Hubei petitioner Yin Dengzhen and his wife Xiao Shujun were both convicted and imprisoned for a false police assault case. Yin Dengzhen was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in the first trial, and the second trial upheld the original verdict.
Yin Dengzhen’s first trial was secretly sentenced on July 15 in the Shayang Detention Center in Shiyan City, Hubei Province. The Shiyan City Court sentenced him to 4 years and 6 months in prison. On September 4, the Shiyan Intermediate Court secretly sentenced the case again, maintaining the original verdict.
Yin Dengzhen’s daughter Xia Beibei told Epoch Times reporters, “On August 31, the lawyer contacted me. The Shiyan Intermediate Court refused to publicly hear the second trial of Yin Dengzhen’s case and chose to secretly sentence it on September 4 in the Shiyan Detention Center.”
Xia Beibei said, “My mother recently had a more serious health issue. On the evening of August 30, I received an anonymous email about the medical information that my mother was sent to the hospital twice for emergencies during detention. I learned that she had gone without food or water for 11 days before being taken to the hospital on February 7, nearly dying. Then on February 8, the Shayang Sub-bureau of the Shiyan Public Security Bureau arrested my mother.”
“My mother was sent to the hospital again on July 23 and is still hospitalized. The Supreme Court has ordered no changes to the compulsory measures,” Xia Beibei said.
The day before Yin Dengzhen’s second trial sentence (September 3), the lawyer visited Yin Dengzhen, who told the lawyer that after being urgently sent to the hospital on July 23, the examination showed she weighed only 71 catties.
Xia Beibei said, “My mother is 160cm tall, originally weighing over 110 catties, her weight dropped rapidly in the short term, with a BMI below 14, reaching a state of ‘extreme emaciation and severe malnutrition’ in clinical medicine, constantly endangering her life. Such a situation often accompanies severe immune dysfunction, electrolyte disorders, can rapidly deteriorate into heart failure, severe infections, or even multiple organ failure, with a very high risk of death.”
Yin Dengzhen was persecuted for 20 years by the Shiyan City government, prosecutors, and courts for reporting in 2003 that the leaders of the Hubei Shiyan City government engaged in corruption with a vegetable wholesaler, selling a vegetable wholesale market worth over a hundred million for only 800,000 to the boss Li Rongke, resulting in severe loss of state-owned assets and over 600 state-owned enterprise employees losing their jobs.
Due to this report, Yin Dengzhen was wrongly accused of “extortion and embezzlement against the government” by the Shiyan authorities in 2009 and was sentenced to 3 years in prison. After 16 appeals and 2022, she was finally acquitted on May 30. She demanded accountability for the judges involved in the case, leading to further persecution.
On June 29, 2023, Yin Dengzhen was beaten by security guards (police claimed to be court police) across the street from the Supreme Court in Beijing, fracturing three ribs. She was then falsely accused of “attacking the police” and sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in prison after secret trials in the first and second instance.
In Yin Dengzhen’s case, the police tried to implicate Xia Beibei without reason, interrogating her for over thirty hours, repeatedly tempting her with questions like “Do you have a mental illness? Are you taking psychiatric drugs? Do you need to be sent to a mental hospital?”
After Yin Dengzhen’s arrest, authorities leaked information internally to give her a harsher sentence of six years and implicate Xia Beibei. So Xia Beibei returned to Hubei at the end of May 2024 to prepare for studying abroad and left China before the two sessions convened at the end of February 2025.
Xia Beibei sought refuge in Japan, while her mother Yin Dengzhen could only entrust lawyers to defend her against judicial persecution. Facing the helplessness and powerlessness, Xia Beibei has appealed to international human rights organizations, hoping that through the experiences of her family, public and international attention can be drawn to the current state of the Chinese judiciary.