Local activists call on China to release exiled dissidentSTAFF WRITER Monday, Jun 03, 2002 Taiwanese human rights organizations teamed up yesterday to show support for an exiled Chinese dissident who was detained in Yunnan in April. At a joint press conference yesterday, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan called for international humanitarian action to secure the release of exiled Chinese dissident Yang Jianli. Yang, 38, was detained on April 27 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, after entering China on a friend's passport. His wife Christina Xiang Fu has been denied entry into China since his arrest. Democracy activists from both Taiwan and China attended yesterday's press conference. Among those present were exiled Chinese writer Bei Ling, political scientist Su Shaozhi, Taiwan's ambassador-at-large Peter Ng and Executive Yuan Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan. During the press conference, Chien Hsi-chieh, executive director of the Peacetime Foundation, called on China to release Yang and remove him from its blacklist. The Harvard-educated democracy activist fled China after the June 4 Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and has been blacklisted by Beijing ever since. Yang holds a doctorate in political economy from Harvard University and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was formerly affiliated with Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Yang went to China to observe labor unrest in the rust belt of northeastern China, which has seen some of the country's largest labor protests since the communists assumed power in 1949. Yang has been a staunch critic of the Chinese government and has organized protests in Boston. He also heads the Boston-based think tank, Foundation for China in the 21st Century. -------------------------- |