A Chinese dissident who has long been a thorn in Beijing’s side has escaped from China to South Korea on a rubber boat, his lawyer said yesterday.
Dong Guangping (董廣平), a former policeman who was imprisoned for his activism, was found by South Korean authorities on Monday night drifting off the country’s west coast on a 3.3m rubber boat with a 9.9 horsepower engine, police said.
He was taken to shore for questioning on suspicion of contravening immigration laws.
Photo grab from Frontline Defenders website
The man’s lawyer, Kim Joo-kwang, confirmed his identity to reporters.
Kim declined to say from where Dong had launched his boat.
Dong, 68, is known for his opposition to the Chinese Communist Party, and his advocacy for political reform and human rights.
He was dismissed from his work as a policeman after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to US-based advocacy group Human Rights in China.
He later spent about three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting subversion of state power,” UN experts said, and was detained again in 2014 over Tiananmen-related activities.
Dong fled to Thailand with his family, who later resettled in Canada as refugees, but Thai authorities handed him over to Chinese police in 2015 despite his UN-recognized refugee status.
Dong’s attorney told reporters that his client’s situation is “highly likely to be a political asylum case.”
The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
The opposition People Power Party has called on the South Korean government to offer Dong “full protection.”
“It should take swift humanitarian measures to ensure that he can safely travel to Canada, where his family is anxiously awaiting him,” party spokesman Choo Hyun-chul said in a statement. “This is a matter of a fundamental responsibility as a liberal democratic state.”
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