Chinese academic Yuan Hongbing can still vividly recall a scene he says he witnessed more than 30 years ago -- a Mongol woman bound at her hands and feet, hung from a tree over a burning cauldron and roasted alive.
She was suspected of being a member of a political party trying to separate the Inner Mongolia region from China.
Yuan, who fled to Sydney in July seeking political asylum, plans to include that account and many others of human rights abuses over the past decades in four books he fled China to publish.
"In order to preserve my writing as a record to the crime and cruelties committed by the Chinese Communist Party against people and humanity, I had no choice but to escape from the clutches of the Communist regime," Yuan said in a statement after his defection.
The law professor's plans could cause embarrassment for the Communist Party by calling attention to abuses that occurred during the sensitive period of the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), namely mistreatment of Mongolians and Tibetans.
Yuan's case, which dissidents say highlights scholars' continuing difficulties in pushing the government's limits on academic freedom, also poses problems for the Australian government which is currently trying to negotiate a free-trade deal with China.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer is due in China this week.
In 1994 Yuan, a Beijing University law school professor, was jailed for promoting rule of law and democracy and charged with "attempting to overthrow the socialist system."
He was released after six months on the condition he stop writing, never set foot in Beijing despite his wife and daughter living there, and spend his life in remote Guizhou province.
For the past decade, Yuan, 52, toed the Party line and eventually won enough trust to be appointed dean of the Guizhou Normal University Law School.
"They gave me some positions. The goal was the same, to give up wishes of freedom and be their spiritual slave," Yuan said.
But at night Yuan worked on his books. He gave his notes to a friend, Zhao Jing, who secretly transcribed and copied them onto CDs which were smuggled out of China.
Despite his relatively high position, Yuan's home was searched; he found out by gluing a strand of hair between his door and door frame each day. His phone was tapped and spies were planted among his students.
In June, he learned authorities knew about his writings and were collecting evidence to imprison him. He seized the chance to escape when his university allowed him to go on a tour to Australia.
He and Zhao slipped away at Sydney airport on July 21.
The law professor said it was worth leaving his family to be able to publish his books, which touch on issues not mentioned in China's state-controlled media or history books.
In one volume Yuan documented through friends and interviews a massive campaign during the Cultural Revolution in which tens of thousands of Mongol minorities suspected of seeking independence were locked up in detention camps.
An estimated 10,000 died, some by committing suicide, and many others were crippled by punishment beatings and torture, Yuan said.
"It was completely unjust. It was mainly because they didn't trust Mongolians," he said by phone from Sydney, where he and Zhao were being sheltered by dissidents.
"I wrote this novel Freedom in Sunset not to simply record what happened, but to reflect on Mongolian people's beauty, spirit of freedom and the suffering they endured."
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