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第57案 | 秦永敏Case 57 | Qin Yongmin

秦永敏（1953年8月11日生于湖北鄂州），武汉钢铁公司冷轧厂原职工，1970年代末在民主墙时期的武汉编辑民主刊物《钟声》，1980年参与筹备建立中国民主党，1981年被捕、1982年以反革命宣传煽动罪判刑八年，1989年出狱。1993年1月14日，他作为主要起草人参与发起《和平宪章》——这份要求为1989年天安门抗争平反、释放政治犯的文件被称为1949年后中国民运第一份纲领——同年12月被以扰乱社会秩序劳动教养两年。1997年他发表致江泽民的公开信要求政治改革，1998年创办《中国人权观察》通讯并公开组建中国民主党湖北省党部，同年以颠覆国家政权罪判刑十二年，拒绝保外就医出国，2010年11月29日服满出狱，此前累计入狱与劳教二十二年。出狱后他组建「中国人权观察」（玫瑰团队），多次申请合法注册被拒，频繁被拘留。2015年1月9日，他在十天行政拘留期满当天被武汉警方带走，与妻子赵素利一同被秘密关押在八仙岛约七十天；赵素利从未被指控任何罪名，却被法外关押约三年，出狱后长期被软禁，住所楼层被警察驻守、走廊加装铁门。秦永敏于2015年3月30日被刑事拘留、2016年6月17日被以颠覆国家政权罪起诉，检方列举的证据是他的和平转型文章、在港出版的著作、人权组织活动与聚餐聚会，法院并不指控任何暴力行为；2018年5月11日武汉市中级人民法院闭门开庭，他全程沉默，同年7月11日被判有期徒刑十三年、剥夺政治权利三年，9月26日湖北省高级人民法院驳回上诉，10月12日移送湖北潜江广华监狱。狱中家属探视带出的消息说他患高血压与肺部疾病、双手颤抖、被禁止读书写作；2020年疫情后探视被阻断。联合国任意拘留问题工作组2019年第20号意见认定其拘留属任意拘留、应立即释放并赔偿，联合国秘书长连续三年将其列为与联合国合作遭报复个案，2025年2月联合国专家再次就其案件致函中方。截至2026年10月，他仍在广华监狱服刑，刑期按维权网所载至2028年1月20日止，无任何获释或保外就医的公开记录。Qin Yongmin (born 11 August 1953 in Ezhou, Hubei), formerly a worker at the cold-rolling plant of the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation, edited the pro-democracy journal The Bell in Wuhan during the Democracy Wall period of the late 1970s, took part in preparations to establish a China Democracy Party in 1980, was arrested in 1981 and sentenced in 1982 to eight years for 'counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement,' and was released in 1989. On 14 January 1993 he helped launch the Peace Charter as its main drafter — the document demanding redress for the 1989 Tiananmen suppression and the release of political prisoners, described as the Chinese democracy movement's first programme since 1949 — and in December that year was sent to two years of Re-education Through Labor for 'disrupting social order.' In 1997 he published an open letter to Jiang Zemin demanding political reform; in 1998 he founded the China Human Rights Observer bulletin and openly organised the Hubei branch of the China Democracy Party, and was sentenced that year to twelve years for subversion, refusing medical parole into exile and serving every day until 29 November 2010 — twenty-two years in prison and labour camps by then. After his release he built China Human Rights Watch (the Rose Team), applied repeatedly and unsuccessfully for legal registration, and was detained again and again. On 9 January 2015, the day a ten-day administrative detention expired, Wuhan police seized him and held him with his wife Zhao Suli in secret on Baxian Island for about seventy days; Zhao, never charged with any crime, remained in extralegal detention for some three years and, after emerging, lived under house arrest with officers posted in her building and an iron door fitted to her corridor. Qin was criminally detained on 30 March 2015 and indicted on 17 June 2016 for subversion of state power, on evidence consisting of his peaceful-transition writings, a book published in Hong Kong, his human rights organising and shared meals and meetings — the court alleged no act of violence. Tried behind closed doors on 11 May 2018, he remained silent throughout; on 11 July 2018 he was sentenced to thirteen years plus three years' deprivation of political rights, his appeal was rejected on 26 September 2018, and on 12 October 2018 he was transferred to Guanghua Prison in Qianjiang, Hubei. Family visits carried out word that he suffers from hypertension and a lung condition, that his hands shake, and that he is forbidden to read or write; visits were cut off during the pandemic in 2020. In Opinion No. 20/2019 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and called for immediate release and compensation; the UN Secretary-General listed his case for three consecutive years as a reprisal for cooperation with the UN; and UN experts wrote to China about his case again in February 2025. As of October 2026 he remains in Guanghua Prison, his term running on Rights Defence Network's dates to 20 January 2028, with no public record of release or medical parole.

