The Unyielding Silence: An 87-Year-Old Falun Gong Practitioner Was Imprisoned in Harbin

Zhao Yungu is yet another victim of a regime that fears even the stillness of an old man.

By Song Baozhai

August 26, 2025

Indoctrination of inmates in Xinkang Prison. From Weibo.

In a country where the elderly are traditionally revered, the image of an 87-year-old man being hauled into a detention van—his frail body lifted by police officers, his dignity folded into a bureaucratic file—feels like a rupture in the moral fabric. But in Heilongjiang Province, China, this is not a metaphor. It is the fate of Zhao Yungu, a retired factory worker from Bin County, near Harbin, and longtime practitioner of Falun Gong, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in August 2024. Forcibly loaded into an ambulance and taken to medical examination, Zhao was imprisoned in Harbin’s Xinkang Prison on August 8, 2025.

Zhao’s story is not new, nor is it anomalous. It is a quiet echo of a decades-long campaign against Falun Gong. Since the Chinese Communist Party banned the movement in 1999, thousands have been detained, tortured, and “re-educated.” But Zhao’s case—his age, his persistence, and the sheer absurdity of imprisoning a man nearing ninety—demands a renewed reckoning.

Zhao and his wife Liu Shumei, herself a retired worker, endured years of harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. Liu passed away in 2019 at age 77, her final years shadowed by state intimidation. Zhao, meanwhile, continued to practice Falun Gong quietly, a solitary act of resistance that would eventually lead to his arrest in July 2023. He was initially released due to poor health, only to be re-detained, tried, and sentenced in 2024.

The details are chilling in their banality. Police officers from Bin County Public Security Bureau reportedly dragged Zhao from his home, citing vague charges of “undermining law enforcement.” His trial, held in Yilan County People’s Court, resulted in a prison sentence and a fine of 30,000 yuan. No violence. No protest. Just a man meditating in his apartment, deemed a threat to national stability.

Yilan County People’s Court. From Weibo.

What does it mean when a government fears the stillness of an old man?

We often speak of authoritarianism in terms of tanks and surveillance drones. But the machinery of repression is often quieter. It is the knock at dawn. The confiscated books. The trial where no defense is heard. Zhao Yungu’s imprisonment is not merely a human rights violation—it is a philosophical indictment. It asks whether a state can be so brittle that it cannot tolerate the inner life of its citizens.

And it asks something of us, too. In the age of geopolitical pragmatism, where trade deals and diplomatic summits often eclipse moral clarity, what do we do with stories like Zhao’s? Do we file them away as tragic footnotes, or do we let them disturb our sleep? There is no easy answer. But perhaps the first step is to speak his name. Zhao Yungu. A man who, at 87, chose stillness over silence—and paid the price.

Source: bitterwinter.org