Identity
Jin Hanqin (金汉琴）, born February 15, 1975, is a villager of group 10, Liuguanping Village, Tumen Town, Yunxi County, Shiyan City, Hubei Province. With her elder sister Jin Hanyan (金汉艳）, she became a rights petitioner after the local government failed to honor a promised public-sector job placement. According to the Chinese Human Rights Defenders prisoner-of-conscience database, she was detained in April 2022 and later sentenced to eight years and six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
The job-placement dispute
In the 1990s Jin Hanqin and her sister attended the Shiyan Agricultural School (now the Shiyan City Science and Technology School), graduating in 1997. Under a 1997 provincial graduate-placement document (鄂毕办[1997]009号）, the sisters were to be assigned public-sector posts with civil-service status, but the Yunxi County government did not implement the placement, giving their posts to others. The sisters petitioned at the provincial and national levels for years. In August 2005, after being told to report to the county tobacco bureau, they were instead given 15 days’ administrative detention and later one year and nine months of re-education through labor.
Detentions and abuse
The Chinese Human Rights Defenders database records a long history of retaliation: in 2007 the sisters were held for months in a black jail set up in an abandoned tobacco-station compound, during which their grandmother died; in 2008 they were seized from Beijing twice and held in the Tumen Town government compound; in 2012 Jin Hanqin was seized from the Taihe Hospital in Shiyan while awaiting surgery and confined in the Maoping welfare home, where she was forcibly medicated. In 2013, the independent outlet Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch reported her sister Jin Hanyan being intercepted in Beijing and confined in a black jail in Jiulongsi village — the same family persecution documented across both sisters’ records.
The 2022 case
In April 2022 the sisters again petitioned in Beijing and were intercepted by Yunxi stability-maintenance personnel and held in long-term extralegal confinement. On June 14, 2022, Yunxi County police confiscated their phones and placed both under criminal detention on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”; on June 28 they were transferred to the Shiyan detention center. Later in 2022 the Yunxi County Court sentenced both sisters to eight years and six months. Jin Hanqin appealed; the Shiyan Intermediate Court’s second-instance judgment vacated the sentences; on February 24, 2025, she applied to the Hubei High Court for a retrial. The outcome of the retrial application is not publicly confirmed.
Current status
According to the Chinese Human Rights Defenders database, Jin Hanqin is held at the Yunxi County Detention Center (Dongfang neighborhood, Chengguan Town, Yunxi County, postal code 442600), with her term recorded as running to December 13, 2030. She was listed as in custody in the Rights Defense Network’s mainland-China political-prisoner monthly report dated August 31, 2026. The status of her 2025 retrial application is unverified.
Name note
Jin Hanqin (金汉琴） should not be confused with her sister Jin Hanyan (金汉艳） — a separate person with her own case record, detained and sentenced alongside her.