Brookline activist Yang Jianli recalls life as a Chinese political prisoner

Neal Simpson/Staff writer

Brookline - Yang Jianli was traveling in China on a fake passport in 2002 when he was arrested, interrogated and thrown in a prison for political prisoners. After months of isolation, interrogation and torture, Yang was brought before a judge and read the charges against him.

The trial lasted two hours.

The sentence lasted five years.

During those years, a patchwork of politicians, diplomats, U.N. workers and Brookline activists lobbied ceaselessly for Yang’s release, often without being able to communicate with Yang himself.

Nearly six months after Yang’s celebrated return to Brookline, the democratic activist sat down with the TAB is his new Park Plaza office to talk about the world he experienced during those years.

A Harvard-educated mathematician and veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Yang had been exiled from his home country for 13 years when he decided to return in 2002 to train and organize protestors in China’s underground democratic movement.

Using a friend’s passport, Yang slipped into the country through a Beijing airport and spent two months meeting with democratic leaders and interviewing close to 100 migrant workers and protestors. The trouble began in April of that year, when Yang tried to leave through a different airport and an employee spotted his fake ID.

‘I began to feel fear’ Yang had nearly talked his way of the mess, when a guard noticed a small notebook filled with interviews.

“He looked at it and saw something strange to him,” Yang recalled. “He became more serious and called more people in.”

“At that time, I thought they would keep me for some time — I was one of the key leading persons overseas for the democracy movement,” he said. “When they arrested me, they would not let me go that easily. They would try to get information from me.”

And so began 12 days of interrogation. Yang said the first guards he met were very respectful, but after they failed to get anything out of him, they sent him to Beijing.

“As I got out of the airplane, I was blindfolded. At that point I began to feel fear,” he said. “I didn’t know what they would do to me — why would a prisoner like me needed to be blindfolded?”

Yang was led to a cell in QinCheng prison, a detention center reserved for political prisoners and, increasingly, the victims of political power struggles within the Communist Party.

Yang was kept there for 15 months before he learned the charges against him. During that time, he was routinely interrogated, sometimes two or three times a day. During each session, he was dragged into a small room and forced to answer a barrage of questions from four or five guards.

Sometimes the interrogators would tell him that Chinese police had captured his wife and son, or that his parents had become gravely ill. Sometimes they just struck up a conversation, hoping he would eventually let something slip.

When he wasn’t being interrogated, Yang was forced to sit upright on a bench for hours without moving. He wasn’t allowed to go outside for fresh air and wasn’t allowed to talk to other prisoners.

“I was essentially put in solitary confinement — without reading materials, without news from outside, without a pen to write, almost nothing,” he said. “Almost no meaningful human contact.”

“One time I tried to remember some complicated English word and I found to my dismay that I could not remember it,” he said. “I began to worry that I would lose memory. So I started writing poems in my head to increase my brain activity.”

Yang wrote poems about anything he could think of — friends, family, religious beliefs, historical events — and committed them to memory. But even as he concentrated on his poetry, his resolve began to fade.

At his weakest moments, Yang said, he would simply “collapse.” It was at those times, he said, that he turned to prayer and the purpose for which God had sent him to China.

“I might not be able to know that at that moment, but in the future I would be able to see the purpose — I have a mission,” he said.

But even prayer was outlawed in QinCheng. When Yang refused to stop praying during his first day, he was dragged to another room and beaten for and hour and a half.

“First they pushed me to the ground, then set their foot on my body and used a club to beat me,” he said. “I was very angry, and indignant. I kept saying, ‘I will sue you guys,’ things like that."

Yang’s stubbornness also won him concessions from the guards. After he tired of sitting up straight on a bench for hours each day, he went to the prison director to complain. Yang told the man he refused to sit any longer and was willing to accept his punishment.

But instead of punishing him, the man promised to consider his request. Several days later, a voice on the loudspeaker announced that prisoners would no longer be required to sit on the benches.

Other times were worse. Yang was once handcuffed for 15 days straight and the guards would sometimes withhold food from him.

Waiting for a verdict

Roughly 15 months after he was first arrested, Yang was read his charges and given access to a lawyer. The man who would defend him during the two-hour trial also brought a letter, which contained the first news from his family he had received in more than a year.

“I was allowed to have paper and pen,” Yang recalled. “I began to write down the poems I remembered, the poems I wrote in my head, instead of writing my defense.”

After just three hour-long meetings with his lawyer, Yang was led before a judge and accused of entering the country illegally and spying for Taiwan. Yang said the espionage charge was trumped up to put him behind bars, but Chinese authorities pointed to a $400 donation from Taiwan he had accepted on behalf of a Chinese youth development organization.

After the hearing was over, Yang returned to his cell and waited for the verdict. And waited.

For nine months, Yang waited in QinCheng for a verdict. When it finally came, he was moved to a transitional “training” facility, where prisoners are subdued through exercise and hard labor before being sent to the prisons where they serve out their sentence, Yang said.

After three months, he was finally moved to the prison where he would live until his release. By the time of the move, he had been in custody for nearly 2 1/2 years — half his sentence.

Yang’s situation improved greatly during the final years of his prison term. The former mathematician began making friends with petty criminals, and eventually taught courses in economics, mathematics and logic for fellow prisoners. He also coached basketball.

“[There was] a lot of interactions through which I turned many inmates and guards to my side,” he said. “They actually made my life there more bearable.”

Yang also turned down the chance at freedom during those years. On three occasions, Chinese officials came to meet Yang, and offered to release him if he agreed to be deported back to the United States.

But Yang, knowing that he would be removed from the travel blacklist after serving his full term, refused to leave the country until he had a Chinese passport in hand.

In August 2007, months after his release from prison, Yang finally did just that.

Today, Yang spends his days working in a sparse Park Plaza office, where he heads up a democratic advocacy group called Initiatives for China.

He will receive an official welcome home from Massachusetts lawmakers in a ceremony planned for April 1 at Nurses Hall in the State House. Yang said he is going to use the opportunity to unveil a project intended to thank the people who advocated for his release and honor the prisoners left behind in China.

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Neal Simpson can be reached at nsimpson@cnc.com.

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Source: Brookline Tab