A pro-democracy activist who helped organize the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was released by China and arrived Thursday in Rhode Island, where he joined another recently freed dissident.
It was the third time in a week Beijing has acted on a case after lobbying from Washington.
Wang Youcai, 37, a physicist, was given medical parole and left the Zhejiang No. 1 prison early in the day, said John Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, a rights group.
After a midmorning stop in San Francisco, Wang arrived at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick Thursday night. He said he was overwhelmed with his new freedom.
"I'm not sure what exactly is going on," he said through a woman acting as his interpreter. "I need time to clear my head."
Asked if he wanted to thank anyone for his release, he said.
"I can't explain things with words very well. But with my whole heart I have a lot of people to thank," he said.
Wang was greeted with hugs and flowers by recently freed dissident Xu Wenli, who is hosting him and also was in prison in China in the 1990s.
In 1998, Wang and Xu were both sentenced to prison terms of more than a decade for activities related to the founding of the China Democracy Party.
Xu was released from prison in December 2002 and came with his wife to Rhode Island to join their daughter. He currently is a visiting senior fellow at Brown University in Providence.
Wang was also one of more than a dozen student leaders of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that led to the Tiananmen Square military crackdown. He served a year in prison in 1990 on charges related to those activities.
At the time of the crackdown, Xu was in prison for earlier democratic activities. Released in 1993, Xu first came into contact with Wang when he was detained in 1998. Wang's friends turned to Xu for help, and Xu publicized Wang's plight.
Despite an age gap of more than 20 years, the two ended up working together to found a democratic party in China.
"I think in 1998 the two generations [of the movement for democracy in China] have merged together and started an open democratic party as the opposition party in China," Xu said Thursday, through his daughter, Xu Jin, who acted as a translator.
Although Xu and Wang have talked by phone, they never met in person.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS