple Daily fees as "illegal income."
- Hong Kong Free Press, 31 December 2020 (carried by ANI and others): the original quotations of Wei Huanhuan on the administrative detention, the house search, the RSDL notice and her public question.
- Weiquanwang, monthly reports on political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in mainland China (February and March 2021 editions): his March and November 2020 summonses for supporting Xu Zhiyong and Chang Weiping, and the note that the authorities had long prepared the materials for his arrest.
- PEN America, Writers at Risk database, entry for Ou Biaofeng: his standing as columnist and online commentator; the forty-two-month sentence; release on 16 September 2024 after serving his full sentence.
- Human Rights in China (HRIC), 2025 long retrospective on twenty years of China's human rights lawyers and the tenth anniversary of 709: his September 2024 release and his post-release disclosure that one of the "offences" held against him was supporting and commemorating "709."
- Radio Free Asia, 26 September 2022, "Father of woman who splashed Xi Jinping poster with ink dies suddenly in jail": Dong Jianbiao's death in prison on 23 September 2022; the official diabetes explanation; the family's account of injuries and cremation five days later; the roadblocked funeral; the situations of Hua Yong and Chen Siming.
- Safeguard Defenders, 2023, "Anxious Families: Collective Punishment in 21st-Century China," chapter on Dong Jianbiao: his work as a miner; his appeal video and retention of a lawyer for his daughter; his detention and house surveillance; his February 2021 arrest after threatening arson; the three-year sentence despite harming no one and damaging nothing; the death and the morgue details.
- Voice of America tracking reports, November–December 2020, on Dong Yaoqiong's video; and Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, "2020 Year-End Report on Mental Health and Human Rights in China": Dong's 30 November 2020 video; Ou's seizure after relaying it and the conversion from administrative detention to RSDL; Dong's third committal in February 2021 (citing Hua Yong's tweeting).
- This site's file on Dong Yaoqiong (persecution/dong-yaoqiong): the complete archive of her ink protest, committals, release and renewed disappearance, cross-referenced with this page.