Canadian turned back in attempt to visit dissident father in China
OTTAWA — Ti-Anna Wang was one passport stamp away from seeing her imprisoned father in a Chinese prison before her dream was shattered yet again.
On Wednesday, the Montreal woman arrived in southern China where her father, Wang Bingzhang — considered the father of China’s ill-fated international pro-democracy movement — has been jailed since Chinese agents snatched him in Vietnam in 2002 and hauled him back to the People’s Republic.
Her 11-month-old daughter was strapped into her papoosestyle body carrier and her husband was by her side. Wang’s passport contained a fresh Chinese visa, something she had been denied for 10 years. But it wasn’t enough.
Her infant daughter and husband were deemed free to enter China. But she was not. So began a six-hour ordeal that would see Wang and her family locked in an airport detention room before they could be sent to a nearby South Korean island on the next available flight.
“I can’t really articulate the disappointment because it’s just so crushing,” Wang said Thursday.
She knew the risks associated with travelling to China following last month’s imprisonment of fellow Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Wang said she gave up pushing the Canadian government to do more for her father, so she asked Global Affairs Canada to focus on something specific — pushing China to grant her a visa, which her activism had barred her from getting since 2009.
In August, she received word that the visa would be granted. Then the arrests of Spavor and Kovrig followed.
“They (Global Affairs) said that they would not tell us not to go but they would just say that they think that I’m someone who could be vulnerable,” she said.
So she and her husband decided to keep the trip to China short — just 48 hours — and Global Affairs said it would have a diplomat accompany them while in China.
They telephoned China’s prisons bureau to say they were coming. They landed in Hangzhou, intending to travel to Guangzhou, where her father is in prison. Then they hit a wall.
“The border agent was communicating with another agent and said something like ‘That’s her.’”
She, her daughter and husband spent six hours in an airport detention room before her husband could buy them tickets out of the country.
Wang said it’s distressing to think about what Kovrig and Spavor are enduring, but she has mixed feelings: “When the Canadian government is negotiating on these issues with the Chinese, they cannot ask for too much each time.”