Chinese dissident Dong Guangping, 68, reached South Korea on Monday night after crossing the Yellow Sea on a 3.3-metre rubber boat, his lawyer said Wednesday. South Korean coast guard officers found him drifting off the country's west coast and took him ashore for questioning on suspected immigration violations, HKFP reported. His attorney Kim Joo-kwang told AFP the situation was "highly likely to be a political asylum case," the Taipei Times reported.
Who is Dong Guangping? A former Chinese policeman dismissed after signing a petition tied to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, Dong was first jailed for "inciting subversion of state power" in 2001 and detained again in 2014 over Tiananmen-related activities. He fled with his family to Thailand, where his wife and daughter were granted refugee status and later resettled in Canada, but Thai authorities returned him to Chinese police in 2015 despite his UN-recognised refugee status, HKFP reported. He completed his second prison sentence in 2019 and lived under sustained surveillance and economic pressure, according to a 2022 UN report cited in the same coverage.
What happened on this attempt? Dong set off from Weihai in Shandong province "after meticulous inspection and preparation," activist Sheng Xue, a friend, said on X, HKFP reported. He spent more than 30 hours at sea on a boat with a 9.9-horsepower engine and had not slept for over 50 hours when he was picked up. He had previously tried to swim to Taiwan's Kinmen archipelago in 2019, nearly drowning, and was detained crossing into Vietnam in 2020, the Taipei Times reported.
How is Seoul responding? South Korea's Foreign Ministry has not commented, but the opposition People Power Party has called on the government to extend "full protection" and arrange safe passage to Canada, where Dong's family is awaiting him, the Taipei Times reported. Rights groups including Human Rights in China are pressing Seoul to invoke its non-refoulement obligations and resist any Chinese extradition request.
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