Son of Chinese rights lawyer Wang Yu seeking asylum in US after years-long ordeal
The son of human rights lawyer Wang Yu is seeking asylum in the United States as she herself is again harassed by Chinese authorities, this time after receiving an award from Washington for defending abused children and women.
Wang’s son Bao Zhuoxuan, 21, had been held at a detention center since traveling from Australia to the U.S. on a tourist visa in March, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Upon his arrival in the U.S., Bao was sent from Los Angeles International Airport to the Adelanto Detention Facility, his passport confiscated. He was currently waiting for the immigration court to decide whether to allow him to stay in the country to pursue his studies or deport him back to China, the newspaper reported.
The young man’s experience of being constantly badgered by officials in China had left him in a “very poor mental state,” with frequent nightmares, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, said a senior attorney from the organization Human Rights First who was handling his case.
Bao’s condition had improved at the center, which had better meals, did not force him to work or wear handcuffs, and even let him venture out for short periods of time, the attorney added.
However, he was worried about implicating his parents back in China and hoped that the Washington government would pay attention to the hardships of the family.
Earlier on March 8, the U.S. Department of State presented Bao’s mother Wang with its annual International Women’s Day award for her years of assistance to abused children, women and ethnic minorities. She went out of contact on Friday morning while planning to listen in on the subversion trial of rights activist Chen Jianfang in Shanghai.
Before the trial, Wang was to have met with Chen’s defense lawyer at 8 a.m. in a restaurant, but she did not show up. Neither the lawyer nor Wang’s husband Bao Longjun were able to reach her by phone. They noted that a large number of national security officers were surrounding the court building and the Shanghai hotel where Wang was staying.
It later emerged that many police officers had forced their way into Wang’s hotel room at around 5 a.m. without displaying their work passes and taken her to a detention center in Hongqiao, where she was interrogated for five and a half hours. She was released by the Shanghai police at around noon, according to her husband.
Over the years, the Bao family had been in and out of detention on the mainland.
In July 2015, father and son were taken away by public security officers at Beijing International Airport just as Bao junior was set to fly to Australia for further studies. Wang was later said to have gone missing as well.
Authorities separated the young Bao, then a teenager, from his parents and locked him up for two days in Tianjin before sending him to Wang’s hometown in Inner Mongolia to live with his grandmother, all without informing the parents.
That year, Wang was arrested in a nationwide clampdown on human rights lawyers and activists that came to be known as the 709 crackdown, named after the start date of July 9. She and her husband were subsequently charged with inciting subversion of state power.
Then on Oct. 2, 2015, Bao junior went from Inner Mongolia to Kunming with the help of other human rights activists, with the intention of getting to the U.S. via Myanmar to continue his studies. His smuggling attempt was foiled by Myanmese border police and he was deported back to China, which confiscated his passport and placed him under surveillance.
Wang, meanwhile, went on state television after more than a year in detention and made a forced confession for the sake of her son.
In November 2017, Bao junior was again intercepted, this time by customs at Tianjin Binhai International Airport before his departure to Tokyo. They invalidated his passport by snipping off a corner and alleged that the young man could endanger China’s national security while overseas.
Bao was eventually granted permission on Jan. 16, 2018, to leave China and arrived the following day in Australia, where he enrolled in the Trinity College in Melbourne.
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