Li Xiaodong （李晓东） is a rights-defense petitioner from Liaoyang, Liaoning Province, who was detained in 2024 after years of petitioning over a labor dispute with the Liaoyang branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, his former employer. He was held at the Liaoyang City Detention Center, convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” （寻衅滋事罪）, and, according to case records kept by rights-monitoring organizations, sentenced to two years in prison and released upon completing his sentence in March 2026.
Background
Born on November 4, 1960, Li Xiaodong worked at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Liaoyang. In November 2005, the bank unilaterally terminated his labor contract without legal process, his length of service was reset to zero, and his wages and benefits were stopped from January 2006, after he refused to sign an agreement stating that he was “voluntarily leaving” the bank. He began a long course of petitioning （上访） for redress, traveling to Beijing repeatedly between 2007 and 2012 — 25 recorded visits to the Beijing ICBC alone — without resolution. His petitioning drew repeated retaliation: a seven-day administrative detention in February 2008 after he sought out the bank’s president; and, in July 2012, a one-year term of re-education through labor for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after an incident at the bank’s Beijing office. Before and during politically sensitive periods he was repeatedly intercepted and escorted back to Liaoyang.
The 2024 case
On January 7, 2024, Li was assaulted by staff of the Liaoyang municipal government’s Beijing liaison office and suffered fractured ribs; a forensic injury assessment was pending. On March 1, while preparing to return to Beijing to submit the injury report, he lost contact and was placed under ten days’ administrative detention for the duration of the “two sessions” political meetings. After the meetings he returned to Beijing, and on March 18, 2024, he filed a complaint with the State Bureau for Letters and Calls over the assault. Immediately after leaving the bureau he was seized by liaison-office personnel, taken back to Liaoyang, placed under criminal detention on March 19, 2024, and formally arrested on March 28, 2024, on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” In May 2024 the case was briefly reclassified to “disrupting the work order of state organs” before proceeding under the original charge. A lawyer who met him at the Liaoyang City Detention Center on April 8, 2024, reported that Li maintained his innocence and considered the detention unlawful.
Outcome
Rights-monitoring records report that the case went to trial and that on June 26, 2025, Li was sentenced at first instance to two years’ imprisonment for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”; he appealed, and the second-instance court rejected the appeal in late October 2025. He completed the sentence and was released in mid-March 2026. (These later developments are reported in a single monitoring record citing 民生观察； no court judgment has been independently located.)
Further records
Further records: media profile and source archive for Li Xiaodong （李晓东）.