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A Rebel's Road Home

by Philip Weiss
November/December 2007 , Page 49

It had been two weeks since Yang Jianli had returned home, but the crayoned sign saying “Welcome Home, Daddy” was still taped to the door of his Brookline, Mass., home when I visited recently. Ringing the doorbell, I thought that the 44-year-old Chinese dissident just might be the toughest Harvard graduate on the planet. Released from a Chinese prison last April after serving five years on charges of espionage and illegal entry, the Kennedy School Ph.D. returned in August amid reports of severe abuse: solitary confinement, 15 months without reading matter, two solid weeks spent in handcuffs. Yang suffered a mild stroke in 2004, but he never gave a false confession. To maintain his acuity in solitary, he composed and memorized more than 100 poems. “He talks about his imprisonment like you might talk about your summer vacation in Wyoming,” says Yang’s former mentor Richard Zeckhauser, a professor of political economy at the Kennedy School.

A muscular man with a glowing smile, Yang came to the door and ushered me into his office. The only signs of his ordeal were the deep crow’s-feet around his eyes. Speaking in heavily accented English, Yang rejected any suggestion that he is superhuman. “I cannot claim that I have always been strong,” he says. “At times, I almost give up hope.” What kept him from doing so, he said, was the responsibility he felt to his family, particularly his wife, Christina Fu, a biostatistician at Harvard Medical School. His faith also gave him strength. “I accepted the ordeals as designated by the Lord,” Yang says.

Yang was born in 1963 in the Shandong province in northeast China. His father was a midlevel Party official, and Yang, a star math student at Beijing Normal University, also became an official. Observing the Party workings, he “saw many good men corrupted—compassionate, caring men.” He came to believe that “it was more likely I would be changed by them than I would change them.”

In 1986, Yang traveled to UC Berkeley to earn a math doctorate. “You don’t know how I felt when I first get my foot on this soil,” he says. He devoured literature banned in China: 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, dissident writings in American Chinese publications. Yang joined the opposition group Chinese Spring and grew increasingly outspoken. He returned to China during 1989’s Beijing Spring, a brief period of liberalization, but after Tiananmen Square, he fled the country a wanted man.

In the following years, he studied political theory at the K-School and became a father. But when labor organizers began resisting the government in northeast China in 2002, Yang used a friend’s passport to return. Authorities at a regional airport detected his imposture and arrested him. Soon he was in solitary. Two years passed before he was told that he had been convicted of spying and illegally entering the country.

Meantime, Yang became a Cambridge cause célèbre. “The community built a pyramid” of support, Zeckhauser says. Its leaders included Christina Fu, congressman Barney Frank, and Yang’s friend, human rights attorney Jared Genser. Genser and Zeckhauser persuaded 107 Harvard professors to sign a letter calling for Yang’s release. Then-president Lawrence Summers presented the petition to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao when he visited campus in 2003. “The Harvard name certainly helped elevate the case,” says Genser.

In September 2006, Yang was offered early release on the condition that he leave China and never return. Yang declined. Then, last April, Chinese authorities freed Yang, but he would not leave China without a passport. Help came from Barney Frank, who represents Brookline. “As the head of the Financial Services Committee, I’ve developed a very good relationship with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson,” Frank says. “He came to see me [before a trip to China] about some legislation. I asked him if he would ask the Chinese about Jianli ... When he came back, he called and said, ‘They agree to let him out, but we can say absolutely nothing. Don’t tell Christina.’”

Weeks of suspense followed. Frank was on Fire Island when he got the call: Yang was headed to the airport. “Don’t say anything ’til his ass is in the seat,” Paulson said. Before calling Christina, Frank recalls, “we waited until the plane was in the air.” On August 18, Yang was back. “They gave me a passport so that I would leave,” he says. “Someday—I don’t think it’s a far way from today—I will go back home.”

His first priority now is reconnecting with his 12-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter. “I need to spend time with them,” Yang says. He also keeps in touch with activists in China and has several books planned, including a collection of the poems he wrote in prison. Still, the transition has not been easy. “In some ways I am tough,” Yang says. “In some ways I am weak, soft.”

His “softness” shows itself unexpectedly. China believes it has the greatest civilization on Earth, Yang explains—the widest streets, the greatest plazas, the tallest buildings. “China has more magnificence than any place in the world,” he says, “but that is not civilization. I was amazed when I went to a small town in the United States. I saw the entranceways for the handicapped in public facilities, libraries, bus stations.”

Suddenly Yang breaks down, sobbing. As tears flow down his cheeks, he cannot speak for several minutes. “There are 60 to 100 million handicapped people in China,” he says at last. “They are not treated as human beings. Most of them live a miserable life. You see them on the street. I tell [Chinese] people, ‘If you ever go to the U.S., go to the small towns. See the public schools, the libraries. Then you will understand what civilization is.’”