Yin Hongwei (尹洪伟) is a Falun Gong practitioner from Hulan District in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province. He is the husband of Zhou Chunling and the father of Yin Li, both also Falun Gong practitioners. In 2025 he was sentenced to four years and six months in prison by the Daowai District Court in Harbin, following the detention of him and his daughter in December 2024.
Detention. On the morning of December 19, 2024, Yin Hongwei was seized by police outside his home as he left for work, according to the prisoner-of-conscience database maintained by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) and accounts published by Minghui, a Falun Gong-affiliated outlet, and the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), an advocacy organization. Officers searched the home and detained his daughter Yin Li, who was there at the time; the elderly father living upstairs was briefly taken and released the same day. Yin Hongwei and Yin Li were held in Harbin detention facilities and formally arrested by the Daowai District procuratorate in late January 2025.
Trial and sentencing. The Daowai District Court tried Yin Hongwei and Yin Li on June 19 and again on August 14, 2025; defense lawyers entered not-guilty pleas, according to the Minghui and WOIPFG accounts. The court sentenced Yin Hongwei to four years and six months in prison with a fine of 30,000 yuan, and Yin Li to one year with a 10,000-yuan fine. Yin Hongwei appealed, and the Harbin Intermediate Court rejected the appeal. Yin Li completed her term and returned home on December 18, 2025. The CHRD database records Yin Hongwei’s term as running to June 18, 2029. No specific criminal charge has been reported for his case.
Family. Yin Hongwei’s wife Zhou Chunling was sentenced to three years in prison in 2024 and taken to the Heilongjiang Women’s Prison in September 2024, according to the same advocacy accounts; she has a separate profile on this site.
Status. Yin Hongwei is reported to be serving his sentence; no release has been reported. No official court document for this case is publicly available. The account of the detention, trial, and sentencing comes from Falun Gong-affiliated and advocacy sources and is attributed as such; the sentence length, term dates, and appeal outcome are corroborated across all three sources.