Qin Yongmin / 秦永敏 — Media Profile & Archive
Person profile: Qin Yongmin: Veteran Democracy Advocate Serving a 13-Year Sentence.
Chronology
- 1982: CHRD and Front Line Defenders report an eight-year sentence for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement.”
- 1993: CHRD and Front Line Defenders report two years of Re-education through Labor after the Peace Charter movement.
- 1998: Reported sentenced to 12 years for “subversion of state power.”
- 2015: Detained again; CHRD records formal arrest on May 6, while HRIC records May 7.
- July 2018: Convicted of “subversion of state power” and sentenced to 13 years plus three years’ deprivation of political rights. Sources differ between July 10 and July 11 for the first-instance judgment date.
- September 26, 2018: CHRD and HRIC report that the Hubei Provincial High People’s Court upheld the sentence.
- 2019: UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Opinion No. 20/2019 found Qin’s detention arbitrary under Categories I, II, III, and V.
- August 11, 2026: Rights Defense Network published a prison-birthday bulletin reporting continued custody at Guanghua Prison and giving a sentence-end date of January 20, 2028; those details remain attributed to that source.
Key sources
PEN America: https://pen.org/writer-at-risk/qin-yongmin/
Chinese Human Rights Defenders: https://www.nchrd.org/2018/01/qin-yongmin/
Front Line Defenders: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/profile/qin-yongmin
Human Rights in China: https://www.hrichina.org/en/citizens-square/final-verdict-qin-yongmin-hubei-provincial-high-peoples-court
UN WGAD Opinion No. 20/2019: https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/3933043/files/A_HRC_WGAD_2019_20-EN.pdf
Rights Defense Network Issue 131: https://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2026/08/20268311311638.html
Discrepancies and limits
Formal-arrest dating differs between May 6 and May 7, 2015. First-instance judgment dating differs between July 10 and July 11, 2018. One Rights Defense Network bulletin contains an appeal-court wording inconsistent with CHRD and HRIC; this archive follows CHRD/HRIC for the Hubei High Court appeal decision. The exact sentence-end date is not independently verified.