Zhou Sanyong (周三永) — Person Profile
Zhou Sanyong (周三永), a resident of Sanhe City, Hebei Province, is a Falun Gong practitioner sentenced to nine years in prison in late August 2022 by the Taihe County Court for his beliefs. The Rights Defense Network’s (维权网) monthly political-prisoners report (Issue 131, August 31, 2026) lists him in its 9-year-sentence band, confirming he remains in custody serving his term as of that date.
The case
On January 22, 2021, while visiting his hometown of Fuyang City in Anhui Province, Zhou was arrested by officers including Liu Xiangzhou, head of the Taihe County Domestic Security Division. According to reporting by Minghui.org, a Falun Gong-affiliated news site, Zhou was putting up informational posters about Falun Gong when he was detained. Police confiscated his printer, cellphone, and other personal items. He was held at the Taihe County Detention Center and later transferred to a brainwashing center.
On May 28, 2021, police from Fuyang traveled with their counterparts in Beijing to Zhou’s home in Hebei and confiscated 110,000 yuan in cash from him. Minghui.org reported that Liu Xiangzhou, the Taihe County domestic-security chief, attempted to escalate the charge against Zhou for his own career benefit.
In late August 2022, the Taihe County Court tried and sentenced Zhou Sanyong to nine years in prison and fined him 100,000 yuan. The presiding judge, Li Lijuan, told him that the first three months he spent incarcerated in the detention center and the brainwashing center did not count toward his prison term, and that his term would run from April 2021 to March 2030 — the judge’s statement, reported by Minghui.org, not an independently established fact. Zhou appealed to the Fuyang City Intermediate Court. After his family’s protest, judges Wu Cuifang, Wu Feng, and Yu Lin agreed to hold an in-person session to hear his case; it was not clear at the time of the report whether the session had been scheduled. No later information about the appeal outcome has surfaced in publicly available reporting.
Status and evidentiary limits
Zhou Sanyong is listed as a current in-custody political prisoner in the sentenced-to-9-years (48 people) group of the Rights Defense Network’s Issue 131 monthly report (August 31, 2026); the latest case-specific reporting dates to December 2022. 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 周三永 was derived from the Issue 131 ZH/EN positional equation (English “…Hu Jinhui, Zhou Sanyong, Liu Ling…” ↔ Chinese “…胡金慧、周三永、刘玲…”); the characters are 周三永, not 周三勇 (the roster contains no 周三勇). Birth year and age are unknown. The appeal outcome is unknown since December 2022 and must not be implied either way. The judge’s claim that the April 2021 term start excludes the first three months of detention is reported speech, not an established fact, and the 110,000-yuan home cash confiscation is independently unverified. The exact current facility and release date are not established and must not be inferred. Not a foreign national — no consular dimension; no official acknowledgment of his case was found in PRC government sources.
Media Profile & Archive: Zhou Sanyong (周三永) — Media Profile & Archive