這個青年的名字叫張勝利。他於當天被美國大使館「禮送」出來，當即遭到中共警察的逮捕。他的運氣很糟。雖然當時的美國總統里根堅決不喜歡共產黨，但當時的美國駐華大使是恆安石，一個內心欽佩共產黨的左傾幼稚官僚。負責陪同張勝利離開大使館的美國外交官查理.馬丁最後緊緊地擁抱著張勝利，流著淚連聲說「對不起」，眼看著張勝利被戴上手銬押走了。
多年之後，張勝利來到了美國，先是投奔FBI，要求叛變，人家嫌他不夠資格，建議他申請政治避難。沒想到，這才是他美國磨難的開始。政治避難被拒絕，上庭，再拒絕；上訴，再駁回。再上訴，再駁回。上個星期，張勝利的尋求美國自由的道路終於走到了頭，隨時面臨遣返。顯然，一回國，他必然再被捕坐牢。
華爾街日報看不過去了，昨天發表長篇編輯部文章，質問「哪個王八蛋管政治避難」，大標題是：讓張勝利留下來！
美國移民局和在美國的大陸留學生等對尋求避難的中國人都有偏見。中國所有被遣送回去的，沒有不被勞教和罰款的。其他國家包括古巴都沒有。
這本身就是足夠的理由取得避難。但看看移民局批准避難的比例，中國人大概5%左右的被批准，而從恐怖國家來的(伊拉克、阿富汗)申請避難，70%到90%被批准。這麼大的差距，華人社區沒人發出任何聲音！
如果有人為他們說話，怎麼會有遣返？建議這位老兄馬上去加拿大，直接去邊境，說要避難。加拿大政策要寬鬆多。關鍵是美國的移民政策歧視華人！(起碼在這點上)。至於說「在美國的大陸留學生對尋求避難的中國人有偏見」，讓我舉例說明吧：去年，中國一個女記者在紐約申請政治避難被拒絕，她把卷宗轉移到華盛頓DC，要我幫忙，她說，華府某著名大學法學院的人權辯護項目在幫助她準備出庭材料，可是，該校一個中國留學生卻故意把她在香港《九十年代》發表的批評中國政府的文章翻譯的完全扭曲。她說：那個法學院的留學生一定是故意要害她。我一看，果然翻譯得很離譜，惡意的，若把他的譯文遞交上去，必定被拒絕。
最近炒得很熱的北朝鮮難民衝擊北京使館區的故事，讓我聯想到二十年前天津青年張勝利和三十年前廣州街頭的乞丐兒童黎智英。張勝利的避難要求被拒絕後，他命運就充滿了監獄、勞改營，逃亡，磨難，最後一事無成；黎智英游泳到了香港，一個不認字的地皮無賴硬是闖出一片天地。
中國政府一千個不是，一萬個混蛋，他們沒有遣返朝鮮難民，而是把他們放生到自由世界，我們可以企望，不出十年，這些難民中必定有英雄出世。你我沾他們光也未可知呢。
中國人，太需要一些逃生的渠道了。可惜，現在世界上，誰也不敢接收中國難民。香港回歸了，臺灣嚇破了膽，東南亞國家普遍害怕共產黨。歐美被資本家的貪慾給劫持了。誰也不得罪中國政府。我們中國人將逃無處逃，死無葬身之地啊。(智叟)
THE REAL WORLD
Let Zhang Shengli Stay
Are lunatics running the asylum policy?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT, WALL STREET JOURNAL
NEW YORK--Zhang Shengli is running out of options. He came by our office here this week, hoping a talk with the press might help save him from being deported to China--where he fears he would go straight to prison. I think his fears are well-founded, all the more so because he is not flashy, not brilliant, not famous. Mr. Zhang is a sturdy 48-year-old fellow with thick eyebrows, a warm smile and what he describes as "so-so" skills in house painting and carpentry. In many ways, his greatest obstacle to freedom is that he seems so ordinary. But 20 years ago he did something that was not at all ordinary. On April 17, 1982, he took a running leap at the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy in Beijing and hurled himself over the wall. Once inside, he asked for asylum. He knew it was a risky bid. "You survive, you gain freedom; you fail, you go to jail," is how he explained it to me.
