At various times over the past five years, Chinese dissident Yang Jianli was handcuffed, beaten, held in solitary confinement, deprived of daylight for months at a time, and forced to sit straight and motionless for four hours a day.

Yesterday, the newly freed Yang got a hero's welcome in Washington from the lawmakers who pressured Beijing to release him. "My dear friends," he told a roomful of cameras as his American wife fought back tears, "it is heartening to be able again to stand on this great land as a free man."

Great land, free man: Hearing those words spoken with Yang's moral authority, even the most jaded reporters in the room could feel a lump in the throat.

It's a shame most of official Washington was on vacation, for they missed that rarest of events in the capital. At a time of nonstop squabbling over a hamstrung war, a hapless attorney general and a humbling fiscal outlook, a group of Democrats and Republicans actually agreed on something.

And so it came to pass yesterday that Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), Democratic firebrand, hailed the work of Hank Paulson, the Republican Treasury secretary. Chris Cox, Republican congressman-cum-Bush administration official, gave a nod to Frank and the efforts of both parties in Congress. It was, for a moment, a reunion of the grand Cold War coalition in which Democrats and Republicans alike fought for the liberty of Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents.

"I know there is a lot of discussion about how Washington has gotten too partisan," observed Frank, an occasional contributor to that condition. "This was a Democratic committee chairman and a Republican secretary of the Treasury combining to get the Communist government of China to release him."

The Chinese have a knack for unifying the otherwise fractious American political system. In advance of next year's Beijing Olympiad, China is gunning for a gold medal in international misbehavior. First came the pet-food chemicals that imperiled American cats and dogs. Then came the lead in Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer and other children's toys. Throw in the trade deficit, currency fights and China's blind eye toward Sudan's genocide, and lawmakers require little coaxing to bash Beijing.

Frank, scolding China for its "grave error" in holding Yang, used the occasion to talk up legislation restricting China's access to America's financial markets.

Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the opportunity to demand that China change its policy toward Sudan and Tibet. "I am again calling on the government of China to fall in line with the civilized world," he said.

Cox, grudgingly acknowledging "something to be grateful about" in Yang's release, still found "much to be sad about" because he wasn't let go earlier.

Cox made a good point: For all the U.S. pressure on Beijing, Yang served his full five-year sentence. But this detail did not trouble Frank, who, wearing scuffed and untied shoes and twiddling his thumbs, made no fewer than five trips to the microphones, where he told and retold the story of his own role in securing Yang's freedom.

When NPR's Michele Kelemen asked Yang if the upcoming Beijing Olympics might have hastened his release, Frank intervened. "I think the answer is clearly no," he said. "I think it's very clear: This is Secretary Paulson's intervention, at my request."

Yang, a Tiananmen Square activist who fled to the United States, returned illegally to China in 2002. He was arrested and subsequently declined four offers of release by the Chinese, holding out for a right to return that he still has not been guaranteed.

Still, Yang, baby-faced at 44, proved to be a sympathetic figure yesterday as he stood behind a wobbly lectern with his wife, mother and son, now a foot taller than when his father went to prison. "In five years and four months, I have lived a lifetime since I left home in April 2002 to observe labor unrest in northeastern China," he said as his wife, Christina Fu, wiped a tear from her eye.

"I still remember some of my English," joked Yang, who has degrees from Berkeley and Harvard. Then he turned to fluently condemning his captors. "I'm here today, stronger than I have ever been, more determined than I ever thought possible, more convinced that the one-party system in China is fatally flawed," he said, reading from a prepared speech. He called himself "deeply heartened by the knowledge . . . that the democratization process in China is irreversible."

As the lawmakers savored their rare victory in securing Yang's release, at least one of them dared to think that American pressure could bring bigger change in China. "This could be the beginning of a historic breakthrough," Lantos predicted, lodging a congressional demand for "a new chapter in human rights" in China.

After his years in Beijing Prison No. 2, Yang wasn't so sure about that. "It is going to happen," he said. "But the difficult question is how -- when and how."

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