Shannon Brandao
Shannon's excerpt from the article: "The Guardian [excerpt]: When Li Cheng En pushed his standup paddleboard off the Xiamen beach on #China’s #Fujian coastline, a mother and son stood nearby, watching him. It was dark, and he moved quickly, but felt sure he’d be caught. Li had spent the day scouting for a secluded beach from which he could launch his bold plan to flee China. But everywhere he went there were fences or security guards and cameras.
'At around 7.30pm, when I decided to go, I thought that there was no more choice for me,' he says. He waited for the security guard shift change. 'I rushed into the water and thought that if they would catch me, they would catch me.'
Li entered the heavily guarded waters that span the shortest distance between China and #Taiwan. As a #surfer, he says he was confident on the board and the water was calm, but it was January, and cold. He passed by what he says were Chinese alarm systems, setting one off.
'It started blaring. I became very nervous at that moment, and I paddled away from that location as fast as I could.'
Hours later, he could sense land in front of him. He arrived on an empty island beach in the Kinmen archipelago, which belongs to Taiwan but sitting is just over three miles from China.
...Li is among a growing list of #dissidents fleeing the increasingly #authoritarian rule of #XiJinping in China. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist party authorities have cracked down on activists, lawyers, counter-culture groups and human rights campaigners. Many have been imprisoned or had exit bans placed on them, preventing them from leaving the country and forcing them to flee by less conventional means.
Earlier this year, Lu Siwei, a Chinese former #humanrights #lawyer, fled over the border to Laos but was detained by Laotian police while trying to board a train to Thailand, and was deported back to China. In August, a Xi critic, Kwon Pyong, fled China by jetski to South Korea, towing barrels of fuel behind him. In September, an activist, Chen Siming, travelled via Laos and Thailand before boarding a plane which made a stopover in Taiwan. He refused to reboard, and spent two weeks living in the airport transit lounge before flying on to Canada for asylum.
In China, Li was an #activist, bringing litigation suits against local authorities to defend community rights, and campaigning for #humanrights causes, including in Hong Kong and Myanmar. He has been questioned, detained and fined. He says that friends who campaigned with him have recently been jailed and he is still under investigation for 'subversion of state power'.
'The sentence would be four to 15 years, so I didn’t think I could stay in China any longer,' he says. So he left."
#news