In the midst of the Communist regime’s enduring persecution of Falun Gong, which has spanned over two decades, many students who uphold the values of “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance” have become targets of persecution in various forms, reported Minghui, a website dedicated to the documentation of persecution of Chinese Falun Gong adherents by the regime.
They include doctoral candidates, master’s students, undergraduates, as well as minors in high school, junior high school, and primary school.
The documented cases include young students who died from the persecution, were illegally sentenced, imprisoned in a forced labor camp or brainwashing center, illegally expelled from schools, forced to drop out, abducted, became homeless, and constantly coerced and harassed at school age as young as eight.
Death of An 18-year Old Boy
Ba Guannan, an 18-year-old boy at Lionart School of Modern Design, Shenyang City in Northeast China, died on the night of March 19, 2014, following months of threats and intimidation by the police.“On the night of March 19, 2014, my son slept like never before, quietly, he never woke up again. He left quietly, taking with him five months of fear, bidding farewell to his 18 springs and autumns. He really left... The sky sprinkled countless snowflakes to mourn his departure…,” described his mother, Wang Yuelian.
On the evening of Oct. 23, 2013, Shenyang police abducted six teachers and around 20 students from the school, including the young Mr. Ba and his mother, Ms. Wang. The youngest student abducted was only 11 years old.
The teachers were all Falun Gong adherents, teaching traditional Chinese culture at the school.
Mr. Ba was interrogated for four days at the police station, during which he was only given a small piece of bread to eat. The police specifically told him, “I am in charge of investigating death row inmates.” The fright, coupled with hunger, thirst, fatigue, and inadequate clothing, caused Mr. Ba to quickly develop a fever and cough. He was detained for another 15 days at the prison hospital.
Interruption of Higher Education
Guo Jiayu, then a new college graduate from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2016, was denied admission to his alma mater’s graduate school for his belief in Falun Gong.He passed the entrance exam in January of that year with excellent grades, but the police forced the school to deny his admission.
On June 16, 2016, he was arrested for producing and distributing DVDs bearing information about the persecution of Falun Gong,
His parents wanted to visit him, but the police turned them away and told them Mr. Guo was faced with criminal charges. He was illegally detained for more than a year and then unlawfully sentenced to three and a half years in 2018.
Cases like Mr. Guo, where the opportunity for higher education is taken away due to persecution, have been too numerous to count.
Wang Meiqi was a senior student at Jilin Normal University. Police abducted her on the evening of April 19, 2021, and unlawfully searched her dorm.
She was detained at Tonghua City Detention Center.
The university called the police and requested that Ms. Wang participate in a thesis defense which was arranged between May 8 and 12 to obtain her diploma. The police in charge, Jiang Hui, rejected the request. Without her diploma, Ms. Wang was unable to pursue her graduate studies even though she had been accepted.
On Jan. 17, 2022, Ms. Wang was transferred to Jilin Provincial Women’s Prison, where she was illegally sentenced to three and a half years in prison and fined 5,000 yuan ($695).
Ms. Wang became the target of the police because she had worked tirelessly with her two aunts to try to rescue her mother, Zhang Qiaolei, also a Falun Gong adherent who was abducted two years earlier on Feb. 27, 2020, for speaking out about the truth of Falun Gong and sentenced to five years in prison unlawfully.
Yao Yuanying, another victim of the persecution, was introduced to Falun Dafa when she was 12 years old in 1996 when Falun Gong was freely practiced in China.
Police abducted her and four other Falun Gong adherents in a private gathering in Beijing on Oct. 23, 2011, when she was a doctoral student at Beijing Normal University. The police, without wearing police uniforms or using police vehicles, unlawfully broke in. Ms. Yao and others were illegally subjected to two years of forced labor.
Persecuted at a Young Age
Liu Xiaolin, who excelled in the 2011 National College Entrance Examination, received an online admission offer. However, the police arrested him and put him in a forced labor camp before he had a chance to start his freshman year, and it’s only because he documented the persecution of Falun Gong on the internet.Oral Defense Denied
Yu Yaou, a doctoral candidate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was ready to defend his dissertation after six years of arduous study and research on Feb. 4, 2010.However, the school authorities suddenly canceled his defense at the last minute upon noticing one sentence in his acknowledgment section, “I want to express my gratitude toward Falun Dafa. Without the support from this righteous faith, there wouldn’t have been this thesis of mine.”
In early 2015, Mr. Yu returned to Guangzhou, the Guangdong campus of his school, to explore the possibility of defending his dissertation and receiving his doctoral degree.
His family lost contact with him shortly after he arrived in Guangzhou. It took his wife and mother, who flew to Guangzhou to look for him, a lot of probing to discover that he was held at the Sanshui Brainwashing Center in Fushan City. But their visit to Mr. Yu was rejected by the brainwashing center.
Mr. Yu was held in the brainwashing center for half of a year without the right to family visitation.
Fast forward to 2019, when Mr. Yu and his wife, Li Shanshan, a Falun Gong adherent and owner of a raw food materials export company, went to Shanghai to participate in a foreign trade exhibition. During the exhibition, the two were stalked.
They were illegally searched and briefly detained by the police at the Shanghai High-speed Railway Station on March 21, 2019, when they were on their way out of Shanghai.
The persecution of Falun Gong practitioners among young students is not sporadic but rather a prevalent and systematic occurrence under the ruling CCP. Many cases of persecution remain unreported because of the CCP’s efforts to suppress information, restrictions on family visits, and clandestine persecution tactics.
