Dissident decries attendance at Games

Hours after returning from a foiled attempt to visit his home country on the eve of the Olympics, Chinese dissident Yang Jianli railed against world leaders participating in the event, particularly President Bush.

"Imagine the situation: The heads of democracies swarmed to Beijing to participate in opening ceremonies which took place under martial law," said Yang, a Harvard scholar and Brookline resident, pointing to the military presence and the crackdown on critics that preceded the event. "Millions of Chinese troops and police are deployed in Beijing and everybody is suspect now. . . . Beijing has become a forbidden city itself."

Yang never made it to Beijing. He never even made it out of Hong Kong Airport. Yang, who was released last year after five years in a Chinese prison, was sent home via Japan, where he had been traveling.

The attempted return was part of a coordinated effort to test how China would react to the return of dissidents at this sensitive time. Of more than a dozen Chinese activists from around the world whom Yang recruited to fly to Hong Kong this week, three were admitted to the country. To Yang, that was an ideal outcome, allowing the three to hold a media conference drawing attention to the plight of political exiles, he said.

Yang said the activists wanted to test the idea that Hong Kong, a special region that is supposed to offer more freedom than mainland China, is largely autonomous. Hong Kong was a British territory returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with assurances that more freedoms would be allowed there. But activists have been dismayed that public protest has been suppressed there, as well as on the mainland, as a government anxious about the success of the Olympic Games tries to put on a good face.

Yang also said he was deeply disappointed with Bush, whom Yang said sent a wrong message by attending the Olympics. Yang did not hear the critical comments Bush made about China's human rights record this week but he said they came too late to matter.

"You are the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, the only country who has a political muscle to do that. You didn't make any difference in China," Yang said of Bush.

Though activists in the United States and elsewhere have seized on the Olympics to spotlight China's record and to press for change, Yang said he senses that Americans do not believe their own government can influence China.

"They think China's regime will last forever, just like the sentiment people had right before the Soviet Union collapsed," Yang said. "Ironically, they still don't believe in the power of the free world to transform an autocratic society into a free society."

Yang, 45, remains a Chinese citizen and was the only one of the activists who flew to Hong Kong this week with a Chinese passport. Two years ago, he refused to leave China without it, even though that would have allowed him to be released early from a five-year prison term. Instead, he served his full term and hung around China, speaking out until authorities gave him a passport and sent him on his way.

A return to China just before the Olympics may seem unwise for a man who has made his home in Massachusetts for two decades, who was exiled after the Tiananmen Square uprising and whose prior trip to China landed him in prison. Yang, who has founded several prodemocracy organizations - including Initiatives for China, based in Boston - suggests it is essential for him to take personal risks to affect change.

"The push for Democracy in China is not like protesting in the United States," Yang said. "Everybody runs a risk and pays a price."

A bright-eyed, affable senior fellow at Harvard, Yang cuts a profile more befitting an academic than a rabble-rouser. His Park Plaza office has posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and a small photo of Yang with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

From that office, he networks with activists in China and around the world. He goes back to China because working from a comfortable office is not enough to shake up a faraway regime, he said.

"We have to practice what we preach to encourage and enhance the morale of our colleagues back in China and overseas," he added.