Word: yang
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Fifteen months of detention in Beijing peaked Monday as Yang Jianli, a pro-democracy activist based in Cambridge, was put on trial by Chinese authorities for espionage and visa violations...
...Yang was seized in April 2002 while attempting to board an airplane after he entered China with another person’s passport. He was held for more than a year without being formally charged with any crime and without any contact with the outside world. Last month, he was charged shortly after being allowed to see his lawyer for the first time...
...When Yang, now 40, first left his homeland in 1986, he did so out of a sense of patriotic duty. The prevailing wisdom of the decade after the Cultural Revolution held that science, not politics, was the key to China's future. "Jianli decided to study math at Berkeley," says Fu, now a statistician at Harvard Medical School, "because he wanted to serve his country." But when the student democracy protesters began to flood Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Yang forsook his equations for late nights watching the TV news. And after Deng Xiaoping declared martial law several...
...meantime, Yang feared, China was beginning to win its public relations war on human rights. He was outraged when then President Jiang Zemin was invited to visit Harvard. Later came China's accession to the World Trade Organiza-tion and Beijing's winning bid to host the 2008 Olym-pics. In this atmosphere Yang began to experience doubts. "The temptation to see for himself what was really happening at home became stronger and stronger," says Fu, "He was starting to feel too cut off." Yang told a distraught Fu that he'd just take a quick look around...
...legal prison term of one year and then deporting him. Instead, China's failure to abide by its own laws with regard to due process will remain a constant irritant in its diplomatic relations. The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Lorne Craner, calls Yang "one of the particular cases we now mention in all our discussions about political prisoners." But unless Washing- ton and other democratic governments are willing to back up verbal opprobrium with serious diplomatic consequences, China's leaders may never honestly face the difficult truth that Yang came home because...