Zhang Chunqiu (张春秋) is a Falun Gong practitioner from Yiyang City, Hunan Province, born in 1963. Over more than two decades he was repeatedly detained, sentenced twice, and sent once to labor re-education — spending over thirteen years in total in detention, according to monitoring records. At the end of December 2023, five months after completing his most recent prison term, he was seized from his home. His whereabouts since then are unknown.
Zhang was first detained on April 19, 2001, together with retired professor Gao Desi, on the campus of Hunan Finance College. He was held at Yiyang No. 1 Detention Center for nearly eight months, then tried and sentenced to eight years in prison. His formal sentence ran from 2001 to February 28, 2008, but he was not released until April 19, 2009. Rights monitors report that he was subjected to repeated beatings, electric-shock torture, and hanging torture during this imprisonment.
On February 23, 2010, Zhang was again arrested and his home searched. He was held at Nanxian Detention Center and subsequently sent to one year and nine months of labor re-education at the Changsha Xinkaipu facility, from which he was released on October 5, 2011. He was briefly seized again in October 2012 while working in Foshan, Guangdong, and detained in Huaihua in April 2014.
On December 6, 2019, Zhang was seized by police in Loudi City’s Louxing District. On June 11, 2020, the Loudi Louxing District Court sentenced him to three years and seven months in prison for “utilizing a cult organization to undermine law enforcement,” a charge commonly used against Falun Gong practitioners in China. His appeal was rejected. He served the sentence at Wangling Prison in Zhuzhou, Hunan, in the prison’s 10th ward, where his family was unable to obtain information about him. The sentence ended on July 5, 2023, and he returned home to Yiyang.
In late December 2023, Zhang was taken from his home by unidentified personnel. Monitoring organizations report that he has been missing since — effectively disappeared. As of August 2026, Rights Defense Network’s political-prisoner roster continued to list him among detainees held without a verdict, though no subsequent information about his location or legal status has been published.
Sources and attribution: The account above is drawn from the CHRD Prisoners of Conscience database record for Zhang Chunqiu and the Minghui victim-library dossier (updated February 2024), both of which track his case in detail, together with the Rights Defense Network’s August 2026 political-prisoner roster. Specific accounts of mistreatment in detention come from these monitoring and advocacy sources and are not independently verified.
Media archive: Zhang Chunqiu — Media Archive