A Chinese dissident who fled to South Korea last month in a rubber dinghy has arrived in Canada, more than a decade after his first escape attempt ended when authorities in Thailand sent him back to his home country.
“I’m very happy,” Dong Guangping told the New York Times after his arrival in Toronto late Friday. “Sitting here now, it feels like I’ve come home.”
The 68-year-old former policeman has long been a thorn in Beijing’s side for advocating political reform and human rights, and served multiple prison terms over the years.
He recounted to the Times his journey in May across the Yellow Sea from the Chinese city of Weihai to South Korea aboard a 3.3-metre rubber boat with a 9.9-horsepower engine.
He initially intended to head to Japan but quickly lost his bearings. “The sea and sky are just a vast expanse of white, and you can’t tell which way is which,” he said.
His mobile phone died and the boat’s engine started to fail, so he adjusted his course for South Korea.
A South Korean fisherman ultimately picked him up, he said.
Mr Dong told the Times that the turning point in his journey didn’t happen at sea, but in the confines of a South Korean coast guard station where officials granted him access to a lawyer.
“I knew then they would send me to Canada, because they were proceeding according to legal procedures,” he said, contrasting his experience there with his past captures in China, Thailand and Vietnam.
“As long as it is a democratic country run by the rule of law, they would not send me back to China.”
Days later, Coast Guard officials requested an arrest warrant for him. But a judge denied it, Mr Dong said, and the authorities eventually allowed him to leave the country.
Mr Dong was dismissed from the police force after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to the US-based advocacy group Human Rights in China.
He later spent three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting subversion of state power”, United Nations experts said, and was detained again in 2014 over Tiananmen-related activities.
Mr Dong subsequently 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-recognised refugee status.
In 2019, Mr Dong unsuccessfully tried to swim to the Taiwanese territory of Kinmen. On a trip to Vietnam in 2020, he was detained by local police and sent back to China.
