China turns Canuck back
Despite visa, can’t visit dissident father in prison
I can’t really articulate the disappointment because it’s just so crushing.” Ti-Anna Wang
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 illfated 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 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 by telephone from the South Korean island of Jeju.
Wang said she knew the risks associated with travelling to China after last month’s imprisonment of fellow Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, which appeared to be retaliation for Canada’s arrest of high-profile Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou. But she was determined to make the journey because she might never get a chance to see her father again, and thought the sight of his new granddaughter might boost his spirits.
Wang has for years pushed the Canadian government to work toward releasing her father. There is one hitch: while she is a Canadian citizen, he is not, despite a strong historic connection.
Wang Bingzhang was one of the first generation of Chinese students to come to Canada and he got his doctorate from McGill University. While in Montreal, he planted Canadian roots, having children who would become citizens.
Ti-Anna was born in 1989, the year the Chinese military killed student protesters in the Tiananmen Square massacre, and he named her in honour of the fallen.
Wang said it’s distressing to think about what Kovrig and Spavor are enduring, but she has mixed feelings.
“Cases like that make me feel a little bit sad because I know that it means that my father’s case cannot be a priority,” she said.
“When the Canadian government is negotiating on these issues with the Chinese, they cannot ask for too much each time.”