From Washington Post:
The Chinese dissident Yang Jianli, who returned to his adopted home in the United States a week ago after five years in Chinese prisons, told The Post’s Nora Boustany that his experience “solidified my belief in what I do” and “made me a better person.” That’s a very courageous way to describe the horrific, but not untypical, ordeal that Mr. Yang suffered as a political prisoner in the country preparing to host the 2008 Olympics.
A longtime U.S. resident and green-card holder, Mr. Yang was banned from China after he supported the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. In 2002 he used a friend’s passport to reenter the country, hoping to help a labor rights movement in western China. He was soon detained. But rather than charge the pro-democracy activist with illegal entry, Chinese authorities held him incommunicado for almost a year. He was then tried on blatantly bogus charges of spying for Taiwan — but the verdict was delayed for months, in violation of China’s own laws of criminal procedure. By the time his five-year sentence was handed down he had been held for two years without trial. The penalty for illegal entry into China is one year. [Full Text]