Time span

Born on 11 August 1953 in Ezhou, Hubei, a worker at the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation; in the late 1970s he edited the pro-democracy journal The Bell in Wuhan during the Democracy Wall era; arrested in 1981 and sentenced in 1982 to eight years for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement," released in 1989; sent to two years of Re-education Through Labor in 1993 for drafting the Peace Charter; founded the China Human Rights Observer bulletin in 1998 and openly organised the Hubei branch of the China Democracy Party, and was sentenced later that year to twelve years for subversion, serving every day until his release on 29 November 2010; seized again on 9 January 2015, the day a ten-day administrative detention expired, and forcibly disappeared for about seventy days; criminally detained on 30 March 2015, indicted on 17 June 2016 for subversion of state power, tried behind closed doors by the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court on 11 May 2018, and sentenced on 11 July 2018 to thirteen years in prison plus three years' deprivation of political rights; his appeal was rejected by the Hubei Higher People's Court on 26 September 2018, and on 12 October 2018 he was transferred to Guanghua Prison in Qianjiang, Hubei, where he remains; as of October 2026 there is no public record of release, sentence reduction or medical parole, and the term recorded by Rights Defence Network runs to 20 January 2028

Place

Wuhan, Hubei (his home and base throughout: the Wuhan steelworks, the place of his arrests, Wuhan City No. 2 Detention Center, and the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court); Baxian Island (where he and his wife were secretly held for about seventy days in early 2015, guarded in rotation by Wuhan public security officers; the island's precise location is not reliably on public record); Guanghua Prison, Qianjiang City, Hubei Province (where he has served his sentence since 12 October 2018); Beijing (where the Peace Charter was launched in 1993)

Figures

Qin Yongmin (born 1953), formerly a worker at the cold-rolling plant of the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation, political commentator and human rights activist, a co-founder of the China Democracy Party, chairman of China Human Rights Watch (HRWIC) and head of its "Rose Team"; Zhao Suli, his wife, taken away with him in January 2015 and forcibly disappeared for some three years without ever being charged with any crime, and kept under tight house arrest thereafter; Xu Qin, HRWIC's secretary-general, detained in February 2018 for campaigning on his behalf; Lin Qilei and Liu Zhengqing, his defence lawyers at the 2018 trial; Qin Yongchang, his elder brother, who carried word out of the prison that he was preparing a hunger strike

Charge and sentence

Three prison sentences and one labour-camp term in one lifetime: eight years in 1982 for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement" (arrested 1981); two years of Re-education Through Labor in 1993 for "disrupting social order"; twelve years in 1998 for subversion of state power; and on 11 July 2018, thirteen years plus three years' deprivation of political rights for subversion of state power under Article 105(1) of the Criminal Law, upheld on appeal on 26 September 2018. The conduct the 2018 judgment treated as criminal, on the prosecution's own documents, was writing articles, publishing a book in Hong Kong advocating a peaceful transition to constitutional democracy, issuing statements, organising a human rights group, and organising shared meals and discussion meetings — the court did not allege that he had committed any act of violence. The four terms total thirty-five years, of which he had already served twenty-two in full before 2015

Characterisation

Persecution for speech, pursued across an entire lifetime: an ordinary steelworker who, from the Democracy Wall era to his seventies, did nothing but write, publish, draft charters and try to register a human rights group and a political party was sent back to prison at twenty-nine, at sixty-four and at every turning point in between; his wife, charged with nothing, was disappeared for three years — punishment by kinship. In Opinion No. 20/2019 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his deprivation of liberty arbitrary under categories I, II, III and V and in breach of numerous articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and called for his immediate release with compensation. China has not complied

Current status

As of this page's check in October 2026 he remains in Guanghua Prison, Qianjiang. A joint communication sent by UN Special Procedures mandate holders on 28 February 2025 still lists him among human rights defenders serving sentences of ten years or more and asks China for information on his access to a lawyer and to medical care; China replied on 29 April 2025 without providing the specific information requested. His hypertension and a lung condition have been reported by his family since late 2018, and a 2021 human rights annual report stated that he was not receiving proper treatment in prison; his health and visiting situation after 2021 are matters of no public record. There is no public record of release, reduction, parole or medical release

First, do the arithmetic: twenty-two years, then thirteen more

Open any human rights file on Qin Yongmin and the first number is always the same: twenty-two years. That is how long he had already spent in prisons and labour camps before his final arrest in 2015 — eight years, plus two, plus twelve. In July 2018 the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court added thirteen more. Three prison sentences and one term of Re-education Through Labor add up, on the face of the judgments, to thirty-five years. For a man born in 1953, if this last term is also served in full, thirty-five of his years will have been spent behind walls — and that figure still excludes the more than forty occasions, counted by human rights groups, on which he was summoned, had his home raided, or was held under one administrative label or another.

That is why this page belongs in Persecution Records, and why its premise must be stated at the top. This is not the story of a man who did one thing in one year and was sentenced once. It is the record of an ordinary worker pursued across his whole life by the same regime under a rotating set of labels — counter-revolutionary propaganda, disrupting social order, subversion of state power — at twenty-nine, at sixty-four, and at every point between. And what he did in those forty-odd years never changed, and was never violent: he edited a journal, wrote open letters, drafted a charter, ran a human rights bulletin, applied to register a group and a party, gathered people around a table to eat and talk, and wrote down what was said. The 2018 judgment itself does not accuse him of any violence. The prosecution's evidence was articles, a book, statements, meetings and shared meals. This page lays out the thirty-five years, entry by entry.

A steelworker and The Bell: his starting point was Democracy Wall

Qin Yongmin was born on 11 August 1953 in Ezhou, Hubei, and went to work at the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation — the cold-rolling plant, according to Rights Defence Network's file. Wuhan Steel was one of the flagship state-owned giants of the planned economy, and a job there in the 1970s was a respectable, secure living. His turning point came at the end of that decade. After Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four, the Democracy Wall moment briefly opened in Beijing and across the country: ordinary people could, for the first time, paste up posters and print mimeographed journals about democracy and law. In Wuhan, Qin edited and published a small journal advocating democratic reform. Its name was The Bell. A steelworker editing a journal about democracy after his shifts: that was the starting point of forty years of writing, and of all his imprisonments.

