Chen said he was not a member of Falun Gong, but he is clearly sympathetic to it. In his letter to Australian authorities seeking asylum, Chen wrote, "Falun Gong may be a cult, but its practitioners are a social vulnerable group and innocent people."
Chen says his father was accused of anti-revolutionary activity in the Cultural Revolution, was taken away and was beaten for two weeks before he died. As a boy, Chen said he raised the family's pigs, goats and chickens to help his mother, a primary school teacher, provide for the family.
He decided to join the Foreign Service, he said, for the simple reason that he thought it would be steady employment. He started with a menial job in the Foreign Ministry. When there was an opening for a post in Fiji, he took it.
"I was quite eager to leave that environment inside China," he said. "There was no freedom."
By the time he was posted to Sydney in 2001, he said that he had lost hope that China's government might change.
His job here was to monitor the activities of dissidents, and almost from the beginning, it weighed on his conscience.
"It's dirty work," he said.
He was scheduled to leave in August.
RSS