Wang Yihong (王义红) is a Falun Gong practitioner from Shuangcheng District, Harbin City, in Heilongjiang Province. She was sentenced to ten years in prison in September 2018 and, as of the most recent reporting in 2024, remained in prison.
Wang, who worked at the Shuangcheng District Epidemic Prevention Station, was 42 when police came for her on the morning of October 9, 2017. Officers from the Criminal Investigation Department of the Shuangcheng District Public Security Bureau knocked on her door at 8:00 a.m. She refused to open it, and the officers damaged the peephole and tried to force their way in; after a standoff lasting several hours, she opened the door around 11:00 a.m. and was arrested. Officers searched her home and confiscated two printers, Falun Dafa books, and a desktop computer. She was taken to the Yaziquan Detention Center in Harbin.
Her arrest was part of a coordinated sweep on October 9, 2017 — days ahead of the 19th Party Congress — in which dozens of Falun Gong practitioners across Harbin were detained. According to reporting on the cases, police had monitored the practitioners’ phone use and daily lives for months; the arrested practitioners included people who had filed criminal complaints against former leader Jiang Zemin over the persecution of Falun Gong. Wang was a single mother. Her daughter had just started high school and her son, then 15, is mentally disabled and non-verbal; her arrest left both children without a caregiver.
On August 3, 2018, Wang was tried at the Daoli District Court together with four fellow practitioners — Wang Xiaohui, Wen Shuangling, Han Entong, and Ran Lingjun. All five were brought into the courtroom with black hoods over their heads, handcuffed and shackled. The trial lasted about an hour; no verdict was announced that day. In September 2018, the Daoli District Court sentenced Wang to ten years in prison; her co-defendants received sentences of two to three years.
On October 9, 2018, Wang was transferred to the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison. She spent three months in the prison’s “intensive training” ward, was then moved to the 11th ward, where she was forced to perform unpaid labor — sometimes until midnight — and later to the 8th ward. When her family visited in early 2019, she reported chest pain and a herniated lumbar disc, which she attributed to being forced to sit motionless on a small stool for long hours over months, and said she suspected an abnormal growth in her chest. It was not clear whether she was permitted to see a doctor. The prison later limited her monthly spending to 120 yuan and, citing the pandemic, suspended family visits; she was allowed one phone call home per month. Further details of her condition were not available.
In a May 2024 update, it was reported that Wang had been transferred to Dongfeng Prison in Harbin City. No further verified information about her condition or status has been published since.
Attribution: the details above are drawn from reporting by Minghui.org, a Falun Gong-affiliated news outlet. No independent corroboration from official court records, state media, or other outlets was located for this case.
View the Wang Yihong Media Profile & Archive for full source detail, the case chronology, and provenance.