69 Reported Deaths of Falun Gong Practitioners Between January and June 2024

Mrs. Li Fenglan, a career woman in finance, faced a grim fate. Despite being diagnosed with breast cancer, Li was sentenced for her faith to twenty months in Gansu Province Women’s Prison on February 27, 2023. While imprisoned, her cancer metastasized, and after being denied medical parole multiple times, she died in the arms of her husband on January 10, 2024.

Unfortunately, Li is not the only Falun Gong practitioner facing this inhumane treatment under persecution. In addition, sixty-eight more cases of Falun Gong practitioners who died after enduring persecution were reported between January and June 2024, according to documentation by Minghui. At least six of those cases were practitioners who were killed in custody from torture. This reported figure represents only a fraction of the actual death toll, which is likely far greater.

Thirty-three deaths took place in 2024, twenty-three in 2023, and six between 2020 and 2022. Earlier deaths, belatedly reported this year, include cases from as early as 2003. Deaths of Falun Gong practitioners in China are often belatedly reported and documented because their loved ones must bypass the Great Firewall to share information with overseas human rights organizations. This delay in communication explains why many deaths aren’t confirmed immediately.

The sixty-nine deceased practitioners came from twenty-one provinces and municipalities across China. Eleven of the practitioners were from Liaoning Province, ten from Hebei, seven from Heilongjiang, and six each from Shandong and Jilin, with the remaining sixteen areas having between one and three deaths.

Nine were women, and the practitioners were between the ages of fifty and ninety-one. They came from many different backgrounds, including a former chief physician, architect, real estate manager, and teacher.

The CCP often condemns Falun Gong practitioners to months or years in prisons or forced labor camps simply for practicing their faith. Fifty of the reported deaths were practitioners who had experienced the terrible conditions and torture made infamous at these locations, including electric shocks, beating forced drug administration, sleep deprivation and exposure to freezing temperatures.

A male practitioner from Heilongjiang Province served fourteen years in prison, after which he emerged emaciated, unable to speak coherently, and paralyzed in both legs. He suffered from memory loss and a prostate condition, and eventually required a nasal feeding tube in his final years. He was sixty-six years old at the time of his death on January 27, 2024, and his wife had passed six years earlier also due to a severe health decline as a result of the CCP’s persecution.

Ms. Xu Haihong was a residence of Qingdao City, Shandong Province. She passed away on December 9, 2023 in Shandong Province Women’s Prison. Ms. Xu had originally been arrested in 2022 after someone reported her for talking to other people about the persecution of Falun Gong. She went on a hunger strike to protest her arrest and was released on bail in critical condition after fifteen days. The police forced her family to pay a 13,000 yuan fine and threatened that Ms. Xu’s case was not over.

On September 10, 2023, the police pounded on Ms. Xu’s door and broke the door and lock when she refused to let them in. They brought her to a detention center and refused to let her family visit her.

For a month, Ms. Xu’s family was given no information by the police or detention center about her situation. On October 2023, they learned that she had been sentenced to a one-year-and-four-month prison term. There had been no notifications to the family regarding her indictment, trial, or sentencing.

Around December 6, 2023, Ms. Xu was transferred to the Shandong Province Women’s Prison, located in the capital city of Jinan. She was admitted to the in-house hospital because of her extremely weak constitution, which was the result of a long-term hunger strike. She died in the prison hospital just three days after admission on December 9, 2023.

Ms. Xu’s family believe that the Qingdao authorities transferred her 200 miles away to Jinan, in order to shift responsibility for her death and make it harder for her family to seek justice for her.

Mr. Liu Dianyuan was a resident of Chaoyang City, Liaoning Province, and he was sentenced to eleven and a half years in 2016 for practicing Falun Gong. He was 78 years old at the time and had a weak constitution but was still accepted by the prison. His health worsened during his sentence, and Mr. Liu passed away at the age of 86 on February 10, 2024, Chinese New Year.

Mr. Liu was originally arrested at his sister’s home on November 9, 2015, after being displaced from his own home and hiding from the police for the past five years. The police fabricated evidence to frame him, stating that they found him in a house full of Falun Gong books and materials despite it actually being his sister’s house.

Five months later on April 7, 2016, Mr. Liu appeared in the Jianping County Court as an emaciated man who had memory problems. Prior to being targeted by police, he had been a healthy and mentally sharp individual. On that day judge Li Yan sentenced him to eleven years and six months in prison, which meant Mr. Liu would be ninety years old upon his official release.

Mr. Liu did not qualify for prison admission due to his poor health at the time, but the Shenyang City First Prison still accepted him when he arrived with the bailiff on June 14, 2016.

There was no confirmation that Mr. Liu’s family had been allowed to visit him after being imprisoned, but in September 2022, the prison guards contacted his family and told them to buy him diapers. His family later learned that Mr. Liu was already incapacitated at age eighty-four, when he was only halfway through his prison sentence. But the prison refused to release him for medical treatment.

On February 11, 2024, Mr. Liu’s family received a call from the prison that he had passed away the day before.

Mr. Pang You, a Beijing resident, directed the city planning office and worked as a manager of a real estate company. He had been arrested multiple times over the course of more than two decades and subjected to torture and harassment by CCP police for being a Falun Gong practitioner.

On September 27, 2000, Mr. Pang was first arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. Less than one year after being released, he was arrested again on August 3, 2008, and sentenced to a four-year prison term.

On May 2, 2022, he was arrested for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong (in order to help the public learn the truth about Falun Gong and the CCP’s persecution). He was released on bail the next day due to poor health but was arrested again on July 28, 2022 and taken in by the Changping District Detention Center. On July 3, 2023, he attended a virtual hearing from his hospital bed and was sentenced to one year and three months. This last imprisonment had previously been reported in a Falun Dafa Information Center article from early November 2023.

On November 26, 2023, Mr. Pang was released from prison in extremely weak physical condition and struggled to walk. However, despite his release, the local authorities kept harassing Mr. Pang and had people monitor him during March 2024. The stress contributed to a further decline in Mr. Pang’s health, which already involved heart and kidney failure, diabetic complications, and severe edema. He passed away on April 9, 2024, at the age of sixty-one.