Du Jingyi (杜景义), a lawyer in his sixties from Changchun City in Jilin Province, was sentenced to seven years in prison around May 2021 for practicing Falun Gong. His appeal was rejected by the Changchun City Intermediate Court. His family was not informed of the verdict.
Du was arrested at about 6 a.m. on September 9, 2019, while out buying groceries. Officers took his keys and searched his home. His wife, Cui Yuqiu (崔玉秋), and their daughter, Du Xin (杜新), were also detained that morning and released around 11 p.m. the same day. Du was held overnight at the Yihelu Police Station and transferred to the Changchun City No. 2 Detention Center the next day; Minghui.org reports he was later hospitalized after developing scabies in his cell.
The Chaoyang District Court held a first hearing on July 13, 2020 and a second on September 28, 2020. At the second hearing, the presiding judge, Zhang Dan, barred Du’s daughter from attending because she was listed as a prosecution witness, and refused to let a relative Du’s daughter had gone to find enter the courtroom. Two days after the first hearing, police detained Du’s wife and daughter again; the daughter was released after thirteen days while Cui Yuqiu remained in custody at the Changchun City No. 4 Detention Center. Cui was given a court hearing on December 11, 2020, which the family was not allowed to attend; its outcome has not been reported.
Cui Yuqiu, 68, had worked at the library of Jilin University. Both she and Du took up Falun Gong in 1996. Minghui reports that she was detained in 2002 and sent to the Heizuizi Women’s Forced Labor Camp for a year, and detained again in 2003 for a year and a half. In June 2017, the couple and seven other practitioners were detained for fifteen days after practicing Falun Gong exercises outdoors near the Jilin University campus.
Whether Du has been transferred to a prison is not known; his current custody status is unconfirmed.
Sources
- Minghui.org, “Jilin Lawyer Sentenced to Seven Years, Wife Awaits Verdict,” May 9, 2021
- Minghui.org (Chinese), “原吉林大学职工崔玉秋屡遭非法关押和劳教” (Former Jilin University Employee Cui Yuqiu Repeatedly Detained and Sent to Forced Labor), July 31, 2018
A note on identity
The Chinese characters 杜景义 are established by multi-anchor evidence, not by transliteration guesswork: a 2018 Minghui Chinese article about Cui Yuqiu — whose biography matches the English 2021 reporting’s “Cui Yuqiu” anchor for anchor — names her husband as 丈夫杜景义. A separate 2005 case from Qinglong County, Hebei, involving the same characters 杜景义 concerns a different person and is not merged here.
Further reading
The full documented case record for Du Jingyi is preserved in a companion media archive, which gathers the case chronology, the Chinese-name identification, and evidentiary limitations in one place.