In 1980 he took part in preparations to establish a China Democracy Party. One distinction must be kept clear: this was an organising attempt of the Democracy Wall period, not the better-known open founding drive of 1998, though the same man stands at the centre of both. Human Rights Watch's file describes the 1980 episode as participation in preparations to establish the party. The Democracy Wall opening was soon shut down — Wei Jingsheng was sentenced in 1979, and through 1980 and 1981 the independent journals and their editors were swept up city by city. Qin was arrested in 1981. In 1982 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement." He was about twenty-nine. He served the full eight years and was released in April 1989 — the month is given by Rights Defence Network's file; Human Rights Watch gives the year. The year matters for understanding everything that followed: he walked out of prison in the most politically charged year of the decade, and still decided to carry on.

The Peace Charter: four years out of prison, he drafts the movement's first programme

On 14 January 1993 Qin took part in launching the Peace Charter movement in Beijing, and he was the charter's main drafter. Human rights organisations and scholars describe the Peace Charter as the first programmatic document of China's democracy movement since 1949. Its core demands were redress for the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, the release of political prisoners, and a peaceful path toward freedom and democracy. Consider the date: 1993, only four years after 1989, when some of those prosecuted for that movement were still in prison. To demand publicly, in a signed charter, the rehabilitation of 1989 and the release of its prisoners required something beyond ordinary courage. The launch was also timed in the run-up to the forty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1993, a connection Human Rights Watch's account makes explicit.

The authorities' answer came at the end of that year. In December 1993 Wuhan authorities detained him for "disrupting social order" and sent him to two years of Re-education Through Labor. RTL was an administrative system under which the police alone could lock a person up for up to three or four years without any court process at all; it was not abolished until 2013. So the return for drafting a charter calling for peace and rehabilitation was not an indictment and a courtroom but an RTL decision paper: no prosecutor, no judge, no defence, no formal charge that ever had to be proved. He was released on completing the term in 1995. Counting from his first arrest in 1981, he had by then lost ten years of freedom to words and organising.

The 1997 open letter to Jiang Zemin — and the twelve years of 1998

After his release he did not stop. In 1997 he published an open letter to Jiang Zemin, then China's president, calling on the Communist Party to begin political reforms and move toward constitutional democracy. In 1998 he set up the China Human Rights Observer bulletin in Wuhan and used it to issue hundreds of reports on human rights conditions in China — in an era before the internet was widespread, a human rights bulletin run by a man who had already served ten years was, in the authorities' eyes, about the most unsettling object imaginable. The same year, activists across China attempted to organise an opposition party openly: the Zhejiang preparatory committee of the China Democracy Party announced itself in Hangzhou and applied for registration, branches followed in province after province, and Qin established the party's Hubei provincial organisation in Wuhan and joined the effort to register it with the civil affairs authorities.

From the second half of 1998 the authorities moved against the party's founders nationwide. Qin was arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison for subversion of state power. Others caught in the same sweep were sentenced in the same range: Wang Youcai in Hangzhou received eleven years and Xu Wenli in Beijing thirteen; both were later released on medical parole into exile in the United States. Qin did not take that road. Multiple sources record that he refused to leave China before constitutional democracy had been achieved, and that he insisted on serving his sentence out to the last day. While still in prison, in 1999, he was elected one of the four co-chairmen of the China Democracy Party. Some reports add that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999; since Nobel nominations are never officially disclosed, this page records that claim as unverified and does not rely on it. He was released on 29 November 2010, as the BBC reported that day — twelve years, not a day less. One authority must be corrected in front of the reader: Human Rights Watch's 2018 statement in one place gives his release as December 2012, which contradicts the BBC's report of 29 November 2010, Rights Defence Network's file, and the record of his documented activities through 2011 and 2012. It is evidently a typographical error; this page does not use it, and flags it so that others do not copy it.

2010 to 2014: out of prison, detained by the month

He was fifty-seven when he came out in November 2010, with twenty-two served years behind him. Release did not mean freedom: he was placed immediately under police surveillance, with his movements, visitors and correspondence restricted. But he resumed work at his old pace — writing, giving interviews to foreign media, organising discussions, and preparing writings and a website on peaceful transition. Human rights reporting from those years describes a man detained, briefly, almost every month, and for longer in sensitive periods: in December 2012 he disappeared for more than a month, and his lawyers lodged a complaint with the Supreme People's Procuratorate accusing Wuhan's Qingshan district police of illegally restricting his liberty; during the 2013 National People's Congress sessions he was held again for about two weeks. He himself once proposed, half in protest and half in self-mockery, that his record of frequent detention should qualify him for a Guinness world record. This page keeps the detail not because it is amusing but because it precisely describes the texture of his life after 2010: the prison walls had been withdrawn, and imprisonment was thereafter dispensed in monthly doses.

In 2013 and 2014 he turned his bulletin work into a formal organisational attempt. With rights defenders from across the country he built China Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch in China, HRWIC), serving as its chairman, together with the network known as the Rose Team, which ran the Rose China website; its membership consisted largely of petitioners and local rights defenders. What the organisation did is set out here as fact, because the prosecution later listed the same items as crimes: it issued online statements criticising government policy, organised online and offline discussions of political and social questions, published a series of open letters to Xi Jinping urging the leadership to hold political dialogue with citizens, and applied repeatedly to register formally with the authorities as a legal non-governmental organisation — each application met with police harassment of its members. That last fact carried no weight in court, but it matters to the archive: an organisation that applies again and again for legal registration, is refused every time, and is then convicted of being an illegal organisation is a closed loop — the legal road is blocked first, and illegality is then punished.

