Falun Gong Practitioner Dies After Being Tortured by Chinese Authorities, Says Nonprofit

A Falun Gong practitioner died after three days in prison after being tortured by Chinese authorities for refusing to give up her faith, according to a report published Nov. 20 on Minghui.org, a U.S.-based nonprofit that documents the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong.Chen Yan died on Nov. 8, according to the Minghui report. She was 45. This marks the latest death in an ongoing and systemic religious persecution of Falun Gong that the Chinese regime has carried out since 1999.Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered on the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. Introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s, it gained widespread popularity, reaching between 70 million and 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade, according to official estimates.In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party—fearing that Falun Gong’s popularity threatened the regime’s power—began a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice. Since then, many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.Chen’s parents told Minghui how they learned of her death. Three days after Chen was admitted to Liaoning Province Women’s Prison, they were called in to see her body—eyes open, black viscous liquid oozing from her open mouth, hair matted, according to the report.Prison guards refused the couple an autopsy report, asked them to sign a cremation consent agreement, and insisted they send a token of appreciation to the prison for allowing their daughter to be sent to the hospital, according to the report. A doctor at the hospital said Chen showed no signs of life by the time she was brought in, according to Minghui.Chen had been detained for her faith and experienced torture several times previously, and Minghui has followed her case over the years.Chen was detained in 2015 for distributing materials about Falun Gong to other people. She was detained at the Benxi City Detention Center, where she was physically tortured and forcibly administered drugs, according to the report. She was then sentenced to three years in the Liaoning Province Women’s Prison, where she was forced to take unknown drugs and suffered damage to her central nervous system.Chen was detained again in July 2024, again for giving someone information about Falun Gong, according to the report.Chen’s parents had not heard from her for days after the detention, and went to her home to discover it had apparently been ransacked. Knowing their daughter had previously been imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong, her 74-year-old father went to the local police station to seek her release. Her family eventually learned where she was detained and that she had been denied visitation and not allowed to see a lawyer, according to the report.Falun Dafa practitioners take part in a candlelight vigil commemorating Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted to death by the Chinese Communist Party in China, in Washington on July 17, 2025. Larry Dye/The Epoch TimesShe was allowed to see a lawyer on Oct. 30, 2024, and the lawyer learned that she had been beaten three times on Aug. 5, 2024, by inmates whom guards instructed to abuse her, and suffered numerous injuries, the report stated. The lawyer told Chen’s family she was weak with medical issues such as heart palpitations and abnormal bleeding, according to the report.The lawyer visited her again the next day, but Chen could not recognize him or recall their meeting the day before, according to the report.In March, Minghui obtained an update on Chen’s case and reported that she had been beaten several times by inmates at the instruction of guards during her months of detention.In May, a judge, Wang Mian, tried Chen in her detention center cell. According to Minghui’s most recent report on Chen, she was emaciated after 10 months of detention at the time and testified to the abuses. In June, the judge sentenced her to five years in prison.The sentencing had a 10-day window for appeal, but the court did not inform Chen’s lawyer or family. Her family learned of the verdict in July and demanded a copy of the sentence from the court, but were refused, according to Minghui.Chen was hospitalized in July, but taken back to the detention center in August and was refused bail. Her family’s attempt to appeal her case was rejected, and her father hired a lawyer, who took up the case on Aug. 22.The lawyer was unable to see her until on Sept. 18 because she had been admitted to a hospital, according to the report. During the first visit, the lawyer saw that Chen was in a wheelchair and could barely hold herself up. The next day, the appeals court upheld Chen’s sentence.Chen’s parents told Minghui that they last saw their daughter in October.On Oct. 10, she was in a wheelchair and displayed involuntary spasms, with her hair matted due to being unwashed for a long period.On Oct. 24, Chen told her parents that she was told she could get a health evaluation only on the condition of renouncing her faith and making statements to defame Falun Gong, and she refused to do so. The last thing Chen said to her parents was “Falun Dafa is good” and “truth, compassion, forbearance is good,” according to the report.Chen’s parents were then told this would be their last visit, because she was being transferred to the Liaoning Province Women’s Prison.On Nov. 5, Chen’s father received a phone call that she had been transferred, and he asked how they could admit her when she was wheelchair-bound and in no condition for it. Li Tingting, deputy director of the detention center, told Chen’s father that they believed Chen was faking her illness, according to the report.Three days later, Chen’s father was contacted by the prison and told to go to Yongsen Hospital because she was in critical condition. When her parents arrived, she had already died, and guards directed the elderly couple to the morgue.Chen’s family has been unable to obtain any answers from the authorities regarding their daughter’s death, according to Minghui.