A Chinese political dissident who fled to South Korea last month in a dinghy has arrived in Canada. His friend announced the news on social media on Saturday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/55297201

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A Chinese political dissident who had fled to South Korea last month in a dinghy has arrived in Canada, his friend said on social media on Saturday.

Dong Guangping was aboard a 3.3-meter (10.8-foot) inflatable boat in the waters off a western South Korean island in May when he was detained by South Korea’s coast guard for allegedly violating the country’s immigration law. It was his fourth known attempt to flee China.

Appearing at a court hearing in South Korea, he told reporters that he hopes to go to Canada to reunite with his wife and daughters, who have already been resettled there, according to South Korean media.

In a post Saturday on X, his friend Sheng Xue, a Chinese Canadian activist, said Dong had landed in Toronto following an Air Canada flight on Friday.

“He just had a big bowl of noodles with eggs, tomatoes and shrimps,” she wrote in the post, adding that she has spent more than 10 years trying to get him out of China.

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  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    172·
    3 days ago

    Let’s hope for him that China won’t be able to fuck with his life too much in Canada; though at least AFAIK they don’t just assassinate people on foreign soil like Russia does.

    • k0e3@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 day ago

      I remember how they used Chinese international students to harass that Uyghur girl in UoT for speaking up against genocide.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      102·
      3 days ago

      If they live in the regions that had the Chinese “police” stations, they might get harassed. A friend of mine had a mainlander room mate till the Chinese police kept showing up and “urging” him to return home. One day he was just gone.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          1·
          21 hours ago

          There were a lot of articles last year about the Chinese police stations across Canada.

          China tells their citizens they are Citizens of the World and have to obey Chinese policy even if they don’t live in the homeland. Which includes no negative info about the homeland. They will threaten people, or their family back home to get compliance.

          • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            16 hours ago

            Yeah, I remember reading about that. Everyone else seems to have amnesia though because whenever I bring it up they think I’m just being racist.

            It’s not surprising though, since we live in a world devoid of nuance. I guess I can’t critique an oppressive nation-state actor for harassing an entire ethnicity which they think belongs to them. Apparently that’s so racist of me…

            • BCsven@lemmy.ca
              2·
              14 hours ago

              Same issue here actually. A few people said I was being racist, even though I’d linked many news articles describing how these office fronts were setup across Canada and the investigation Canada took into complaints of China operating this way against Canadian residents.

    • HotznplotznOPEnglish
      163·
      3 days ago

      Yes, let’s hope the best. Canada ranks among the Western countries most targeted by the Chinese government (as per Citizen Lab and other reports). Important ethnic Chinese organisations have been effectively taken over by Beijing, as have most Chinese language media. Chinese embassies and consulates monitor the Chinese ethnic community and coordinate United Front activities.

      Addition:

      A Chinese dissident died suddenly in B.C. This ex-spy who snooped on him says it may not have been an accident

      … For 15 years, Eric worked for the 1st Bureau at China’s Ministry of Public Security, a unit that specializes in surveillance of dissidents abroad. He previously told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that he spied on a Japanese-based cartoonist and a YouTuber exiled in Australia. Often, he said, his cover was working for real companies in the countries where he was deployed — companies that collaborated with China’s secret police.

      For example, while on assignment in Cambodia, his cover was with the Prince Group, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in real estate and financial and consumer services. (The company did not reply to messages from Radio-Canada.)

    • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
      53·
      3 days ago

      sure, Don’t go to BC and don’t go to Waterloo, Ontario and stay far away from Spadina in Toronto.