Ji Yunzhi with her son Simon Xiaofeng Zhang

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Rick Scott released the below statement on Communist China’s unjust arrests ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Three days before the opening of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Ji Yunzhi, a Falun Gong practitioner, was arrested for simply practicing her religion and is now being held at Inner Mongolia’s Balin Zuoqi Detention Center. Chinese police have been following and persecuting Ji Yunzhi since 1999, and she has been forced into forced labor camps and tortured in 2001 and 2008. Ji Yunzhi is currently on a hunger strike to protest her detention, and authorities aren’t allowing her family to visit her.

Hours before the opening Ceremony, Koo Sze-yiu, a veteran Hong Kong pro-democracy activist who is suffering from stage 4 cancer, was arrested on bogus charges under the National Security Law after planning a peaceful demonstration against the unjust imprisonment of Hong Kongers.

Senator Rick Scott said, “We know Communist China unleashes the police and military on those it fears. They’re imprisoning more than a million Uyghurs. They’re imprisoning pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. They’ve spent decades going after Falun Gong, and half a century persecuting Tibetans. These latest arrests are the latest example of Beijing’s willingness to silence and imprison religious minorities and political dissidents. It’s gross and deserves the scorn of every freedom-loving nation. The fact that the International Olympic Committee remains silent makes it complicit in the human rights abuses the Chinese people experience every day at the hand of the Chinese Communist Party. Every freedom-loving nation must speak clearly and do what the IOC won’t: punish General Secretary Xi for his genocide and anti-democratic crackdowns.”

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