Mother of London Designer Held in Solitary Confinement

Ms. Wang Meihong, a 65-year-old geological engineer in Mudanjiang City, Heilongjiang Province, was arrested on March 31, 2020 for talking to people about Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999. In early May 2021, she was sentenced to four years at Heilongjiang Women’s Prison. 

Ms. Wang’s loved ones have been denied family visits or phone calls with her. A prison guard recently called her husband, Mr. Yu, and said she often screamed in the middle of the night. Her husband immediately suspected it was torture that caused her screams. The guard switched topic when Mr. Yu pressed to know more about his wife. 

Many prisons in China intensify the persecution of jailed Falun Gong practitioners towards the end of the year in order to meet quotas for transforming practitioners and to receive bonuses. Ms. Wang’s husband suspected Heilongjiang Women’s Prison is doing the same.

According to insiders, Ms. Wang is currently held in solitary confinement, and she is likely to be in a dangerous situation as prisons often use more brutal torture methods on practitioners in solitary confinement.

Finding Faith and Transformation of Body and Heart

In 1995, Wang took interest in Falun Gong after witnessing the miraculous recovery of her husband’s health after he took up the practice. At the time, she had lumps on both sides of her chest, which continued to increase in size and hardness and caused a lot of pain. Her doctor had suggested that she undergo a double mastectomy. However, soon after taking up Falun Gong, the lumps disappeared and she no longer needed surgery.

Wang lived by the three principles of Falun Gong–Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance–and tried to help others to the best of her abilities. One such example was when her father gifted her two sets of valuable stamp collections worth more than half a million yuan in 1999. At the time, this was enough to buy up to ten houses in the region. Wang’s husband asked one of his coworkers to appraise the stamps, but the colleague ended up “losing” the collection. Wang and her husband suspected that the coworker had, in fact, stolen the stamps, but they decided to let it go. This was because they knew that the coworker’s wife was seriously ill and treatments were expensive.

Past Persecution

On October 22, 2003, Wang was first arrested and five months later sentenced to 11 years in prison.

At Heilongjiang Women’s Prison, she was forced to work in a room with two big machines that operated at temperatures as high as 400°F (180°C). Guards also forced her to sit on a small stool for long hours every day and subjected her to constant physical and verbal abuse.

During the time her time in prison, her husband was also serving a 15 year term for practicing Falun Gong. As a result, their teenage daughter was left alone. After being admitted to Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts in 2010 to study fashion design, their daughter moved to the U.K. and hasn’t been able to return to China since. In 2016, the couple tried to apply for passports to travel to the UK to visit their daughter, but police told them their request would never be approved.

• Ms. Meihong Wang is the mother of London fashion designer Amy Yu, one of Falun Dafa Information Center’s family rescue cases. To help her reunite with Amy, contact UK representatives or sign Amy’s petition here:

Family Rescue: Amy Yu

Based on an original Minghui article.