Harvard scholar freed from Chinese prison

Stephanie Ebbert

April 28, 2007

Prodemocracy activist and Harvard scholar Yang Jianli was released yesterday after five years in a Chinese prison on charges of illegally entering the country and spying, Reporters Without Borders announced.

The 43-year-old Brookline resident remains in China, awaiting a visa to return to the United States, where he has lived since the 1980s. His case had become a crusade, prompting appeals from Congress, the State Department, and international human rights groups for his release . In May 2003, a United Nations committee ruled that Yang was being held in violation of international law.

Dozens of Harvard faculty members had also taken up the cause on behalf of Yang, who earned a doctorate in political economy from the Kennedy School of Government in 2001, and his wife, a Harvard Medical School researcher.

"This is absolutely the best news that I could possibly have ever imagined hearing," said Richard Zeckhauser , a Harvard Kennedy School professor of polit ical economy who advised Yang with his doctoral dissertation.

Zeckhauser called Yang brilliant -- someone who not only earned two doctorates, but wrote a book and struck a charming political figure. "His problem is he thought of himself as being invincible," he said.

Joseph Nye , a former dean at the Kennedy School who spearheaded a faculty letter-writing campaign to Chinese officials asking that Yang be freed, called Yang "a scholar, a student in good standing."

"We wanted him released as our student, but we also felt it was important to reinforce the fact that researchers should be allowed to do academic work without political interference," Nye said.

Chinese authorities rejected the pleas, saying Yang's five-year sentence was in keeping with Chinese law. He was released five years to the day of his arrest.

A Chinese citizen who had permanent US residency, Yang was a democracy activist who hoped to return to a free China someday. "My dream is to contribute to democratization there," he told the Globe in 1998. He co founded the Boston-based Foundation for China in the 21st Century, which was running a prodemocratic website and broadcasting the "Voice of China" radio program into the country.

In 1989, Yang was a doctoral student in math at the University of California when he rushed back to China to support students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. Afterward, he testified before Congress about the massacre he witnessed there, and found himself banished from China, his passport taken away.

In 2002, Yang sneaked back into his homeland using a friend's passport, to secretly report on workers' strikes in northeastern China.

After his arrest, Yang acknowledged that he had entered the country illegally. However, human rights groups rallied to his cause to try to get him a fair trial and to protect him while in prison. "I asked the family: 'Why did he go with this passport? He's a known character. It's stupid.' They also agreed it's stupid. But what can you do?" said T. Kumar , Amnesty International's advocacy director for Asia.

Advocates also acted out of concern that he was being targeted for his political past -- and suggested that the government might have added a trumped-up charge of espionage more than a year after he was initially detained for entering the country illegally.

"That seemed to have been a flimsy afterthought designed to justify his prolonged detention," said Jerome A. Cohen , professor of Chinese law at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "The maximum punishment for passport violation was a year but they weren't even finished investigating him at the end of the year. So they did what they often do -- they find a second charge in order to start the clock over again."

"They should have released him, at the most, at the end of a year," added Cohen, who has worked with Yang's family for his release. "But to hold him four more years? It seems to be punishment for his democracy activities."

The Chinese government had said in response to the UN inquiry in 2003 that Yang was taken into custody solely because he was suspected of breaching the law by illegally crossing the border, but that authorities were still investigating other offenses. The authorities said they had protected his rights.

However, the UN committee reported that the government did not deny that it held him for two months without notifying his family in China so they could hire a lawyer, and that authorities did not file a warrant for his arrest within the required time frame. Yang was not formally sentenced until 2004.

Yang's wife, Christina Fu , could not be reached for comment yesterday. She was tireless in advocating for his release, Nye said. The couple has two children, Aaron and Anita .

"It's been terrible for his wife and children," said Cohen. "My hope is he will come back to the Boston area very shortly and be able to resume his democratic activity educating people about China and spurring China to more legal reform."

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Source: "Boston Globe".