Agence France-Presse
Copyright 2003

Monday, February 10, 2003

BEIJING, Feb 10 (AFP) - Wang Bingzhang, sentenced to life imprisonment Monday on spying and terrorism charges, has been astaunch overseas critic of Beijing's communist regime for almost 20 years.

The founder of the pro-democracy magazine "China Spring" and co-founder of two banned political groups -- the China Alliance for Democracy and the China Democracy and Justice Party -- was formally arrested on December 5 in southern Guangdong province, state presssaid.

Wang had been missing for nearly six months after vanishing in June with fellow dissidents Yue Wu and Zhang Qi while in Vietnam to meet Chinese labor leaders in an effort to promote the fledgling Chinese labor movement.

The 55-year-old became a thorn in Beijing's side soon after being sent to Canada in 1978 to study medicine, one of the first Chinese students to go overseas under the reforms of the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

But after obtaining a doctoral degree he defected to the United States where he founded China Spring and the Alliance for Democracy, an exile dissident group.

Both the group and the magazine became popular with Chinese students in the US in the 1980s. Smuggled copies circulated widely among students and intellectuals in China, and party leaders frequently attacked Wang for fomenting dissent.

His four children are all US citizens and live in the United States, but Wang refused to take up citizenship, feeling that it would be easier to fight for democracy in China as a Chinese citizen, associates of his have said.

He leapt to the world's attention after slipping into China from the Portuguese colony of Macau in 1998 under the name Qi Xin to meetdemocracy campaigners in a push to set up an opposition party to China's communist rulers.

His return then was considered one of the boldest challenges to Communist Party rule in years, but he was tracked down after a nationwide police manhunt and expelled.

Despite his narrow escape, Wang vowed to return to battle for the right of the growing community of exiled dissidents to legally go back to their homeland, human rights groups said.

The Chinese government has blacklisted scores of exiled political dissidents and refuses to allow them to return home, although many still carry valid Chinese passports.

Whether Wang secretly crossed the border again on his own free will remains unclear.

China's official media said he was found by local police bound in a temple in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region after being kidnapped.

Following his disappearance, the China Democracy Party said it had received intelligence that Wang, Yue and Zhang had indeed been kidnapped at or near the Vietnam-China border, but possibly by Chinese agents.

He now faces his toughest test of all -- fighting from a prison cell his conviction on charges that he was paid by Taiwanese espionage agencies to collect and steal Chinese state secrets and for "organising and leading a terrorist group".

mp/rcw

Copr. (C) West 2003 No Claim to Orig. U.S. Govt. Works
Copr. (c) 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.