Exiled Tiananmen-era dissident detained in China

Published 6:17 am Wednesday, May 13, 2009

BEIJING — An exiled Chinese dissident and a leading figure in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was detained trying to enter mainland China six months ago and held without charge since then, his family said today.

It was the second time Zhou Yongjun, a permanent U.S. resident, has been detained while trying to enter China to visit his family. He spent more than two years in a Chinese labor camp in the late 1990s after being detained in Shenzhen, a southeastern city next to Hong Kong.

Zhou’s older sister, Zhou Sufen, said today that her brother disappeared in October after entering the mainland from Hong Kong. Police informed her Monday that her brother had been transferred from a detention center in Shenzhen to Suining city in the family’s home province of Sichuan.

The phone call from police was the first official acknowledgment of Zhou’s detention. Shenzhen officials repeatedly denied having him in custody, Sufen said by telephone from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.

In April 1989, Zhou captured world attention by kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People by Tiananmen Square to petition China’s communist leaders to acknowledge the student demonstrators. He was a 21-year-old undergraduate at the time.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are believed to have been killed six weeks later when troops stormed into the center of Beijing in the early hours of June 4 on orders from top party leaders to break up the student-led protests.

An estimated 30 men still remain in prison today for trying to block the military’s advance and clashing with soldiers, a U.S. rights group said in a statement today.

Susan Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, said staff were aware of media reports on Zhou’s detention and raised his case with the Chinese Foreign Ministry today “as is usual with human rights cases.”

Beijing is obligated to inform the U.S. if an American citizen is detained in China but such notification is only sometimes done as a courtesy when American green card holders are involved, she said.

Zhou had applied for but does not yet have a green card, his family said.

Zhou’s girlfriend, Zhang Yuewei, said by telephone from the couple’s home in Los Angeles, that he had risked detention because he was desperate to see his elderly parents who are both ailing. She said Zhou, 41, has been working in human resources for the past five years, helping U.S. factories and other businesses find employees and helping new immigrants apply for work or residence permits.

Zhang said the family was kept informed about Zhou’s whereabouts over the past six months by released detainees who had contact with him in the Shenzhen detention center. They told the family he had been accused of political and financial crimes and most recently of fraud.

“The accusations have changed many times, and still we haven’t received any formal notice,” said Zhang.

Zhou was imprisoned for two years after Chinese leaders crushed the 1989 movement. He then left China for New York and became a permanent U.S. resident.

He slipped back into China in December 1998 to visit his mother, was arrested in Shenzhen and spent more than two years in a labor camp. He returned to the United States in 2002.

Repeated calls to the Suining Public Security Bureau rang unanswered today. An official with the Shenzhen bureau directed calls to the local Communist Party office, where phones also rang unanswered.

The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation called on China to release the 30 Tiananmen prisoners still in jail, noting that many were sentenced to death or to life in prison after being convicted of counterrevolutionary sabotage and hooliganism — charges that were removed from China’s criminal code in a 1997 revision.