Beijing, Family of Three Sentenced for Practicing Falun Gong

Yu Shikun, her daughter, and son-in-law were all found guilty by the Mentougou District Court

By Yang Feng

April 16, 2025

Mentougou District Court, Beijing. From Weibo.

Practicing Falun Gong in China may mean that your whole family will be arrested and sent to jail. 

Earlier this month, relatives of a 62-year-old woman, Yu Shikun, learned that the Mentougou District Court in Beijing had sentenced her to one year and six months in prison. Her daughter Liu Meili received a jail sentence of two years. Liu’s husband, An Chaoxu, was sentenced to two years, but with a three years’ probation.

The case confirms that Article 300 of the Chinese Criminal Code, which punishes those who “use” a banned religious movement regarded as a “xie jiao” (“group spreading heterodox teachings,” sometimes less correctly translated as “evil cult”), is enforced against those who simply practice a proscribed spirituality or even are just suspected of doing it.

The family lived in Wangdu County, Hebei province, under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Baoding. Like many internal immigrants, An Chaoxu could not find work there and moved to Beijing, some 160 kilometers away from Baoding. 

On April 25, 2024, while Liu Meili was visiting her husband in Beijing, they were both arrested and charged with distributing Falun Gong literature. The evidence was, however, scarce even for Chinese standards. The Mentougou District Domestic Security Division in Beijing thus contacted police in Wangdu County and neighboring counties in Hebei asking to collect evidence against the couple. The Hebei police answered that none had been found. 

Falun Gong practitioners in Guangzhou in the mid-1990s. before the movement was banned. Credits.

Liu was then submitted to considerable pressure and probably torture in jail. The police told her she would be released if she would name the person who introduced her to Falun Gong. Finally, she mentioned her own mother, Yu Shikun. The police did not release Liu but had her mother detained in Hebei on June 12, 2024, while she was visiting her son in Baoding, and transferred to a Beijing jail. They confiscated the computer equipment of her son, who was not charged with any crime, but whose work as a software programmer was seriously disrupted. The police also forced Yu’s husband to sign a blank sheet of paper. He does not know what they made him say and claims he only told the police he had no complaints about his wife practicing Falun Gong, as this cured her migraines and made her into a more calm and pleasant person.

Yet, evidence that Liu, her husband, and her mother were propagating Falun Gong was still not persuasive. The Mentougou District police sent the case to the Mentougou District Procuratorate, which returned it to them in September 2024 noting evidence was insufficient. The Mentougou District police then on October 7, 2024, sent three cruisers to Hebei. They canvassed for four days the neighborhoods where Yu and Liu used to live, telling the populace that there were rewards for those who reported on Falun Gong practitioners, including the arrested mother and daughter.

They managed to collect some “evidence,” which was used to convict the family at the Mentougou District Court.

Source: bitterwinter.org