Deseret Morning News: U. student wants to get fiancee out of China

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

University of Utah engineering student Sheng Mei is hoping to persuade the Chinese government to let his fiancee out of China - so, once again, he's asking Utahns to write their congressmen and the Chinese embassy on her behalf.

Mei says his fiancee is being held in China because she's a practitioner of Falun Gong, the spiritual practice that the Chinese government has outlawed. In late 2003, according to Mei, his fiancee was abducted by Chinese authorities. Mei credits media attention and letters from Utahns for her release seven weeks later. Now, more than a year later, the government still won't give her back her passport, he says.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice currently followed by an estimated 100 million people, including 70 million in China, according to Falun Gong devotees. There have been reports of torture and deaths of practitioners in Chinese jails, and of cases of passports being denied to other practitioners.

"A number of Chinese I know who are now living in the United States (with political asylum status) had to either find unconventional ways to escape China or underwent a long and strenuous process of getting the proper paperwork in order to leave, usually with the help of sympathizers in China," says Levi Browde, an editor with the Falun Dafa Information Center.

According to Browde, there have been cases of Falun Gong practitioners "tortured to death simply for posting on the Internet the stories of how they were persecuted." In some cases, he says, practitioners were tortured to death "simply for posting similar stories on poster-boards in their local towns in China."

The policy is to not let Falun Gong practitioners out for fear they will expose human rights abuses, Mei says. His fiancee, Li Qian, is being monitored closely by her local security bureau, he says. "Li was notified secretly by a kindhearted officer. The officer told her that the security bureau wants to arrest her and minded her to be cautious."

Last spring, Mei says, his fiancee traveled from Shanghai to Suzhou to retrieve her passport and was questioned for several hours by Chinese authorities but was not given the passport. Still Mei knows that Li is luckier than most. Her mother has been sentenced to three years in prison, he says, "for holding a banner at the airport that read 'truthfulness, compassion, tolerance.' " These are the cornerstones of Falun Gong, a practice that cultivates moral character, Mei explains.

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When his fiancee was first abducted Mei contacted everyone he could think of who might be willing to work for her release. Now he hopes Utahns will help out again.

http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600107105,00.html