(Minghui.org) Mr. Zou Feiyu’s wife received a notice at 10:30 a.m. on January 2, 2024 asking her to visit him at a detention center at 1:30 p.m. that day. Since it was such a short notice, she did not have time to inform Mr. Zou’s mother and son because both of them lived in different provinces hundreds of miles away. She went to the detention center alone and learned that her husband had been sentenced to four and a half years and that he was set to be transferred to a prison the next day.
The detention center guards refused to reveal which prison it was. Prior to that, Mr. Zou’s wife was never notified of his trial or sentencing. She only learned from an insider that he stood trial in early May 2023.
Mr. Zou, a 49-year-old resident of Kunshan City, Jiangsu Province, was sentenced for his faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999. He was arrested on July 10, 2022, only five months after he married his second wife. His wife, who was arrested the same day, was soon released on bail and then had her bail condition dismissed. Mr. Zou remained in custody and his arrest was approved on August 18, 2022.
Mr. Zou’s mother went to the Kunshan Detention Center by herself in early May 2023 to visit him and demand his release. A guard lied to her that her son wasn’t detained there. She was devastated and burst into tears outside of the detention center. When she returned home, she told her daughter-in-law, who was not aware of her trip to the detention center, what had happened. Her daughter-in-law was shocked to see how much she had aged in just one day.
Two Prison Sentences Totaling 13 Years
Mr. Zou, a native of Pingjiang City, Hunan Province, was admitted to Northeast Normal University in 1993. At the recommendation of his professor Mr. Bai Xiaojun, he began to practice Falun Gong in November 1996. After graduating in July 1997, he became a teacher at a middle school in Kunshan City, Jiangsu Province. He married his first wife Jiang Haiqiu in December 1998, and they welcomed their son in May 2000.
On January 5, 2001, when their son was only seven months old, they were both arrested after the police found out they were printing informational materials about Falun Gong. Mr. Zou was sentenced to eight years and fired from his job at the school. He survived brutal torture and was released on November 6, 2006.
Jiang was given two years of forced labor. After she was released, she stopped practicing Falun Gong and didn’t want Mr. Zou to practice it either. They agreed to divorce in January 2007. Mr. Zou has custody of their six-year-old son and Jiang soon re-married.
While Mr. Zou was serving time, Mr. Bai, the professor who’d introduced Falun Gong to him, was tortured to death on July 18, 2003, while in Chaoyanggou Forced Labor Camp in Changchun City, Jilin Province.
Mr. Zou was arrested again on April 28, 2010, and sentenced to five years. During his incarceration, his son, who was in the fourth grade, lived with his mother.
Mr. Zou was released on April 27, 2015. A month later, Jiang died of lung cancer at the age of 41, just weeks before their son was to take the high-school entrance exam. Due to the ongoing persecution his family suffered and the loss of his mom, the boy developed severe depression.
Mr. Zou married again during the 2022 Chinese New Year in February, only to be arrested five months later. His wife has a heart condition and was in poor heath, so his mother came from her hometown in Hunan Province to Kunshan to stay with her. His mother returned to her hometown before her son’s prison transfer. Her grandson was attending college out of town so he did not get to see his father either before the prison transfer.
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Arrested Five Months after Wedding, Former Middle School Teacher Secretly Tried for His Faith
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