(Minghui.org) A married couple in Jinan City, Shandong Province, were sentenced for their faith in Falun Gong, Minghui.org learned recently.
Ms. Li Shanshan received three and a half years, and her husband, Mr. Yu Yaou, one and a half years. The couple were arrested in July 2025, after surveillance cameras recorded them distributing Falun Gong informational materials.
While held at the Jinan City Detention Center, the couple were often heard shouting “Falun Dafa is good and Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good.” Mr. Yu was later moved to a different facility.
Ms. Li went on a hunger strike in protest and was force-fed twice a day. Each time she was handcuffed and shackled before being wheeled to the detention center clinic. At least four guards administered the force-feeding. They sometimes poured the food into her mouth and other times through a tube inserted into her nostril.
Ms. Li lost a significant amount of weight by the time she was transferred to a prison in April 2026. It is unclear whether her husband has been admitted to prison.
Past Persecution
The couple have been repeatedly targeted for their faith over the years. Mr. Yu, then a PhD student, was arrested and detained in March 2015, because he wrote in the opening paragraph of his PhD thesis to express his gratitude to Falun Gong for giving him the strength to go through the doctoral program.
Ms. Li, legal representative and owner of Jiannai Import & Export Trading Co., Ltd., was harassed on the phone by a police officer on May 9, 2018, while she was on a train to Shanghai for a business trip. Not long after she returned home, she and Mr. Yu were stopped at a highway toll booth in Linyi City, Shandong Province, around 8 p.m. on May 20, 2018. The local police placed a big boulder against the couple’s car tires to prevent them from leaving.
The couple ended up staying in their car until noon May 21, 2018, when a group of officers from Jinan arrived. They allowed the couple to drive back to Jinan, and they followed them. The police revealed that they had to do this because it was a sensitive period: the 18th Meeting of the Council of Heads of Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was to be held in Qingdao City, Shandong Province, on June 10, 2018.
After arriving in Jinan on the afternoon of May 21, 2018, the police squirted chili pepper water into the couple’s car. At 3 p.m., they smashed the car window and dragged the couple out.
That night the couple was taken to the Qianfoshan Police Station and they were not released until hours later. Ms. Li returned to the police station the next day (May 22, 2018) to demand the return of her confiscated Falun Gong books, only to be arrested on the spot. Her husband, who worked in her company, was arrested around the same time. The police also raided her company.
The couple were taken to the Zhonggong Detention Center around 2 a.m. on May 23, 2018. Ms. Li refused to walk inside the detention center, and the police carried her in. They accidentally dropped her on the staircase, causing two of her incisors to hit a stair. One incisor had a chip as a result.
Ms. Li went on a hunger strike and was force-fed. She was also handcuffed and shackled for an entire week. The guards held her in solitary confinement from June 10 to 21, 2018. The guards fabricated a letter which they claimed was from her husband urging her to eat again.
Ms. Li’s parents paid the police 4,000 yuan to get her and her husband released on bail on June 21, 2018.
Ms. Li and Mr. Yu traveled to Shanghai in mid-March 2019 to attend a foreign trade exhibition. They were monitored. After the exhibition on March 21, they were planning to board the high speed rail to leave Shanghai when police asked to check their IDs and luggage.
They refused and told the police that it is illegal to persecute Falun Gong. The police tried to drag the couple away, which soon attracted the attention of onlookers at the station.
After the couple was taken to an office, an officer took out a piece of paper and told Ms. Li that she had been spreading information about Falun Gong on Minghui.org, when in actuality, it was a report published on March 20, 2019, on the persecution that the couple had experienced between May-June 2018.
The couple told the police that there is no law in China that criminalizes Falun Gong. They were released that afternoon and left Shanghai.
Related Article in Chinese:
Related Reports:
Minghui Report: 245 Falun Gong Practitioners Arrested in March 2019
Persecution Cases of Teachers and Students Submitted Recently to the UN
Persecution of a Ph.D. Student by Chinese Communist Party's "Unlawful Rules"
Contrasting Attitudes Toward Falun Gong in Taiwan Versus China (Photo)
Chinese Communist Party Panics Over a Few Words of Gratitude in Doctoral Thesis
Guangzhou South China Botanical Garden Officials Pressure PhD Candidate's Family
Falun Gong Practitioners Discouraged from Working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
All content published on this website is copyrighted by Minghui.org. Minghui will produce compilations of its online content regularly and on special occasions.
