(Minghui.org) A college student in Shanghai has been detained since early July 2019 for spreading information about Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. The authorities refuse to disclose his whereabouts to his parents.
Mr. Zhong Yiming, 19, a native of Dalian City, Liaoning Province, is a freshman at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
The university called his parents in early July and asked them to go to the school right away. His parents flew to Shanghai on July 3, only to be told that their son was under investigation for practicing Falun Gong.
The school officials said that he was recorded on the school’s surveillance camera for distributing Falun Gong materials on campus every day around 2 a.m. for a period of time. Through investigation, they found Mr. Zhong had bought a printer with the money he saved from his allowance and printed Falun Gong informational materials with it.
The university authorities even sent staff to Mr. Zhong’s high school, the No.24 High School of Dalian, to investigate him. The high school reported back that both Mr. Zhong and his grandmother are Falun Gong practitioners and that Mr. Zhong used to tell his fellow students about Falun Gong there.
The university reported him to Shanghai police, who ordered him to disclose where he had learned Falun Gong and to write a “regret statement” to give up his belief.
When Mr. Zhong refused to comply, the police threatened to terminate his college studies and sent him to a detention center in Shanghai on July 5, but they didn’t inform his parents of the location. His parents stayed in Shanghai for a few days to look for him, to no avail.
It was reported that the Shanghai authorities have received many phone calls from around the world in the past two weeks, requesting them to release Mr. Zhong. They now blame Mr. Zhong for having connections with “Western forces.”
It was also reported that the Shanghai police had flown to Dalian City on July 22 in an attempt to arrest his grandmother, who is in her 80s.
