An American and a New Zealander, held in China for alleged terrorist activities, had planned to explode a hot air balloon above Tiananmen Square and scatter hundreds of pro-democracy leaflets, an associate said yesterday.
It would have been the highest-profile move in the country's political heart by an opponent of the government since 1999 when 10,000 members of the now-banned Falun Gong spiritual movement besieged the Zhongnanhai leadership compound near Tiananmen at the heart of Beijing in a peaceful protest.
Security men detained Benjamin Lan, 54, a Taiwan-born veteran of the US military, and Sun Gang, 44, a Chinese-born New Zealand businessman, in Beijing on May 12, a few hours before they were to carry out the plan, said Peng Ming, president of the little-known China Federation Party.
The pair and six Chinese nationals also rounded up were members of Peng's staunchly anti-communist party, which has set up a government in exile with the aim of fomenting "revolution" and "overthrowing" the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have run China since 1949.
"This regime is evil to the core and will not change on its own," Peng said by telephone from San Francisco.
"It's like a dilapidating house. Renovation is no good. It has to be torn down and rebuilt," said Peng, one of the most radical opponents of Chinese Communist Party rule.
"We're not ruling out the use of force, but it's a last resort," Peng said, adding that underground party members in China include veterans and former CCP members.
Peng said the men could be sentenced to death if convicted.
The group was putting together the hot air balloons brought into China from the US when they were arrested after a Chinese dissident alerted the security apparatus by publicizing their plan on the Internet.
They had planned to explode the balloons by remote control above Tiananmen Square and Beijing's international airport, sending into the air 2,000 leaflets espousing the party's pro-democracy platform.
"It wasn't mission impossible. If the Security Bureau had arrived a few hours later, the balloons would have been up in the air," said Peng, who fled China to Southeast Asia en route to the US in 2001 after 18 months in a labor camp.
"The terrorism accusations may have stemmed from the detonators found in their possession. But the detonators were intended to explode the balloons and not attack people," the 46-year-old activist said.
"How can we be terrorists? We've never attacked civilian targets or harmed civilians. The government's accusations are without basis," said Peng, a former CCP member and manager of a state-owned firm.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said this week Lan and Sun came to China to carry out "violent terrorist activities."
In February, a court in Shenzhen jailed US-based democracy activist Wang Bingzhang for life on errorism and espionage charges -- the first time the terrorism charge had been used to convict a democracy campaigner.
Peng and Wang are shunned by China's exiled pro-democracy movement, which is fragmented but mainly advocates changing the country through peaceful means.
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