Zhang, a practitioner of Falun Gong, was illegally detained on Aug. 11, after an incident her family described as an abduction.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. First introduced to the public in China in 1992, the practice quickly spread by word of mouth to reach an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners by 1999.
The Chinese Communist Party, fearing that Falun Gong’s popularity threatened the regime’s power, began a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice, on July 20, 1999. Since then, untold numbers of practitioners have been subjected to illegal detention, torture, brainwashing, forced labor, and even live organ harvesting by the Chinese regime.
On Aug. 11, Zhang and her husband had returned home around 2 p.m. after visiting relatives, and soon experienced a power outage, the report stated. The couple initially stayed in the home despite the outage, until a police officer called Zhang’s husband and asked him to come downstairs because the officer had scratched his car.
When Zhang’s husband opened the door, two officers from the Huizhan Police Station forced their way in and dragged Zhang away, the report stated.
The family later learned that the power had been deliberately shut off and believed it was done by the police officers waiting outside Zhang’s home.
Zhang was detained at the Daqing City Second Detention Center and charged with “undermining law enforcement,” a charge Minghui has found is used frequently against prisoners of conscience under the Chinese communist regime.
Police officers submitted Zhang’s case to prosecutors the day after her arrest and sought a heavy prison sentence unless Zhang wrote a statement renouncing her faith. Zhang wrote that she had done nothing wrong by practicing Falun Gong.
Zhang’s family didn’t receive any news about her again until Aug. 17, when the detention center director called and told them to go to the hospital.
“You'd better come quickly to the emergency room. If you are late, you may not see her again!” they recalled him saying.
Family members said when they arrived at the hospital, they found Zhang intubated and were told by a doctor that she had a cerebral aneurysm and intracranial hemorrhage—a massive, inoperable brain bleed. There was nothing more they could do for her, the doctor told the family, except to put her on a ventilator as the family called their relatives and made funeral arrangements.
At the hospital, law enforcement pressured the family to sign forms that would shift liability for Zhang’s death away from the police who detained her, the Minghui report stated.
Some 20 members of the local police station and detention center were there to pressure the family into signing the bail form, the family told Minghui. The police then tried to get the family to sign a certificate of release, which would have made it appear on paper that Zhang had not died in custody, but they refused to sign it.
The family said it was left to cover the cost of Zhang’s treatment and hospital stay, and were unable to get any details about Zhang’s death from the police or detention center.
The local police chief, surnamed Xue, gave no answers about Zhang’s condition, only telling them the police have orders to close Falun Gong cases within three years. “Our job is to arrest people, nothing else,” he said, according to an account by a family member.
The detention center told family members that it had no knowledge of how Zhang ended up with the severe brain injury, but said they had given her a physical exam before detaining her.
“We are only responsible for detaining people. We wouldn’t even touch a strand of her hair,” the detention center director, surnamed Hou, told family members. “We don’t care how the investigation of her case went.”
The detention center showed the family surveillance footage of Zhang in her cell on the last day. She appeared to be asleep, lying on her bed around noon, with her hands overlapping on her stomach. Then suddenly she lifted her legs up, the rest of her posture unchanged. Minutes later, a doctor was performing CPR on Zhang in the video. Twenty minutes after that, she was being carried outside to an ambulance.
Years of Harassment
Officers at the Huizhan Police Station had targeted Zhang for several years.In July 2022, eight officers arrested Zhang at her home, where they confiscated Falun Gong books, a photo of the founder of Falun Gong, and Zhang’s computer. They told Zhang she had been caught on camera distributing materials about Falun Gong and that they had opened a case against her in April, the Minghui report stated.
At the time, the Chinese regime still had severe lockdown protocols in place related to the COVID-19 pandemic so the police were unable to detain Zhang; they instead released her on bail for one year. In 2023, a police officer named Li Zhicai pressured Zhang to sign a residential surveillance form and go to the police station for questioning, the Minghui report stated. Zhang did not sign the form that would have effectively put her on probation and was thereafter repeatedly followed and harassed by local law enforcement led by Li.
At one point, Zhang lived separately from her husband because of the harassment; however, the officers followed and harassed her husband instead, the report noted.
Then, in 2024, Li told Zhang’s family they had dropped the case, and would not harass Zhang if she moved back home. Zhang moved back in with her husband in early 2025 and was arrested on Aug. 11.
