A Chinese dissident who spent years in prison and detention over his activism has reached South Korea after a daring 30-hour escape by sea, using a small inflatable boat in what his supporters say was his fourth attempt to flee China and reunite with his family in Canada.
Dong Guangping, 68, a former police officer who became a prominent critic of the Chinese authorities, was picked up Monday by the South Korean Coast Guard after leaving the Chinese coastal city of Weihai in Shandong province, his lawyer and a fellow activist told CNN.
Dong’s wife and daughter have been granted asylum in Canada. Dong has also been granted asylum there, but previous attempts to escape China through Thailand and Vietnam ended with his detention and deportation back to China, drawing criticism from human rights groups and United Nations officials.
His arrival in South Korea now places the government of President Lee Jae Myung, who took office last year and has tried to improve Seoul’s often tense relations with Beijing, in a sensitive diplomatic position.
South Korea’s Coast Guard confirmed that fishermen reported an unidentified boat on Monday evening. Officials said the person aboard was a Chinese man in his 60s, but declined to identify him, citing privacy laws.
Dong’s lawyer, Kim Joo-kwang, confirmed to CNN that the man was Dong, but said he could not provide further details because the Coast Guard investigation was ongoing.
Chinese Canadian activist Sheng Xue said she had spoken to Dong by phone after he reached South Korea, and that the Coast Guard had also confirmed his identity to her.
“For a long time, we discussed ways to escape China,” she told CNN.
According to Sheng, Dong said he spent more than 30 hours on the water after leaving Weihai. His boat engine broke down as he approached the coast of Taean, a county in western South Korea. He had not slept for two days and was close to fainting when he reached South Korean waters, Sheng said.
“When I talked with him, he said ‘I got here!’. He was pretty proud of it,” she recalled.
“He was lucky to get close to the shore,” she said. “It [was] a small boat on the sea, so it’s very hard to control.”
Rights group Human Rights in China urged South Korea to protect Dong and not return him to China.
“For more than a decade, he has never ceased striving for liberty and reunion with his family,” the group said. “That a man nearing seventy years old was driven to cross open seas in a small inflatable boat is itself a devastating indictment of China’s human rights situation.”
CNN said it had contacted the foreign ministries of Canada and South Korea, as well as the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, for comment. China’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the case when asked at a regular press briefing on Wednesday.
Years of failed escape attempts
Dong worked as a police officer in Zhengzhou, in China’s central Henan province, before being fired after co-signing a letter marking the 10th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
He was imprisoned for three years in 2001 over his activism, and was arrested again in May 2014 after taking part in another memorial for victims of the Tiananmen crackdown, according to Amnesty International.
In 2015, Dong fled to Thailand with his wife and daughter, where the three sought refugee status from the UN. His wife and daughter were later able to move to Canada, but Dong was forcibly returned to China by Thai authorities despite appeals from his family and rights groups. He was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and released in 2019.
Barred from leaving China, Dong later tried unsuccessfully to swim to Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan just a few kilometers from China’s east coast.
In 2020, he managed to cross illegally into Vietnam, but was arrested and again sent back by Vietnamese authorities in 2022. He was later sentenced in China to 11 months in prison for “illegal border crossing” and released in October 2023, according to Front Line Defenders.
During that disappearance, his family in Canada publicly appealed for information about his whereabouts, including by delivering letters to the Chinese and Vietnamese embassies in Ottawa.
His daughter, Katherine Dong, previously said he kept trying to flee because “his dream of being reunited with family was so strong.”
“And then again that dream of freedom was snatched away,” she said at the time. “I know that in China he will face more persecution, more mistreatment, more injustice.”
After Dong’s latest escape, his family declined to comment through Sheng and other friends.
Growing risks for Chinese dissidents
China has tightened its grip on protest and political dissent in recent years, using sweeping censorship and surveillance systems, including facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools.
That has pushed some Chinese dissidents to attempt increasingly dangerous and unconventional escape routes rather than travel through neighboring countries such as Vietnam or Thailand, which have a mixed record on protecting Chinese dissidents.
In August 2023, another Chinese dissident crossed the sea from China’s eastern Shandong province to the South Korean port city of Incheon, a journey of about 400 kilometers, on a jet ski. The man, believed to be activist Kwon Pyong, carried a helmet, binoculars, a compass and five 25-liter fuel tanks tied to the jet ski, according to South Korea’s Coast Guard.
Canada has long served as a place of refuge for Chinese dissidents. Many Chinese activists have also found safety in the United States over the years, though the Trump administration has sharply restricted the number of refugees allowed to enter the country annually, with an exception for White South Africans.
It remains unclear whether Dong will seek refugee status in South Korea, a country known for strict immigration policies and a low approval rate for asylum requests.
The Coast Guard told CNN that Dong had been arrested on suspicion of violating immigration law and that his case would later be transferred to prosecutors.
Sheng said she had written to Canada’s Global Affairs department about Dong’s case and urged South Korean authorities not to return him to China.
“Given his history, any forcible repatriation would place him at grave risk of imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and potentially death,” she wrote in her letter to Global Affairs Canada.