January 2015: on the day his administrative detention expired, he was taken away

The final round began with an administrative detention. In early January 2015 Wuhan police gave him ten days of administrative detention on grounds that human rights sources summarise as giving too many interviews to foreign media, writing too much, and organising an illegal assembly. According to the procedural chain in Rights Defence Network's and Chinese Human Rights Defenders' files, on 9 January 2015, the day that detention expired, he was not released: police took him directly into enforced disappearance. The exact date of the seizure varies slightly across sources — a 2021 UN Special Procedures communication says he was taken into custody on 15 January 2015, and some reports place it later in the month. This page uses 9 January, on the strength of the most complete procedural record, and sets out the disagreement in the verification note.

He later told his lawyer what happened during the disappearance. He was taken to a place called Baxian Island; his wife Zhao Suli, seized at the same time, was held there with him; the couple spent about seventy days on the island, guarded around the clock in rotation by Wuhan public security officers. For those seventy days there was no charge and no paperwork: his family did not know where he was, and neither did his lawyers. Only on 30 March 2015 was he transferred to Wuhan City No. 2 Detention Center and formally criminally detained — which is to say, the formal clock of his criminal detention started almost eighty days after he had actually been taken. On 6 May 2015 the Wuhan Public Security Bureau formally arrested him on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power." The case then ground back and forth at the prosecution stage: the Wuhan City People's Procuratorate twice returned it to the police for further investigation before finally indicting him on 17 June 2016 — on the graver charge of subversion rather than incitement, an escalation for which no reason was given to his lawyer. From seizure to indictment took a year and five months; before he first stood in front of a judge, more than three years had passed.

What happened to his right to a lawyer in those three years is a point on which the sources conflict, and this page records the conflict rather than smoothing it over. Rights Defence Network's monthly report on prisoners of conscience recorded that he first met a lawyer on 21 June 2016 and was in good condition. CHRD's case file states, in terms, that he was denied access to a defence lawyer from his formal arrest in May 2015 until August 2017, in violation of his right to counsel. Both accounts come from human rights networks that tracked his case for years, and the publicly available material does not allow this page to decide between them — there may have been a single meeting in 2016 followed by a long refusal, or the monthly report's date may be wrong. What is not in dispute is that a first trial date set for 29 December 2017 was abruptly cancelled by the court with no new date fixed, and that by the time he was finally tried in May 2018 he had been held for over three years without a verdict, far beyond what international standards permit for pre-trial detention.

The "crimes" in the indictment: articles, a book, meals and meetings

Lay out the 2016 indictment and the factual findings of the 2018 judgment, and the composition of this case is unmistakable. Human Rights Watch's and CHRD's summaries of the prosecution documents agree: the alleged subversive activities consisted of writing and circulating essays on democracy, including a long piece on China's peaceful transition to constitutional democracy; publishing a book in Hong Kong advocating peaceful transition; founding and leading the China Human Rights Watch organisation; organising online and offline political discussions and petitions; conducting organisational advocacy for the China Democracy Party; contacting overseas groups; and calling on the Chinese government to honour its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including advocacy of the use of UN human rights mechanisms to inform international experts about abuses in China. Hong Kong Free Press's account of the judgment added the most important sentence of all: the court did not allege that Qin Yongmin had engaged in any act of violence. The conduct listed was writing articles and publishing a book, issuing statements, organising a group, and organising shared meals and meetings.

In other words, this is a subversion file that requires no violence, no weapons and no secrets: a sixty-four-year-old man used articles and gatherings to argue that his country should move peacefully toward constitutional democracy, and was given thirteen years. Human Rights Watch's China director put it directly on the day of the verdict: his only "crime" was to organise a human rights monitoring group to peacefully push for reform in China. A CHRD researcher observed that the authorities had spent three years investigating and had still been unable to build a convincing case. And take note of one item in the charge sheet — that he advocated engaging the UN's human rights machinery. The UN Secretary-General's annual reports on reprisals for cooperation with the United Nations listed Qin Yongmin's case three years running, in 2018, 2019 and 2020, precisely because his prosecution rested in part on that advocacy. Reporting human rights abuses to the UN was entered as evidence of subversion, and the UN then registered the prosecution as a reprisal. The two documents footnote each other.

Zhao Suli: charged with nothing, disappeared for three years

Qin Yongmin was not this case's only victim. In January 2015 Zhao Suli was taken from the couple's home at the same time as her husband. She was never officially accused of any crime — Human Rights Watch's statement is explicit on the point. Yet she was held in unknown locations for more than three years. After the seventy days on Baxian Island, her detention continued through a series of extralegal facilities: CHRD's July 2018 statement said she had been held in "black jails" for about two years, and that at some point in 2017 she was taken to a medical facility for treatment of an unknown condition and then held in secret for a further eight months — a place she herself could not identify. Only in early February 2018, her health reportedly somewhat improved, was she allowed to meet relatives briefly in Wuhan's Heping Park, with plainclothes officers watching closely; immediately afterwards she was taken home and placed under so-called residential surveillance. From then on, state security officers were stationed in her building: according to CHRD's file, her flat is on the fourth floor of a five-storey block, officers were posted on the first and third floors, an iron door was installed in the corridor leading to her home, observation windows were built into the exterior walls on the first and third floors, and vehicles were stopped and their drivers questioned at the corner of her street. Her son, who studies in Anhui Province, was also monitored by state security officers.

One small discrepancy of timing should be noted. Human Rights Watch says she was held in unknown locations for over three years and, after her release in April 2018, continued to be closely guarded. CHRD's statement says she left the black jails at some point in 2017 and was thereafter held under surveillance at home. The two accounts agree completely on the substance — years of extralegal detention followed by tight surveillance — and differ only on the month the home phase began; this page records both. An update in May 2019 reported that she remained under de facto house arrest, cut off from friends and family, unable to work and destitute, suffering from moderate anaemia and in need of a blood specialist she could not afford, with mental health problems resulting from her situation; that item rests on a single source and is recorded here as reported, without embellishment. A woman charged with nothing was first disappeared for three years and then confined inside her own home, with police living in her building and an iron door added to her corridor. That is the full anatomy of what "punishment by kinship" means in this case.

