A Chinese dissident who fled to South Korea last month on an inflatable boat has flown to Canada, he told The New York Times on Saturday.
Dong Guangping, a 68-year-old former policeman, has been a thorn in Beijing’s side for advocating political reform and human rights, and has served many prison terms over the years.
After several failed attempts to escape China, the longtime critic of the ruling Communist Party first went to South Korea, where he was briefly detained before authorities let him leave.
“I’m very happy,” Dong said after arriving in Toronto late Friday. “Sitting here now, it feels like I’ve come home.”
He recounted to the Times his trip across the Yellow Sea from the Chinese city of Weihai to South Korea aboard a 3.3-meter (11-foot) dinghy with a 9.9-horsepower engine.
He originally intended to go to Japan, but soon lost his bearings, saying, “The sea and the sky are just a great white space, and you can’t tell which way is which.”
His cellphone died and the boat’s engine began to fail, so he adjusted his course for South Korea.
A South Korean fisherman finally got it, he said.
It was not immediately clear how he was able to secure his release.
Chinese-Canadian journalist and human rights activist Sheng Xue posted on X that Dong “was walking around the neighborhood, so excited that he took a photo with the Canadian flag.”
The photo is included in the post.
Dong was fired from his police job after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to the US-based advocacy group China Human Rights.
He later spent about three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting the overthrow of state power,” United Nations experts said, and was arrested again in 2014 for Tiananmen-related activities.
Dong fled to Thailand with his family, who later settled in Canada as refugees, but Thai authorities handed him over to Chinese police in 2015, despite his UN-recognized refugee status.
In 2019, Dong tried unsuccessfully to swim to the Taiwanese territory of Kinmen. On a trip to Vietnam in 2020, he was arrested by local police.
