He Pengfei (何鹏飞) is a Falun Gong practitioner from Fuzhou, Fujian Province, born in 1968. A retired military officer who became a section-level civil servant in Fuzhou’s cultural-market law-enforcement administration, he served a five-and-a-half-year prison term between 2015 and 2020 for spreading Falun Gong materials. After being detained again on May 22, 2024, he was tried by the Minqing County Court on November 5, 2024, and sentenced to four years in prison.
Background
He joined the army in 1986 and transferred to civilian work in December 2002, taking a post with the inspection team of the Fuzhou Broadcasting and Television Bureau. After a 2011 institutional merger, he moved to Fuzhou’s cultural-market comprehensive law-enforcement brigade as a section-level (科级) cadre, and was promoted to principal staff member (主任科员) in 2013. According to Falun Gong–affiliated case archives, he began practicing Falun Gong in 2011 after finding the movement’s main text online, and was seconded to the provincial culture department in 2012, where he received positive evaluations from both the department and his original employer.
The 2015 detention and five-and-a-half-year sentence
On June 7, 2015, He was seized by plainclothes officers at the entrance of his apartment complex. According to practitioner-community accounts, the officers struck him, causing facial bleeding, and took him to the Jinshan Police Station; his wife and daughter were also briefly taken in during the home search that followed, which confiscated computers, a printer, mobile phones, discs, cash, and Falun Gong books and materials. The Cangshan district public-security, procuratorial, and court authorities handled the case. He was tried on May 11, 2016 and sentenced to five and a half years on September 29, 2016; the Fuzhou Intermediate Court upheld the verdict on December 8, 2016. He was transferred to Fuqing Prison on December 22, 2016. Practitioner archives describe sustained mistreatment during the sentence — including beatings by guards, forced medication, reduced food, and prolonged standing and squatting punishments — presented as attributed accounts, not independently verified findings. He was released in December 2020, after which he learned that his employer had dismissed him in March 2017, that 35 years of service had been removed from his pension calculation, and that his health insurance and other benefits had been cancelled. In the first four months of 2021 he was harassed by local police at least three times, according to the same archives.
The 2024 detention and four-year sentence
On May 22, 2024, officers from the Mawei District domestic-security division entered He’s home and took him to the Fuzhou City Second Detention Center. Prosecutor Cai Xiaoqin of the Minqing County Procuratorate indicted him; the Minqing County Court heard the case on November 5, 2024, as a closed hearing — only He’s brother and cousin were admitted. At trial, He stated in his own defense that distributing Falun Gong materials had harmed no one; his lawyer argued that the police surveillance evidence had been gathered unlawfully and that the criminal provision applied to the case did not fit his conduct. Judge Liu Xiaoxia nevertheless sentenced him to four years at a later date, a ruling also signed by judge Zhang Tingting and clerk Zhang Xiaofei. As reported in January 2025, He was in the process of appealing. The formal criminal charge for this sentence is not publicly recorded. The CHRD political-prisoner database records the four-year term as running to May 21, 2028.
Current status
He Pengfei is believed to be currently imprisoned, serving a four-year sentence expected to run to May 21, 2028. He appeared in the August 31, 2026 monthly roster of mainland political prisoners maintained by the Chinese-language rights monitoring network 维权网, listed in custody. No PRC court verdict or state-media coverage of his case has been located; the case record rests on the CHRD political-prisoner database entry and the Falun Gong–affiliated case archive.
View the He Pengfei (何鹏飞) Media Profile & Archive for the complete source record and provenance.