11 May 2018 in court, 11 July in judgment: the man who said nothing

On 11 May 2018 the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court finally tried the case. On CHRD's account of the proceedings, the trial was held behind closed doors: police did not allow his family to attend, and several supporters who had intended to come were held under house arrest or intercepted. His defence lawyer Lin Qilei afterwards told Agence France-Presse what happened inside: Qin refused to cooperate with the court and remained completely silent throughout the trial. Reporting by the Independent Chinese PEN Center and PEN America added that he reportedly fainted during the trial and was unconscious while prosecutors read the indictment — a detail resting mainly on PEN's chain of reporting, recorded here as such and flagged in the verification note. The silence was his entire defence. A man who had written for forty years said not one word in the court that would decide his next thirteen years, because he did not recognise that a court had jurisdiction over writing itself.

On the morning of 11 July 2018, in Courtroom No. 3, the Wuhan court announced its verdict: Qin Yongmin was guilty of subversion of state power and was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and three years' deprivation of political rights. English-language sources differ by one day on the date — Human Rights Watch and UN documents give 10 July, while Chinese sources and CHRD consistently record the morning of 11 July, as does the BBC's report; time zones and filing times can account for the difference, and this page uses 11 July, noting the variant. His family was barred from the sentencing hearing, and several supporters were taken away by police outside the court. The day before, Liu Xia, the widow of Liu Xiaobo, had been allowed to leave China for Germany; in the same week, one prisoner's widow walked out of house arrest into exile and a sixty-four-year-old democracy activist received thirteen years, and nearly every international report wrote the two events into the same paragraph. His other lawyer, Liu Zhengqing, told AFP he was in despair and angry at the verdict and would definitely appeal. On 26 September 2018 the Hubei Higher People's Court rejected the appeal and upheld the original sentence. On 12 October 2018 he was transferred to Guanghua Prison in Qianjiang City, Hubei, to serve his term. On the start and end dates recorded by Rights Defence Network, the thirteen years run from 30 March 2015 to 20 January 2028.

Inside Guanghua Prison: fragments carried out by family visits

After the transfer, news of him shrank to the fragments his family could carry out of monthly visits — every fragment spoken under surveillance. Zhao Suli was permitted to visit once a month, through a glass partition, with prison officers alongside. After her second visit, in December 2018, she spoke publicly, and Radio Free Asia reported her account in detail: her husband, who suffers from hypertension, was being made to perform physical labour; more than a dozen inmates were assigned to watch him around the clock; family visits were likewise attended by inmates and guards; he loves reading and writing, but the prison forbade him books and writing, allowing only designated materials. CHRD's case file records the same month's visit somewhat differently: he told his wife his blood pressure was very high and that he was given antihypertensive medication every day, but that he also had a lung condition that caused him discomfort; he said he had not written to her because he feared any letter would be confiscated. After a visit in January 2019, Zhao and his brother reported that his health looked poor, his hands were visibly shaking, visits lasted only twenty minutes with four or five guards monitoring, and he was not allowed to read or write. His brother also brought out a message: he was preparing to resist by hunger strike. Members of the Rose Team immediately appealed to him publicly not to do it — a hunger strike would destroy what remained of his health, and would betray the concern of his wife and friends.

The provenance of each fragment is stated here item by item. The forced labour, the round-the-clock watch by a dozen inmates, and the family's fear for his life rest mainly on Zhao Suli's December 2018 public statement as reported by Radio Free Asia — a family-testimony chain, recorded as such and not dressed up as independent verification. The daily medication for hypertension, the lung discomfort, the ban on reading and writing, and the twenty-minute monitored visits are corroborated by CHRD's visit records and stand a grade firmer. In April 2020 CHRD learned that family visits had been halted altogether during the pandemic and that the prison would not agree to video calls; even before the pandemic, he had not been allowed to make phone calls, and the family received letters from him only sporadically. CHRD's 2021 annual report summed up his health in one sentence: Qin Yongmin suffers from hypertension and a lung condition without proper care in prison. From then until 2026, no new public information has emerged about his health, his labour or his visits inside Guanghua — not because his situation improved, but because the narrow channel that carried news out of the prison closed with the pandemic.

The impact on his family: a household cut in two

Set out the family ledger separately, because it deserves its own page of arithmetic. The husband: three prison sentences and one labour-camp term, twenty-two years served before 2015 alone. The wife: some three years of extralegal detention without any charge, then confinement in her own home, with police stationed in her building and an iron door on her corridor, and a son studying in another province under surveillance as well. Zhao Suli's condition in 2019 — unable to work, without income, anaemic and unable to afford a doctor — is not an accident that befell this family. It is the predictable output of the punishment's design: when a household's principal earner is imprisoned for more than three cumulative decades, and the spouse left behind is simultaneously stripped of any normal working life, poverty and untreated illness become a second sentence running alongside the first, and the second sentence has no expiry date.

The visiting regime, as it applied to this family, should also be recorded in full: a wife could see her husband for twenty minutes a month, through glass, with four or five guards present; letters were not written because he feared confiscation; appeals and protest could not be discussed because a single relayed sentence about a hunger strike triggered immediate alarm outside. In 2020 the pandemic cancelled even the twenty minutes, and a request for video calls was refused. As of this page's check, the family's last publicly recorded contact remains the sporadic letters of before 2020. Whether visits have since resumed, how Zhao Suli's health and circumstances now stand, and how her son is doing are all matters of no public record. This page registers that item as "no public record" and invents no details for a family that has lived under surveillance for more than a decade.

