Ottawa Citizen: Eight hours of terror in Beijing

Canadian Ying Lee was in China to help her homeland. Her thanks was to be detained and interrogated.

The Ottawa Citizen

Former professor KunLun Zhang was sentenced to three years in a Chinese labour camp for performing Falun Gong.

Peter Battistoni, The Vancouver Sun / Ying Lee, a Canadian citizen, was detained by Chinese police for downloading information from the Falun Gong Web site and giving it to friends.

Lynn Ball, the Ottawa Citizen / LingDi Zhang called on Irwin Cotler to help her appeal to the Chinese government to release her imprisoned father, KunLun Zhang.

For eight terrifying hours last February, a Vancouver environmental consultant says she was detained and interrogated by security agents in China as part of the Communist government's crackdown against Falun Gong.

Ying Lee, one of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in British Columbia, says she was arrested just before midnight on Feb. 27 after visiting friends in Beijing who also perform meditation exercises and join in spiritual discussions aimed at relieving stress and nurturing positive emotions.

Ms. Lee, 37, says that although she didn't publicize her ordeal at the time, she says the escalating persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China and the imprisonment of another Canadian citizen -- former McGill University professor KunLun Zhang -- has prompted her to speak out.

"What the Chinese authorities did to me violates the basic human rights of a Canadian," she says.

"This behaviour is totally unacceptable."

Ms. Lee was born in Beijing, came to Canada in 1989 and eventually earned a PhD in planning from the University of British Columbia.

Earlier this year, she joined a team of engineers and private consultants who were awarded a contract by the Canadian International Development Agency to help China improve its transportation system.

After arriving in Beijing on Feb. 26, she visited two friends who practise Falun Gong and gave them news stories printed from an Internet site that described the Chinese government's positive attitude toward Falun Gong before it was banned in July 1999.

"On the way back to the hotel, I noticed that I was being followed," she says.

At about 11:45 p.m., she received a call in her room from someone who said she was a friend waiting in the lobby.

"When I went down, two plain-clothes national security officers approached me and asked me to follow them," Ms. Lee recalls. "They took me in a car with blinds to their office."

For the next eight hours, she says she was interrogated in a small room with five chairs and one table. Two men sat across from her and two women sat behind.

"They asked me what was my purpose in China, whom I went to meet and whom I plan to meet," she says. "When they realized it was true that I was there with a business visa and on a CIDA mission, they turned to the printed (Internet) articles as the evidence of my 'crime' -- bringing in illegal documents."

Ms. Lee says: "They threatened me to write a confession, which I refused to do. They threatened to detain me for a criminal investigation. They also threatened that I would be sent to jail despite the fact that I had a Canadian passport. They showed me a form that would send me to a detention centre."

When morning came, Ms. Lee was returned to her hotel room, which she says had clearly been searched during the interrogation.

Throughout that day, as she attended meetings related to the project, Ms. Lee says "at least two cars with six people were following me." And when she returned to her hotel room, she was contacted again by security officers and questioned about whether she was involved in a Falun Gong web site.

She says she was asked to provide her personal telephone directory, which prompted questions about various friends in China.

Over the next 10 days, as members of the project team travelled to the cities of Hunan, Shaanxi and Qinghai, Ms. Lee says she was under constant surveillance and was questioned several more times by security officers.

On March 10, she took a flight from the airport at Beijing and returned to

Canada.

At that time, she says, she emailed a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chretien complaining about China's crackdown on Falun Gong but not about her own treatment.

In May, when she was to return to China to continue work on the transportation project, Ms. Lee says she was denied a business visa by the Chinese consulate in Vancouver.

Ms. Lee, who has relatives throughout China, says she is not afraid to go back.

"I didn't do anything wrong," she insists. "What they did to me, and the persecution in general, is wrong."

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/001208/5010459.html