Elderly Woman’s 7.5-Year Sentence Highlights Harsh Repression Against Falun Gong Practitioners in China

The CCP’s eradication campaign against Falun Gong unfolded largely in secret. The verdict in a 2025 case offers a rare insight into the nationwide persecution.

The No.2 Intermediate People's Court in the Beijing suburb of Fangzhuang on Aug. 15, 2006. Goh Chai Hin/AFP via Getty Images

In the summer of 2024, when Wei Suwen strolled through a park in Beijing, she enabled her phone’s hotspot—turning it into a small web server accessible to anyone nearby. This idea, developed by her fellow Falun Gong practitioners, was intended to raise awareness of the persecution of her faith community via a wireless connection between devices.

Twenty minutes later, police arrived at the park and took the 65-year-old away.

In June 2025, Wei was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison. She was convicted of “using a heretical religion to sabotage law enforcement,” a charge often levied against Falun Gong practitioners and other faith groups targeted by Beijing.

That’s according to the verdict recently obtained by The Epoch Times. The judicial document was not classified, but official secrecy surrounding the eradication campaign against Falun Gong means court documents are seldom available, even to the family.

Details of Wei’s alleged offense and the sentence offer a rare glimpse into Beijing’s systematic campaign to eradicate the faith group, which is underway across the country and even extends abroad, including in the United States.

At least 70 million Chinese had taken up Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, by the end of the 1990s, according to a state survey at the time, with many citing the practice’s health benefits and moral philosophy centered on the universal principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

Finding that Falun Gong’s surging popularity threatened the regime’s authority, Jiang Zemin, China’s top leader at the time, ordered the practice to be wiped out on July 20, 1999. Since then, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has mobilized its entire security apparatus to locate, arrest, and detain practitioners in prisons, brainwashing centers, and other facilities. Many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.

Chinese internet moderators also scrub any references to Falun Gong beyond the official narrative that denigrates it, making it one of the most heavily censored topics in China.

According to the court document, the mobile phone Wei used could set up a wireless network that allowed nearby mobile devices to connect without a password.

“After connecting to the hotspot, the browser on the client device will automatically open and access Falun Gong-related information published within the mobile phone,” the court document reads.

Such a method relies on a wireless connection between devices rather than the internet, placing it beyond the scope of the internet’s central blocking.

Wei denied any wrongdoing.

“I believe my actions are reasonable and legal,” she told the court, according to the document. “I want everyone to know the truth about Falun Gong.”

In addition to the prison term, the Dongcheng District People’s Court in Beijing also imposed a fine of 16,000 yuan ($2,345).

In October 2025, a Beijing intermediate court, without holding any hearings, rejected Wei’s appeal against the sentence, according to Minghui, a U.S.-based website that tracks and documents the ongoing persecution.

Torture and Abuses

Wei is currently detained in the third division of Beijing Women’s Prison, a facility notorious for its inhumane treatment of practitioners to force them to renounce their faith, according to Minghui.

Also imprisoned there is Gong Ruiping, a 61-year-old former schoolteacher who is serving a 5.5-year jail term for her faith.

The authorities took Gong away from her home in July 2021, after a surveillance camera caught her distributing materials related to Falun Gong weeks ago, according to a verdict that The Epoch Times recently obtained. The sentence was handed down by a Beijing district court in February 2022.

Gong Ruiping in an undated photo. Courtesy of Minghui.org

It was not the first time that Gong, who started practicing Falun Gong in 1996, was punished for calling attention to the persecution. Before the most recent arrest, she had already spent nine years in total behind bars for her faith.

While imprisoned, she was tortured to near death on multiple occasions, according to a 2015 criminal complaint filed with China’s top court against former Party leader Jiang.

In the complaint, published by Minghui in 2016, Gong recounted the torture, sexual assault, forced feeding, slave labor, and other physical and psychological abuses she endured during her detention in the regime’s brainwashing centers and prisons from 2001 to 2005.

Once, prison guards hung her in the air by a rope and deprived her of sleep and access to the toilet for more than a month. On another occasion, a prison guard slapped her face more than 500 times.

“If you don’t denounce Falun Gong, we’ll make you either lose your mind or your life!” she recounted a guard yelling at her, according to Minghui.

A January Minghui report documented 751 practitioners who were sentenced to jail, including 237 from 2024, who were accounted for in the latest annual report. The delay in reporting is due to the difficulties of getting such information out of China, Minghui said, as the regime sought to conceal its human rights abuses against Falun Gong from international scrutiny.

The website also verified 124 practitioner deaths in 2025 based on firsthand information.

Among the verified victims was Chen Yan, who was transferred to a women’s prison in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning last November to serve a 5.5-year jail term for her faith. Three days later, the prison informed Chen’s daughter that her 45-year-old mother had died.

Frank Fang contributed to this report.