Chinese scholar’s case called a kidnapping
CHICAGO — Yingying Zhang, the daughter of a factory driver from China, took thesamecareer path as many other young Chinese academics before her: She traveled to a U.S. university with dreams of one day landing a professorship and being able to help her parents financially.
But just weeks after arriving at the University of Illinois, the 26-year-old visiting scholar in agriculture sciences stepped off a bus on a sunny afternoon and got into a black hatchback.
She since.
Her disappearance June 9 on her way to sign an apartment lease is being treated as a kidnapping. The case has shaken staff and students at Illinois’ flagship public school in UrbanaChampaign. And it’s led some parents of the more than 300,000 Chinese students studying at American universities to question whether it’s safe to send to their children to the United States.
Zhang’s father, Ronggao Zhang, traveled to the university from the family’s home in Nanping, China, to awaitword on his daughter. He had a message for whoever might have abducted her.
“We will forgive you,” he said in a telephone interview. “But please, let Yingying go.”
The 53-year-old, speaking througha translator, had a message for his daughter, too: “Yingying, please be strong.”
Local police and the FBI say Zhang’s case is a top priority, though they have withheld details of their investigation, even from the father, said Yingying Zhang’s boyfriend, who sat in on the weekend interview with the father from the 44,000-student campus about 140 miles south of Chicago.
“So you can imagine the anxiety,” Xiaolin Hou said. “It’s almost torture not knowing anything.” hasn’t been seen
Chinese media have covered Zhang’s disappearance, with her friends and acquaintances drawing attention to her case on Chinese social media sites such asWeChat.
“There’s so little we can doathome, butwe’dlike the local police in the United States to stay on top of the case and not to let it slide,” said Zhao Kaiyun, a roommate of Zhang’s at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. Zhanggraduated last year with a masters’ degree in environmental engineering.
The University of Illinois has the largest Chinese student population of any U.S. college, with 5,600 students enrolled, according to U.S. government data.
By chance, U. of I. representatives recently held a previously scheduled orientation session in China for students headed to the school and their parents. Several attendees asked about Zhang’s disappearance, said Robin Kaler, the associate chancellor for public affairs.
“Parents were very concerned,” she said.“We obviously tell them that it is a very safe community in general, but that there are instances when horrible things can happen. And this is one instance.”
Urbana- Champaign, with a population around 250,000, typically records no more than a few homicides each year.
The university’s reputation as a leader in agriculture studies attracted Zhang to the school.