Elderly Woman Dies 27 Days After Release From Guizhou Province No. 1 Women’s Prison, Her Body Found to Bear Multiple Fractures

Ms. Liu Shuling(刘淑玲), a Falun Gong practitioner in her late seventies from Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, died on June 23, 2026, just 27 days after being released from a five-year prison sentence served for her faith. She had entered prison able to speak and walk; she left it incapacitated, unable to talk, and, as a hospital later discovered, with several ribs and a thigh bone broken. Her case was reported by Minghui.org on August 09.

Released incapacitated, dead within a month

Ms. Liu was arrested on May 25, 2021, by officers from the local Domestic Security Office and the Changzheng Police Station, held at the Zunyi City Second Detention Center, and later sentenced to five years in prison. She was held at the Guizhou Province No. 1 Women’s Prison, also known as Yang’ai Women’s Prison, in the provincial capital of Guiyang.

According to reports, Ms. Liu was tortured for refusing to renounce Falun Gong and soon became incapacitated, though the prison declined to explain to her family what had happened to her. When relatives first visited, she could still speak; by their second visit, she had lost the ability to speak and could communicate only by shaking her head. She was extremely weak and emaciated, and her family feared she had been injected with an unknown drug that left her mute.

When Ms. Liu’s term expired on May 26, 2026, police took her not to her home but to a nursing home, where they assigned personnel to watch her and installed a surveillance camera in her room, permitting only family to visit. She had blood in her stool and could take only small amounts of liquid food. When the nursing home sent her to a hospital, doctors found several broken ribs and a fractured thigh bone—injuries they determined to be the cause of her incapacitation.

After ten days of inpatient care, the hospital discharged Ms. Liu against her family’s concerns, saying the bleeding had stopped. Within days she was again in critical condition and returned to the hospital. Believing she had little time left, her family took her home at around 3:00 p.m. on June 23, 2026. She died at approximately 9:00 p.m. that evening, 27 days after her release.

Decades of persecution

Ms. Liu’s imprisonment stemmed from a raid on her home on October 30, 2019.

According to reports, seven officers from the Changzheng Police Station, accompanied by a fellow villager, entered her home that afternoon and confiscated the printer, computer, and other equipment she was believed to have used to produce materials about the persecution of Falun Gong. Police did not detain her at the time but returned to harass her repeatedly, and she was forced to live away from home for a period to avoid further persecution before her arrest in 2021.

Her ordeal was not her first. In the early years of the persecution, Ms. Liu was arrested for traveling to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice Falun Gong and was sentenced to five years in a forced labor camp.

Documented record of abuse

Ms. Liu was held at the Guizhou Province No. 1 Women’s Prison, formerly known as Yang’ai Prison, in the southwestern outskirts of Guiyang. According to Minghui.org’s compiled record of the facility, it has served since 1999 as the principal site for imprisoning female Falun Gong practitioners in Guizhou, with at least 130 sentenced practitioners held there over the years and at least seven reported to have died as a result of the persecution.

Minghui’s record documents specific practices at the facility. Practitioners were reportedly subjected to forced labor. They were also placed under a “paired surveillance” system, in which two or more criminal inmates monitored a single practitioner around the clock. Under this system, a practitioner was barred from practicing her faith, restricted in whom she could speak to, and followed even to the toilet. Those who went on hunger strike to protest their treatment were reportedly bound for extended periods and force-fed.

The record also names practitioners who died there. Ms. Xu Jiarong died on May 13, 2008, while serving a seven-year term. Ms. Gao Qiying died on February 11, 2010, at the age of 40, little more than a year after she was seized. Her family reportedly learned of her death while traveling to the hospital to see her. All of these women, the record notes, had been in good health before their imprisonment.

Ms. Liu Shuling’s case follows the same course. She entered the prison able to speak and walk. She was returned to her family mute and emaciated. Hospital physicians found multiple fractured bones, confirmed only after her release. The prison offered no explanation for the injuries. She died 27 days later.