(Greg Wayland, NECN: Boston, MA) – A journey home was ruined for one foreign scholar in Massachusetts. Yang Jianli was exiled from China after spending five years in jail there. Now just days before the Olympics, he’s told he can’t go home.
Yang Jianli Is 45 now, a Harvard scholar and leader of of a Chinese human rights group in exile.
In 1987 he was a student activist in Bejing’s Tianamen square before the brutal government crackdown he narrowly escaped alive.
And here he is last year after a five year Chinese imprisonment for slipping into Beijing to report on a labor strike.
Now China is hosting the Olympics and this week Yang, a Boston area resident, tried to enter Hong Kong legally to participate in a citizen’s walk for human rights.
He was turned back.
Any official reason given for why you were blocked from re-entering Hong Kong. — The Hong Kong authorities did not provide any reason.
And he says the Olympic festivities mask Chinese political realities.
Would say Beijing has become a Forbidden City and the Olympics are taking place under martial law.
Workmen have been preparing Tiananmen square for the Olympics, without government acknowledgment of the student uprising that bloodied that ground nearly twenty years ago.
It’s been almost twenty years since Tiananmen Square. And you were at Tiananmen Square. Has there been any progress in human rights in your estimate? — There’s progressin personal liberties. People enjoy more economic freedom — because of Tiananmen Square? — Because of Tiananmen Square, because of economic growth. But not political rights.
President’s Bush’s remarks in support of human rights, he says, were too little, too late…and he has a message for the western world.
Too many people in this country do not believe in the power of a free world to transform an autocratic society like China into a free society.
They tend to believe it is more reliable dealing with a dictator than an uncertain democracy.
But you cannot rely on a government that does not rely on their own people.
And he wishes he could be marching for human rights in Hong Kong.
But he says three overseas activists did make it into Hong Kong and plan to participate in that citizen’s walk for human rights after all , although it will be in scaled-down form, and obviously under the watchful eyes of Chinese authorities. In Boston, Greg Wayland, NECN.
Source: http://www.necn.com/Boston/World/Yang-Jianli-Olympics-mask-realities-of-China/1218234204.html