Zhou Lina (周丽娜) — Person Profile
Zhou Lina (周丽娜), a woman in her 40s from Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province, is a Falun Gong practitioner sentenced to four and a half years in prison on March 14, 2025, by the Linghai City Court for her beliefs. The Rights Defense Network’s (维权网) monthly political-prisoners report (Issue 131, August 31, 2026) lists her in its 4.5-year-sentence band, confirming she remains in custody serving her term as of that date.
The case
The case began on April 14, 2024, when police raided the rental apartment she shared with her roommate, fellow Falun Gong practitioner Meng Chunying (孟春英). Zhou was not present at the time, but officers seized 115,000 yuan in cash and two bank certificates of deposit worth 50,000 and 30,000 yuan that belonged to her, according to reporting by Minghui.org, a Falun Gong-affiliated news site. After Meng Chunying’s son told police the two women shared the apartment, the authorities grouped all confiscated items together, labeled them “co-owned,” and placed Zhou on a wanted list. On August 21, 2024, police who had been following her arrested Zhou when she visited another practitioner, Miao Jianguo, to charge her electric bicycle. Miao was arrested at the same time.
Her trial took place on February 18, 2025, at the Linghai City Court — the court designated to handle Falun Gong cases in the greater Jinzhou area. Judge Xie Lihua presided, with judges Tian Fang and Zhang Meng, prosecutor Li Feng, and assistant prosecutor Tan Yuwei present. During the roughly 50-minute hearing, the prosecution presented only a single photograph of the confiscated items, though the indictment listed numerous pieces of evidence. Zhou denied the prosecution’s claim that she and Meng co-owned the items. Her lawyer argued that the interrogation record lacked her signature as required by law and should be ruled inadmissible, and that the domestic-security division that supervised the arresting officers could not impartially authenticate the prosecution evidence. The Jinzhou City Domestic Security Division had certified the confiscated Falun Gong books as “cult propaganda”; her lawyer countered that no law in China criminalizes Falun Gong or labels it a cult.
On March 14, 2025, the Linghai City Court sentenced Zhou Lina to four and a half years in prison and fined her 6,000 yuan. The verdict was not mailed to her lawyer until March 18 — four days after the ruling — a delay Minghui.org attributed to an insider as a tactic to shrink the appeal window. She nonetheless filed an appeal before the deadline. On May 14, 2025, the Jinzhou City Intermediate Court denied her appeal and upheld the verdict. Minghui.org further reported that Zhou failed the detention center’s physical examination — she had a low platelet count — but was admitted to the facility anyway. As of late December 2025, she was still detained at the Jinzhou Women’s Detention Center, awaiting or undergoing transfer to prison to serve her term.
Status and evidentiary limits
Zhou Lina is listed as a current in-custody political prisoner in the sentenced-to-4-years-and-6-months (72 people) group of the Rights Defense Network’s Issue 131 monthly report (August 31, 2026); the latest case-specific reporting (late December 2025) had her still detained at the Jinzhou Women’s Detention Center. All case reporting comes from a single outlet family (Minghui.org) — no independent international-media coverage and no PRC official record (verdict, court notice, or state-media report) surfaced in bounded searches, so case details carry single-source attribution throughout. The Chinese name 周丽娜 was derived from the Issue 131 ZH/EN positional equation (English “…Zhang Huiqiang, Zhou Lina, Wang Baoru…” ↔ Chinese “…张慧强、周丽娜、王宝茹…”), not from a source that prints the Chinese characters alongside the case facts. Birth year is unknown (“in her 40s” per Minghui); occupation is unknown; details of the appeal ruling beyond “denied” are unknown; the current facility after the December 2025 report, the prison transfer status, and the exact release date are unknown and must not be inferred. Not a foreign national — no consular dimension; no official acknowledgment of her case was found in PRC government sources.
Media Profile & Archive: Zhou Lina (周丽娜) — Media Profile & Archive