Yang Shiyi (杨适怡) is a practitioner of Falun Gong from Xiangtan, Hunan Province, currently serving a five-year prison sentence for his religious practice. As of August 2026 he was listed by the Rights Defense Network (维权网) among the political prisoners and prisoners of conscience held in mainland China.
Yang, formerly a worker at the coal shop of the Xiangtan railway station, has been documented as a Falun Gong practitioner since before the practice was banned in 1999. Reporting by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders Prisoners of Conscience database records one re-education-through-labor term and two earlier prison sentences, totaling about fifteen years of detention.
On 20 February 2023, police from the Yuntang station of the Yuhu branch of the Xiangtan Public Security Bureau detained Yang at his rented accommodation and held him at the Xiangtan detention center, where he was then formally arrested and prosecuted. Around New Year 2024 his family was informed by telephone that he had been sentenced to five years on undisclosed charges, with no public trial record. He was transferred to Wangling Prison in You County, Zhuzhou City, Hunan, with the term recorded as running to 19 February 2028.
The Rights Defense Network's Issue 131 monthly report (31 August 2026) lists "Yang Shiyi" / 杨适怡 in its group of prisoners sentenced to five years, indicating he remained in custody at that date. The report describes itself as an incomplete list that may contain errors.
All custody and sentence details above come from monitoring-organization reporting and Falun Gong–affiliated reporting; no court record or official charge sheet is publicly available, and the formal charge is reported as unknown. The alternate rendering 杨适宜 appears in the same database record as an alternate rendering of the same person, not a separate identity.
Media archive: Yang Shiyi (杨适怡) — Media Archive