Lisa Zhang from the Central Coast of NSW says her mother Fengying Zhang, 62, went to the local grocery market in Beijing on the morning of Nov 25, but never returned home. The next day, her bike was found in the yard of the local police station.
“Mum went to the grocery market to do some shopping ... While she was telling people how much she benefited from practicing Falun Dafa, someone reported her to the police and she was illegally arrested and detained,” Ms Zhang explained.
Police transferred Fengying to Changping Detention Centre in Beijing for a “pre-trial” on Nov 27. There has been no word on Fengying’s status since then and her family has not been allowed to see her.
Falun Dafa (also called Falun Gong) is a traditional meditation and spiritual practise that follows Buddhist and Daoist principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. By 1999, there were 100 million people practising Falun Dafa in China, according to state reports. Investigative research by the communist authorities in late 1998 found that nearly 98 per cent of practitioners claimed Falun Dafa had improved their health.
Fengying’s advocacy for the spiritual practise is based on personal experience–she credits the practice with curing her chronic neck pain, osteoarthritis and prolonged gastroenteritis, since she took up the practise 16 years ago.
Current estimates state that between 450,000 and 1 million Falun Gong practitioners are imprisoned in Chinese labour camps. According to United Nations Rapporteur on Torture Dr Manfred Novak, Falun Gong practitioners comprise 66 per cent of all reported torture cases in China.