The international response: from statements on verdict day to a UN opinion

The international reaction to the verdict of 11 July 2018 arrived the same day. Human Rights Watch called for his immediate and unconditional release; its China director Sophie Richardson said his only "crime" was to organise a human rights monitoring group to peacefully push for reform, and that the unjust prosecution and appallingly harsh sentence demonstrated the Chinese government's contempt for fundamental rights and the rule of law. Amnesty International's China researcher Patrick Poon told AFP that it was appalling to see so heavy a sentence imposed on a veteran activist who had merely exercised his freedom of expression, one day after Liu Xia's release had offered a measure of hope — and that it was a reminder not to forget the less famous activists who face harsh sentences and harassment. PEN America called the thirteen years an atrocious and illogical attack on freedom of speech and expressed grave concern for his health. Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights, Bärbel Kofler, issued a statement the same day saying the sentence deepened her concern about human rights in China, noting that he had already spent twenty-two years in prison for peacefully working for civil rights and democratic reform, calling on the Chinese government to release him immediately, and pledging that the Federal Government would continue to stand up for him.

The UN record is the fullest, and the most damning in its paper trail. In its eighty-fourth session (24 April–3 May 2019) the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted Opinion No. 20/2019, holding that the deprivation of liberty of Qin Yongmin (together with Zhen Jianghua) contravened Articles 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 20 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was arbitrary under categories I, II, III and V; it requested the government to release both men immediately and accord them an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations, and recommended that China ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The opinion was adopted years ago; he is still in prison. Beyond that, the UN Secretary-General's annual reports on reprisals for cooperation with the UN included his case three years running — 2018, 2019 and 2020 — on the explicit ground that his prosecution rested in part on his advocacy of civil society engagement with UN human rights mechanisms. The United Nations formally registered his treatment, that is, as retaliation for cooperating with the United Nations.

Procedural follow-up has continued into the present. In 2021, UN Special Procedures sent communication AL CHN 4/2021, raising the allegation that he had been denied access to his lawyer and requesting information on his access to adequate medical treatment; the information requested was not provided. On 28 February 2025, UN experts — including the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders — sent a further joint communication concerning seven defenders serving sentences of ten years or more (Ding Jiaxi, Huang Qi, Huang Yunmin, Ilham Tohti, Qin Yongmin, Zhang Haitao and Zhao Haitong) and the disappeared Gao Zhisheng, confirming that Qin remains in Guanghua Prison and reiterating concern over detention conditions, denied visits and the absence of health information; China replied on 29 April 2025, again without providing the specific information requested. This page does not overstate what these documents have achieved: they have not opened a single cell door. But they constitute a year-by-year international file proving that his case has never been closed in the UN's records — a man in his seventies in a prison in Qianjiang whose name still appears on a UN communication list in 2025.

The cost to those around him: the people who spoke for him were taken, one by one

The archive must also record what happened to the people around him, because it explains why news has thinned to nothing since 2018. Xu Qin, secretary-general of China Human Rights Watch, campaigned throughout his detention for him and for Zhao Suli, organising petitions and searches for the disappeared wife. In February 2018 Xu Qin was seized by police and in March placed under residential surveillance at a designated location on suspicion of inciting subversion. She was later detained again; according to CHRD's 2022 annual report, the after-effects of a stroke and a heart condition worsened in detention, and in June 2022 her family learned she had become paralysed. More than ten members of the Rose Team were disappeared, criminally detained or arrested in the single year of 2015–2016, on CHRD's count. The organisation was broken up, its website closed, and those who carried its voice were removed one at a time. By the time the pandemic cut off prison visits in 2020, very few people remained outside who could still bring word of him out. The silence around his name is not natural forgetting. It is what remains after the messengers have been picked off.

Current status and the questions still unanswered

As of this page's check in October 2026, the confirmable position is this: he remains in Guanghua Prison, Qianjiang, serving the thirteen-year sentence imposed in 2018, which on Rights Defence Network's dates runs to 20 January 2028, when he will be seventy-four; the UN experts' February 2025 communication proceeds on the basis that he is still imprisoned, and China's April 2025 reply contains nothing about release or any change in his custody; there is no public record of sentence reduction, parole, medical release or early release of any kind. The unanswered questions include: the state of his hypertension and lung condition after 2021, no public record; whether family visits resumed after the pandemic and on what terms, no public record; whether he is still forbidden to read and write and still required to labour, no record after 2020; Zhao Suli's present health and circumstances, no public update since May 2019; and whether he has lodged a petition for retrial and what became of it, no public record. These blanks are listed one by one because, for a man who has now spent more than half his adult life in custody, honestly registering "we do not know" honours him better than any invented detail could.

