Ottawa Citizen: Zhang Recounts to Daughter Tale of Torture in Labour Camp

Thursday January 11, 2001

More than two months after she last heard from her father, University of Ottawa student LingDiZhang called him at his home in Jinan, China, Yesterday and helped him solve a mystery.

KunLun Zhang, 60, a professor of sculpture and former Montrealer who has been in detention since November for practising Falun Gong, couldn't understand why he'd been released so early from his three-year sentence at a notorious Chinese labour camp.

Ms. Zhang was able to tell her father about an international campaign for his release that she'd sparked at a press conference in November.

"I told him there were so many people who had supported him," she said. "He was very grateful and wanted me to pass on his thanks to the Canadian people."

Last night, about eight weeks after she first appealed to the public about the professor's imprisonment in China, Ms. Zhang was back where the campaign to free her father began.

At the campus Unicentre building, not far from the site of her emotional November press conference, Ms. Zhang was all smiles last night as she met with her friend and fellow Falun Gong practitioner Lucy Zhou to celebrate Mr. Zhang's release.

"First, I want to thank Mr. Irwin Cotler," she beamed, referring to the Liberal MP and international human rights lawyer who took on Mr. Zhang's case and lobbied his own government to harden its line on human rights with China.

"And I'm very grateful to the other MPs and Canadians who wrote letters, to (Foreign Affairs Minister) John Manley, and to the Ottawa Citizen and other media for writing about my father."

It was a phone message yesterday afternoon that alerted Ms. Zhang to her father's release. She quickly checked the Chinese embassy's Web site to verify the news, and says she was dumbfounded to discover what it said about her father.

"During the time of education, Mr. Zhang had come to a better understanding of the [slanderous word] nature of Falun Gong and his illegal activities," the embassy's statement said.

Ms. Zhang says she was stunned by the notion her father would renounce Falun Gong.

"I called my father and asked him: 'Did you really say that?' And he said he did not."

Instead, she says, he told her of the electric shock torture and beatings he's endured over the past two months.

"He said he thought he was going to die," she said of their five- minute phone call. "Now, he's very weak. He just got home a few hours ago."

Though elated at her father's release , Ms. Zhang said she is still worried about his safety and concerned about the fate of tens of thousands of other Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted in China.