National Post (National Edition)
The other Canadians imprisoned in China
Through Huseyn Celil’s 14 long years of imprisonment in China, Kamila Talendibaeva has been unable to exchange so much as a word with her husband.
But at least Celil’s relatives could visit him every six months or so and report back to the Toronto-area resident.
Then, about three years ago, they, too, disappeared, probably into the re-education camps Beijing set up for its Uyghur minority. With them, the wife’s last life line to her spouse, a Canadian citizen like her, also vanished.
Now Celil, a Uyghur activist jailed on dubious terrorism allegations, is an increasingly dim memory for their four sons, aged 14 to 20.
“It’s been really tough for us,” says Talendibaeva. “They are becoming adults and they haven’t seen their dad since they were little.”
The plight of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, Canadians detained by China after the arrest of a Huawei executive in B.C., has drawn public and political attention.
But largely forgotten in recent months is a group of Canadians, or people with blood ties to Canada, jailed for political and religious “crimes” long before the Huawei affair erupted, earlier reminders of Beijing’s routine trampelling of human rights.
Their plight was underscored Tuesday when one of them, Canadian citizen Sun Qian, was hauled before the courts and sentenced to eight years in prison, essentially for following the banned Falun Gong movement.
Another is Wang BingZhang, a prominent pro-democracy activist whose wife, children, siblings and parents are all Canadian citizens. He’s been languishing in a Chinese prison for a stunning 17 years.
Their family members and other advocates implore the federal government to do more to help them, saying the standard playbook of quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy has resoundingly failed to sway Beijing.
“We have 17, 18 years now of experience, and we know what doesn’t work,” said Ti-Anna Wang, a Toronto lawyer and daughter of Wang BingZhang.
When Sun was first arrested in 2017, and accused of using “heretical religious organizations” to disrupt the law — a typical ploy to suppress Falun Gong practitioners — her lawyer, Xie Yanyi, says he tried repeatedly to secure a meeting with then-Canadian ambassador John McCallum. It never happened.
“I felt the ambassador didn’t care,” Xie said in an interview.
Not only is Sun now facing a long prison term, but Xie himself had his licence to practise law revoked in the wake of his advocacy for the Canadian.
Those three may not be alone. Cherie Wong of the Alliance Canada Hong Kong says there are 123 Canadians detained in China, many likely for common crimes, but undoubtedly others for political reasons in a country that brooks little dissent.
Sylvain Leclerc, a Global Affairs Canada spokesman, said Canada remains “deeply concerned” about Celil and takes every opportunity to press to get consular access to him. It also is closely monitoring Sun’s case, had officials at her sentencing Tuesday, and has “raised her case directly with Chinese counterparts.”
The government also condemns Wang’s imprisonment and that of all human-rights defenders in China, said Leclerc.
Celil grew up in the Xinjiang region that is the homeland of China’s mostly Muslim Uyghur minority, and came to Canada with his wife as a refugee in the early 2000s.
They were visiting her relatives in Uzbekistan in 2006 when that country’s government arrested Celil and handed him over to China, which eventually convicted him of terrorist activities. No evidence has ever come to light that supports those charges, his wife says, but as a rights advocate he was a thorn in China’s side.
Nor has China allowed consular visits by this country’s diplomats, refusing to recognize his Canadian citizenship.
Those relatives who used to visit Celil sometimes had grim news, reporting that the inmate received substandard food, was often kept in isolation and could not get access to needed medication, says Talendibaeva.
She managed earlier this year to talk to Dominic Barton, Canada’s current ambassador to China, who assured her that every effort is being made to advocate for Celil. Yet, she feels Ottawa has fallen largely short on the file.
“I was hoping for more from the Liberal government, but Trudeau hasn’t done anything,” said Talendibaeva.
Sun became a Canadian citizen around 2007, and split her time between Vancouver and Beijing, where she and her husband owned a successful biochemical company.
She has said she was badly mistreated in detention, forced to wear arm and leg shackles for long periods, pepper sprayed repeatedly for no reason and subjected to anti-Falun Gong brainwashing. Now she faces a further eight years behind bars, a sentence her lawyer says is likely another pressure tactic by Beijing in response to Canada’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei CFO, on a U.S. extradition request.
“She is almost forgotten in a very dark, cruel place,” says Falun Gong Canadian spokeswoman Grace Wollensack.
While Ottawa may have been working behind the scenes for Sun’s freedom, it has done little publicly to advocate for her, and that has probably only emboldened China, says Wollensack.
“After those Canadians got arrested … it was like nothing happened, business as usual with the Chinese government,” she says. “That basically gave them a signal, a message: ‘It’s OK to arrest a Canadian citizen. There’s no consequences. There’s a green light.’ ”
Wang, 72, studied for a PhD in experimental medicine at McGill University in the 1970s, with two of his three children born in Canada. His own parents and siblings later emigrated here and became citizens, says daughter Ti-Anna, who was named after Tiananmen Square in memory of the 1989 massacre there of democracy protesters.
Helping found the overseas Chinese democracy movement, Wang worked largely in New York City and never became a Canadian citizen, believing that if he wanted to some day return to a democratic China, he could not abandon that citizenship, his daughter says.
He was captured by Chinese secret police in Vietnam in 2002, spirited across the border and convicted at a one-day closed trial of spying and terrorism. There’s no evidence backing up either allegation, says Ti-Anna. She even met with a Thai police detective who investigated China’s charge that her father plotted to blow up its embassy in Bangkok, and concluded there was nothing to it.
Barred from entering China, she has not seen her father since 2008. Only a few relatives are allowed in for rare visits. They report he is in poor health, increasingly depressed and anxious over his predicament.
“It’s been very hard to believe. I don’t think anyone in my family thought it would go on so long,” says Ti-Anna. “It’s hard to express what it’s like. It’s very sad.”
Alex Neve, Canadian head of Amnesty International, suggests that Canadian officials should take every opportunity — even in agricultural or tourism affairs — to raise such “egregious” cases with Chinese counterparts. And Ottawa should develop a broader group of international allies to back up Canada, he says.
If countries do not swiftly condemn Beijing’s rights abuses, “it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more and more people being arrested,” says Neve. “Because the clear message is that China can engage in that sort of unlawful behaviour and get away with it with very little consequences.”