Australian-Chinese man deported after Shanghai protest
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese-born Australian activist, who changed his name to get round a ban on his return to China, was deported to Sydney after making a one-man protest in Shanghai, a campaign organizer said on Thursday.
Zhang Xiaogang, originally from China’s southern province of Guangdong, is a computer engineer who became a human rights and democracy campaigner after 1989. He now works as a taxi driver in Australia to give him more time for activism.
He was in China as part of the “Gongmin Walk 2010,” an international project to promote human rights and civil society in China, said Yang Jianli, a fellow exile and president of Initiatives for China, which is organizing the walk.
Zhang had hoped to reach Beijing to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the June 4 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests center on Tiananmen Square and petition the government on behalf of Chinese citizens forcibly evicted from their homes.
But he went missing on Wednesday, after recording a protest at the Shanghai World Expo. He wore a t-shirt saying “Support the victims of the Shanghai Expo” — referring to people moved to make way for the multi-billion dollar event. A clip showed him walking around the site, apparently ignored by other visitors.
He later got in touch to say he had been held for ten hours of questioning and put on a plane to Australia, said Yang, who lives in exile in Boston and has doctorate degrees from Harvard and Berkeley universities. Zhang could not be reached.
NEW NAME
Zhang, who is in his mid-50s, was blocked on recent attempts to return to China, and changed his name and got a new passport to secure his visa for this trip, said Yang, who was himself released in 2007 after serving five years in a Chinese prison on charges of sneaking into the country and spying for Taiwan.
Tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square before dawn on June 4, 1989 to crush weeks of student and worker protests. Public memories have faded but the ruling Communist Party, which has never released a death toll, still fears any commemoration could challenge its continued hold on power.
A handful of people are still serving time for activities in 1989, others are in prison for continued activism after their initial release, and hundreds more protest leaders are in exile.
The country’s most prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed last December for 11 years for campaigning for political freedoms, after he helped organize the “Charter 08” petition that called for sweeping political reforms.
Before that Liu was prominent in the 1989 protests.
Zhang said in a letter written before his departure that, as an overseas signatory of Charter 08, he was also returning to show solidarity with Liu.