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Change Your Life! |
Dissident editor and poet Bei Ling re-exiled |
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August 27, 2000
BEIJING (AP) - Chinese police released the U.S.-based editor of a dissident literary magazine after 16 days in custody and sent him back to the United States Saturday, removing an irritant in shaky but improving China-U.S. ties. The editor, Bei Ling, speaking by mobile phone on the way to Beijing's airport, said Chinese and U.S. diplomats arranged his release to smooth the way for President Jiang Zemin's trip to New York next month for a U.N. summit and talks with President Bill Clinton. Police also freed Bei's brother, Huang Feng, late Friday, a little more than a week after he was detained as part of the investigation. Bei's arrest August 11 drew angry publicity in the United States that threatened to undo months of diplomacy to repair ties. Well-known authors demanded his release in essays appearing in major U.S. newspapers. Bei, a poet, has lived in the United States since 1988. Based in Boston, he has edited the literary journal, Tendency, and he and others have routinely smuggled copies of the journal into China for distribution among Chinese intellectuals. Bei agreed to leave China as a condition for his release and it was uncertain when he would be allowed to return. Police put him on an Air China flight bound for San Francisco. "I have to leave. I have no choice," Bei said in a brief interview in the departure hall of Beijing's Capital Airport. "If I didn't leave I would have gone to jail." Looking the picture of a poet in shorts, sleeveless T-shirt and sandals and with his long hair tied in a ponytail, the 40-year-old Bei said that he was not mistreated in detention, he had eaten well and the prison was fairly clean. Bei's arrest came amid a broadening crackdown by the communist government on the publishing industry. Chinese leaders fear that criticisms of the government and calls for political change, however mild, could further incite workers and farmers already protesting corruption, layoffs, taxes and stagnating incomes. In a provocative - and what he later called a naive move - Bei had 2,000 copies of the August issue of Tendency printed in Beijing. The issue included works by Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, an introduction to underground Chinese literature and a poem by Liu Xiaobo, a dissident literary critic. It also contained a photo of Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests who now lives in the United States. Bei said police accused him of illegal publishing and told him if he refused to go to the United States he would face between three years and 10 years in prison. Being kicked out was better than going to jail, Bei said. "I just never imagined that China was still so strict." As part of his release, police fined him 200,000 yuan (dlrs 24,000), only 10,000 yuan (dlrs 1,200) of which he was able to pay, and they made him pay for his plane ticket to the United States.
One of two plainclothes police officers who escorted Bei from detention to the airport and through customs said the poet was under a six-month parole while the investigation continued. He and Bei said there was a chance that the poet could return to China in the future - as long as he didn't break the law. Bei said his brother had no connection to the journal but had been detained because "he helped me get things." Before bringing him to the airport, police allowed Bei to meet his brother and parents to say good-bye. "My biggest wish is that one day soon I will be able to come back to the motherland," Bei said. |
