Hubei Human Rights Defender Yin Xu'an Has Been Forcibly Disappeared for More Than 300 Days After Going to Beijing for Medical Treatment

(Rights Defense Network Information Center report) On June 7, 2026, this website learned that Yin Xu'an, a human rights defender from Daye City, Hubei Province, has been forcibly disappeared for more than 300 days after going to Beijing for medical treatment.

Since Yin Xu'an was intercepted and repatriated after going to Beijing for medical treatment on August 11, 2025, the Hubei Province, Daye City human rights defender Yin Xu'an has been forcibly disappeared for more than 300 days with no news; his family hired lawyers to search for him locally twice without success; government departments have been passing the buck to one another.

Yin Xu'an began petitioning for rights in 2007 and participated in protest activities including gathering to watch and show support; he was arrested many times, subjected to reeducation through labor and held in black jails; he was imprisoned twice and served eight years. The most recent time, he was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months; his conditions and health in prison were very poor, and after completing his sentence he was illegally detained for more than 1 year and 4 months before finally being released home. His experience can be described in four words, “life worse than death”; his physical condition is particularly poor. Yin Xu'an is seriously ill and has extremely high-risk hypertension, with his blood pressure at its highest reaching 300/220, severe coronary heart disease, and an urgent need for surgery. In early August, Yin Xu'an went to Beijing for medical treatment. Ultimately, on the evening of August 11, 2025, he was kidnapped by the authorities while boarding a 120 emergency ambulance in Beijing, intercepted and repatriated, and it has now been more than 300 days; he remains in a state of forced disappearance, with no news. Yin Xu'an went to Beijing solely because his illness was serious and he needed medical treatment, yet the Chinese Communist authorities repeatedly intercepted him, forcibly disappeared him and illegally detained him. This is a serious trampling of his right to life and health.

Profile of Yin Xu'an: Born on August 27, 1974, he is a native of Daye City, Hubei Province, a former villager of Bao'an Town, Daye City, Hubei Province, a public-interest rights-defense citizen, a democrat and a political prisoner.

In 2003, he was subjected to a miscarriage of justice by a local court for filing a complaint against the Civil Affairs Bureau of Liangzihu District, Ezhou City, Hubei Province, over its illegal registration in a dispute concerning his and his wife's divorce; the local higher court then failed to act, and he was forced to go to Beijing to petition in 2007;

Since November 2007, he has suffered repeated illegal punishment and harm by the authorities because of his many petitioning trips; he was illegally detained six times and held in black jails eight times for petitioning for rights and participating in actions to gather, show support and protest; in 2009, during then-U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to China, he was subjected by the Hubei authorities to two years of reeducation through labor, plus a three-month extension of his release, for going to the Public Security Bureau of Beijing Municipality's Public Order Corps to apply for a march and demonstration; during his reeducation through labor, he repeatedly fainted and required emergency treatment because he suffered from stage-three hypertension (extremely high-risk level) and various other diseases, such as hepatitis B, cholecystitis and gallstones;

Beginning in 2012, because of his rights-defense activities in Beijing, he began paying greater attention to the cause of democratic public-interest rights defense; in 2012, he actively participated in the democratic direct election of academic representatives for the 18th Party Congress, calling for the advancement of political-system reform, the abolition of the reeducation-through-labor system and a crackdown on black jails; from July to October 2012, he was illegally detained by the authorities for 42 days for reporting and suing the local government of Hubei Province over its illegal expropriation of land, and for suing the Hubei Provincial Reeducation Through Labor Committee over issues including illegal extensions and illegal elections;

Beginning in 2013, he actively became involved in actions to show support and gather onlookers, including the case of independent candidate Liu Ping in Xinyu, Jiangxi; the Xue Fushun incident in Qufu, Shandong; Sun Feng's “subversion” case in Zibo, Shandong; the April 29 event commemorating Lin Zhao; the opening of the trial in Zhao Fengsheng's “subversion” case in Hengyang, Hunan; the Zhengzhou Ten Gentlemen incident; the Zhang Xiaoyu case in Jiaozuo; the opening of the trial in veteran Fan Mugen's forced demolition case in Suzhou; and, together with rights-defense netizens including Wang Fulei, the action to show support for rights-defense citizen Wang Jian;

On March 8, 2015, he was arrested by the authorities for forwarding via WeChat the “List of Daye City, Hubei, Stability-Maintenance Personnel Stationed in Beijing,” administratively detained for 15 days, and on March 24 criminally detained on suspicion of “leaking state secrets”; he was later released;

On July 25, 2015, because he and rights defenders including Wang Fang and Geng Caiwen wore T-shirts supporting butcher (Wu Han) in front of the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan and took photographs that they uploaded to online media, he was taken from his home by police on July 28 and detained at the Bao'an Town Police Station in Daye City; on August 23 of the same year, he was transferred to criminal detention; on September 26, he was arrested on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”; on September 13, 2016, his case was heard at the Daye City Court in Hubei Province, and on May 27, 2017, the court sentenced him to three years and six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”; during his detention, he was subjected to brutal beatings and torture by prison guards and inmate bosses, leaving him physically and psychologically devastated, and his repeated requests to meet with a lawyer were denied;

On December 27, 2018, he was released early after a sentence reduction, but shortly after leaving prison, during the period of the Chinese Communist Party's Two Sessions, he was again criminally detained by the Daye City police in Hubei Province on suspicion of “deliberately leaking state secrets” and was abused, until he was released in January 2019;

On May 23, 2019, Yin Xu'an petitioned for rights because Yuan Qifa, secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission of Bao'an Town, Daye City, and Yin Qingsong, secretary of the Communist Party branch and village chief of Jintang Village, among others, had, without the consent of any of the villagers of Yinsifangwan in Jintang Village, not only forcibly measured the collectively owned land on which they depended for their livelihoods, but also driven an excavator to the site to carry out the illegal forced expropriation; he was then subjected to repeated retaliation and again criminally detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”;

In October 2019, his case was prosecuted by the Daye City Procuratorate at a local court; on January 19, 2020, his case was heard by the Daye City Court in Hubei Province, which delayed proceedings until July 21, 2021, when it finally sentenced him to four years and six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” with his sentence running until November 22, 2023; it is reported that his physical condition in prison was extremely poor and that he had been resuscitated several times. The verdict in the second trial of Yin Xu'an's case was issued on January 28, 2022, upholding the original four-and-a-half-year sentence. He previously served his sentence at Huangzhou Prison.

This website will continue to follow Yin Xu'an's situation.