Chen Xitao is a Falun Gong practitioner from Hailin City, Heilongjiang Province. She and her husband, Guo Libin, are farmers who have been repeatedly targeted by authorities for their shared faith since at least 2014. In December 2021 she was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, and she is currently held in the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison.
Arrests and detention
Chen and her husband were first arrested together on January 21, 2014, when police from the No. 3 Police Station raided their home, confiscating a computer, a printer, Falun Gong books, and cash, and held them in police custody for a month.
On June 13, 2017, Chen was arrested at Harbin Railway Station after presenting her resident ID to buy a ticket. She was taken back to Hailin the next day, and police ransacked her home, confiscating a photo of Falun Gong’s founder, a computer, a printer, a cell phone, and cash. She was given 15 days of detention. When her husband and relatives petitioned the Domestic Security Office for her release, several of them were detained in retaliation.
On June 2, 2018, Chen was arrested again and held at the Hailin City Lockup for nine days, extended by police for another 15 days.
On June 10, 2021, at around 3 a.m., officers from the Hailin City Domestic Security Office and the Disan Police Station broke into the couple’s home and arrested Chen and Guo as they prepared to work in their field. The arrests were part of a coordinated sweep of 28 Falun Gong practitioners across Mudanjiang City, ordered ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s July 1 centennial celebrations and tied to the ongoing “Zero-out” campaign pressing practitioners to renounce their faith. Police ransacked their home and took away their child’s debit card.
Trial and sentence
The couple’s cases were submitted to the Hailin City Procuratorate on September 16, 2021, and moved to the Hailin City Court in mid-October. They were tried on December 23, 2021. Each was sentenced to six and a half years in prison and fined 5,000 yuan. They appealed to the Mudanjiang City Intermediate Court, which upheld the verdicts.
Chen was admitted to the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison on May 26, 2022, to serve her term; her husband was sent to Mudanjiang Prison about two months later.
Treatment in custody
In August 2026, Minghui reported that Chen remained at the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison and had been subjected to abuse there: after admission she was kept at the training division, her personal clothes and shoes were thrown away by guards and inmates, she was forced to wear an inmate uniform, and she was denied a pair of slippers, being forced to wear sports shoes even when showering.
Notes
- The criminal charge cited by the court is not specified in the reporting reviewed; it is not stated here.
- The exact release timing of her six-and-a-half-year term has not been independently verified.
- This profile relies on reporting by Minghui.org and the Falun Dafa Information Center. Minghui is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement; its reports should be read with that affiliation in mind. Where two independent organizations (Minghui and the Falun Dafa Information Center) report the same core facts — arrest date, sentence length, prison transfers — the facts are treated as corroborated; single-source details are attributed to their source.
Related reading: Chen Xitao — Media Profile & Archive