Full timeline

• 11 August 1953 — Qin Yongmin is born in Ezhou, Hubei; he later works at the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation (the cold-rolling plant, per Rights Defence Network).
• Late 1970s — During the Democracy Wall period he edits and publishes The Bell, a pro-democracy journal, in Wuhan.
• 1980 — He takes part in preparations to establish a China Democracy Party (an organising attempt of the Democracy Wall era).
• 1981 — Arrested.
• 1982 — Sentenced to eight years in prison for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement" (Human Rights Watch and CHRD agree on the sequence: arrested 1981, sentenced 1982; some secondary retellings conflate the two years).
• April 1989 — Released on completing the eight years (month per Rights Defence Network).
• 14 January 1993 — He helps launch the Peace Charter movement in Beijing as its main drafter; the charter demands redress for the 1989 Tiananmen suppression and the release of political prisoners, and is described as the Chinese democracy movement's first programme since 1949.
• December 1993 — Detained by Wuhan authorities for "disrupting social order" and sent to two years of Re-education Through Labor; released on completing the term in 1995.
• 1997 — Publishes an open letter to Jiang Zemin calling on the Communist Party to begin political reforms toward constitutional democracy.
• 1998 — Founds the China Human Rights Observer bulletin in Wuhan, issuing hundreds of human rights reports; the same year openly establishes the Hubei branch of the China Democracy Party and joins the registration effort; arrested in the second half of the year.
• Late 1998 — Sentenced to twelve years in prison for subversion of state power (CHRD's 2018 statement's phrase "twelve years from 1997" is imprecise; the sentence was imposed in 1998 — see verification note). While in prison he is elected, in 1999, one of the four co-chairmen of the China Democracy Party.
• 29 November 2010 — Released on completing the twelve years (reported by the BBC that day). Immediately placed under police surveillance; by then he has served twenty-two years in prison and labour camps.
• 2011–2014 — Resumes writing, interviews and organising; repeatedly summoned and briefly detained, his lifetime detentions passing forty; in December 2012 he disappears for over a month and his lawyers complain to the Supreme People's Procuratorate against Wuhan's Qingshan district police.
• 2013–2014 — Builds China Human Rights Watch (the Rose Team) with defenders nationwide, runs the Rose China website, publishes open letters to Xi Jinping urging political dialogue, and applies repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — to register the organisation legally.
• Early January 2015 — Given ten days' administrative detention by Wuhan police on grounds including too many foreign-media interviews, too much writing, and organising an illegal assembly.
• 9 January 2015 — Seized on the day the administrative detention expires and forcibly disappeared (for the date discrepancy, see verification note); he and his wife Zhao Suli are held on Baxian Island for about seventy days under round-the-clock guard by Wuhan police; Zhao Suli's own extralegal detention runs to some three years, without any charge ever being brought against her.
• 30 March 2015 — Transferred to Wuhan City No. 2 Detention Center and criminally detained.
• 6 May 2015 — Formally arrested by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power; the procuratorate twice returns the case for further investigation.
• 17 June 2016 — Indicted by the Wuhan City People's Procuratorate on the graver charge of subversion of state power, the evidence listed being his writings, book, organisation and meetings; sources conflict on when he was first allowed to see a lawyer (see text and verification note).
• 29 December 2017 — The scheduled first trial date is abruptly cancelled by the court, with no new date set.
• February 2018 — Zhao Suli, disappeared for some three years, is allowed a brief meeting with relatives in Wuhan's Heping Park and is then taken home to live under close surveillance; the same month, HRWIC secretary-general Xu Qin is detained for campaigning on his behalf.
• 11 May 2018 — Tried behind closed doors by the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court; family barred from attending; he remains silent throughout the trial (per his lawyer Lin Qilei, speaking to AFP); PEN reporting says he fainted during the proceedings (unverified — see verification note).
• 11 July 2018 — Sentenced by the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court to thirteen years in prison and three years' deprivation of political rights for subversion of state power (some English-language sources give 10 July — see verification note); his family is barred from the sentencing. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, PEN America and Germany's human rights commissioner condemn the sentence the same day and call for his release.
• 26 September 2018 — The Hubei Higher People's Court rejects his appeal and upholds the original sentence.
• 12 October 2018 — Transferred to Guanghua Prison, Qianjiang City, Hubei, to serve his sentence (until then held at Wuhan City No. 2 Detention Center).
• December 2018 — After visiting him, Zhao Suli publicly describes his situation: hypertension, lung discomfort, forbidden to read or write, visits under close monitoring — and, on her account, required to perform physical labour and watched around the clock by fellow inmates (family-testimony chain; see verification note).
• January 2019 — After a further visit, the family reports his health poor and his hands shaking; visits last only twenty minutes with four or five guards monitoring; his brother relays that he intends a hunger strike, and Rose Team members publicly urge him not to.
• May 2019 — The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's Opinion No. 20/2019 (adopted at its eighty-fourth session, 24 April–3 May 2019) finds his detention arbitrary and calls for immediate release and compensation. The same month, an update reports Zhao Suli still under de facto house arrest, with moderate anaemia and no money for treatment (single-source report).
• April 2020 — CHRD learns that family visits have been blocked during the pandemic and video calls refused; he had already been denied phone calls, and the family received only sporadic letters.
• 2021 — UN Special Procedures communication AL CHN 4/2021 requests information on his access to a lawyer and to medical care, without receiving it; a human rights annual report records that he suffers from hypertension and a lung condition without proper care in prison.
• 28 February 2025 — Five UN Special Procedures mandate holders send a fresh joint communication on him and six other defenders serving ten years or more, confirming he remains in Guanghua Prison; China replies on 29 April 2025 without providing the specific information requested.
• October 2026 — At this page's check, there is no public record of his release, sentence reduction or medical parole; on Rights Defence Network's dates the term runs to 20 January 2028.

