Zhu Tianfu (朱天富)
Zhu Tianfu is a Falun Gong practitioner from Caiyuan Village in the Jiulong Subdistrict of Fangzi District, Weifang City, Shandong Province. Born in 1953, he has been detained repeatedly since 1999 for his practice of Falun Gong. His wife, Zhang Ximei, has also been detained; monitoring reports say she suffered a mental breakdown while held at the Wangcun labor camp.
Zhu's first recorded detention came at the end of 1999, when he traveled toward Beijing to petition on behalf of Falun Gong and was intercepted and held for 15 days, according to a Falun Gong-affiliated case archive. In 2002, he was sent to Weibei Prison to serve a five-year sentence; the archive says no legal procedure was followed and his family was not notified. He was released in 2007. In September 2015, he mailed a complaint to the Supreme People's Procuratorate naming former leader Jiang Zemin over the persecution of Falun Gong, according to the same archive.
On December 6, 2022, Zhu was taken from his sister's home and placed in a detention-and-education facility in Fangzi District. On December 23, 2022, he was tried by video link with the Fangzi District Court — conducted, the archive reports, on the mobile phone of the facility's head — and sentenced to three and a half years with a 5,000-yuan fine. He signed the verdict under what the archive describes as deception and never received a copy; he was then released because of pandemic conditions and lived away from home to avoid further detention.
On August 7, 2024, police from the Fangzi branch detained Zhu in Zibo and placed him in the Weifang City Detention Center. A prisoner database maintained by China Human Rights Defenders lists his projected release date as February 6, 2028. The formal criminal charge was not disclosed in any available report.
The account above rests on Falun Gong-affiliated monitoring sources; no court judgment or independent confirmation of the sentence has been located.
Sources: victim archive, Minghui (updated September 6, 2024); case record, China Human Rights Defenders political-prisoner database (CHRD PoC), entry updated September 2024.
Further reporting, source chronology, and source verification for this case are collected in the Media Profile & Archive.