Verification note

The core facts of this page — born 11 August 1953; Wuhan steelworker; editing The Bell in the late 1970s; the 1981 arrest and eight-year sentence for counter-revolutionary propaganda; the 1993 Peace Charter and two years of RTL; the 1998 party founding and twelve-year subversion sentence; release on 29 November 2010 with twenty-two years served; the January 2015 seizure and some seventy days on Baxian Island; criminal detention on 30 March 2015 and formal arrest on 6 May 2015; the indictment of 17 June 2016; the trial of 11 May 2018 and the thirteen-year sentence of 11 July 2018; the appeal rejected on 26 September 2018; the transfer to Guanghua Prison, Qianjiang, on 12 October 2018; Zhao Suli's disappearance for some three years without charge; UN Opinion No. 20/2019 and the UN joint communication of February 2025 — are corroborated by at least two independent sources each, principally Human Rights Watch's statement of 11 July 2018, Chinese Human Rights Defenders' case file (updated July 2025), its statement of 11 July 2018 and its 2021 and 2022 annual reports, the BBC's reporting of 2010 and 2018, AFP reporting carried worldwide, PEN America's 2018 statement, the German Federal Foreign Office statement of 11 July 2018, the UN Working Group's Opinion No. 20/2019, and UN Special Procedures communications of 2021 and 2025. The main discrepancies and the choices made are as follows. First, the 2010 release date: Human Rights Watch's 2018 statement in one place erroneously gives December 2012, contradicting the BBC's report of 29 November 2010 and Rights Defence Network's file; this page uses 29 November 2010 and names the error. Second, the twelve-year term of 1998: CHRD's 2018 statement contains a phrase dating it "from 1997," inconsistent with Human Rights Watch and the case file, which place the sentencing in 1998; the phrase is recorded as imprecise. Third, the 1982 sentencing year: CHRD's file is explicit that he was arrested in 1981 and sentenced in 1982; some secondary pages conflate the two, and this page keeps them separate. Fourth, the exact day of the January 2015 seizure: Rights Defence Network records 9 January (the day his administrative detention expired), a 2021 UN communication records 15 January, and some reports place it later in the month; the text uses 9 January on the strength of the most complete procedural chain. Fifth, the sentencing date: Chinese-language sources uniformly give 11 July 2018, while Human Rights Watch and UN documents give 10 July, most plausibly a time-zone and filing artifact; the text uses 11 July. Sixth, the lawyer-access conflict: Rights Defence Network's monthly report records a first lawyer meeting on 21 June 2016, while CHRD's case file states he was denied counsel until August 2017; both are recorded in the text and neither is suppressed. Seventh, the month Zhao Suli left extralegal detention: Human Rights Watch gives release in April 2018, CHRD's statement gives transfer to home surveillance at some point in 2017; the accounts agree on roughly three years of extralegal detention followed by tight surveillance, and differ only on the month. Eighth, the courtroom fainting rests on PEN's chain of reporting alone and is marked unverified. Ninth, the reported 1999 Nobel Peace Prize nomination appears in only a few secondary reports and nominations are never officially disclosed; it is recorded as unverified. Tenth, details of forced labour and a round-the-clock watch by more than a dozen inmates come from Zhao Suli's public statement of December 2018 as reported by Radio Free Asia — family testimony, cited as such. Eleventh, Zhao Suli's 2019 anaemia and destitution rest on a single-source update and are labelled accordingly. Evidence grading: UN opinions and government statements and contemporaneous wire reporting are grades one and two; human rights organisations' case files and annual reports are grades two to three; family testimony and single-source details have been downgraded and labelled throughout. No unsourced social-media material is used on this page.

Our Take

This commentary is tied to the facts of this case alone. First, look at the shape of the charge sheet across forty years: in 1982 it was called counter-revolutionary propaganda; in 1993 no charge was needed at all, only a labour-camp paper; in 1998 and 2018 it was called subversion. The labels rotated three times; the defendant's conduct never changed — articles, a journal, a charter, a bulletin, an organisation, people gathered around a table. A regime confident against violence does not need to aim its criminal law at shared meals and essays. To write the words "peaceful transition" and receive thirteen years is, in effect, an official admission: in this order, the most dangerous thing is not violence but peaceful non-obedience. Second, consider the most distinctive item of evidence — that he called on the government to honour its UN treaty obligations and advocated using the UN's human rights mechanisms. In any normal country that is a citizen's plain right. Here a prosecutor wrote it into a subversion indictment, and the UN Secretary-General then registered the case for three consecutive years as a reprisal for cooperation with the UN. Indictment and reprisal report corroborate each other so exactly that the archive needs to add very little: the documents speak for themselves. Third, consider Zhao Suli. Charged with nothing, she was first disappeared for three years, then confined in her own home, with police moved into her building and an iron door fitted to her corridor. Punishing one person was not enough; his wife had to be turned into part of the wall around him, so that every day he would know his persistence was being billed to his family. This kind of kin-punishment is not sloppy law enforcement — it is a deliberately engineered pressure device, and its target was never a crime but a will. Fourth, consider the trial. A man who had written for more than forty years said nothing at all in the court that decided his next thirteen years. Not because he had nothing to say, but because he had done the calculation: a court that writes shared meals into a subversion judgment does not merit a defence. Set his silence beside the judgment's noise on the same page, and let the reader decide which carries more weight. Fifth, the total. Born in 1953, first imprisoned at twenty-nine, out for the third time at fifty-seven, taken for the fourth time at sixty-four, due to finish at seventy-four, with thirty-five years of sentences on paper and more than forty lesser deprivations of liberty besides. The UN said "release immediately" seven years ago; governments and rights groups issue their statements year after year; Xu Qin, who spoke for him, is paralysed in another cell; and he is still in Qianjiang. This page writes the ledger out year by year and item by item for one reason: so that "twenty-two years, then thirteen more" is not a figure of speech but a record anyone can check line by line — because for a man who has sat his whole life away in prison, the accuracy of the archive is the most honest measure of what the world still owes him.