He failed. After fruitless attempts to enlist help from the British and Greek embassies in whisking away Mr. Zhang undetected, the U.S. Embassy staff expelled him later that same day through a main gate. One of the officials then at the embassy, Charles Martin, witnessed what happened next. Chinese security officers, who had ringed the compound after they saw Mr. Zhang go over the wall, hustled him into a car and drove off.
But Mr. Zhang didn't give up. In 1997 he made his way to the U.S. itself and asked again for asylum. His mistake, one expert tells me, may have been that instead of simply lying low and disappearing illegally into the Chinese community, he trusted the system and applied to the immigration courts for asylum. He has had no luck. This month, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the November 2000 ruling of a Boston immigration judge, Patricia Shepard, that Mr. Zhang is to be "removed and deported back to the People's Republic of China." Time is fast running out.
His mouth tight with worry, Mr. Zhang describes the welcome that awaits him back in China: "They will be waiting for me at the airport. They will handcuff me. They will not even give me a chance to go home. I will go directly to jail."Given China's record of manhandling dissent, he's probably right, though our immigration authorities prefer to maintain otherwise. Mr. Zhang, with his bulldog desire for liberty, his criticism of China as a "communist tyranny" and his persistent history of seeking asylum in the U.S., has by now made himself quite visible to the Chinese authorities. But Mr. Zhang has not achieved prominence enough among Americans to secure his own safety. Instead, he occupies a precarious niche, exposed in his quest for liberty but not protected by it. His story cuts to the core of one of the big dilemmas of the free world. When citizens of unfree nations ask for asylum, it may not be possible to help them all.
But surely there comes a stage at which an individual has shown enough will and taken enough risk so that it is simply wrong--and damaging to our own principles of freedom and human dignity--to turn him away. Where is that line? And to what standards should asylum-seekers be held? In the post-Sept. 11 climate, as America continues to discover how horrifically some holders of Saudi and other Middle Eastern passports have abused our trust, it's tougher to argue for keeping a welcome mat out.
But Mr. Zhang's case has nothing to do with terrorism. All he threw over our embassy wall was himself. And when we refused his request, he left peacefully. Since he reached America, his problems have been in part that his story of past persecution in China has been hellishly tough to prove. With highly limited resources and no certainty about his future, he has been hard put just to scrape by, with the help of the Chinese dissident community. His English is still poor (he spoke with me through an interpreter). And when he began applying to the courts, he was unable to locate a witness who could even say whether he was indeed the man who once came over the U.S. Embassy wall.
Add to that the tall order of certifying details of the rest of his existence back in China. Compound it all with the labyrinthine requirements of U.S. immigration policy, which can get confusing even for the English-speakers who actually administer it at the Department of Justice. As one spokesman told me the other day, while trying to explain some of the official statistics, "There is absolutely nothing in the immigration system that's simple."
On top of that is an immigration policy that in some ways encourages our immigration officials to view the simple desire to live in America as a sort of irritating and suspect trait in foreigners. What you get is Mr. Zhang, in his white T-shirt and sneakers, with a desperate look in his eyes, unpacking on a table at our office big bundles of documentation he has amassed with great effort and care, none of it sufficient to satisfy the system.
According to Mr. Zhang's sworn statement, given in 1998 when he first filed his case with a U.S. immigration court, here's what happened after he was rejected at the embassy in 1982: He was sentenced in China to two years at a labor camp near his native city of Tianjin. The following year he escaped, made his way again toward the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and was again nabbed by Chinese security forces. This time he was sentenced to three years in a prison camp in western China.Released in 1986, he returned to Tianjin, but as a former prisoner he no longer had residency status. He lived with his parents. He married in 1988 and soon his wife bore a son. Mr. Zhang supported his family by peddling clothes on the street, harassed periodically by authorities.
In 1996 he saw an ad in the paper offering American business visas for $1,000. This inspired him to make another bid for freedom, He scraped together the money and traveled to San Francisco, where he tried to defect. But he wasn't sure how to go about it. He went to an FBI office, where officers sent him to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where officials gave him forms to fill out and sent him away. He ran out of time and money. With the Chinese government probably none the wiser, he went back to China.
And he tried again. In 1997 he pulled together the fee for another visa, came again to the U.S., and this time applied through the courts for asylum, hoping eventually to bring over his wife and son. He got help from the Chinese dissident community, notably a New York-based group called Freedom and Democracy in China, whose chairman, Ni Yuxian, testified in 1998 that Mr. Zhang had already, by then, "been actively involved in the democracy movement for mainland China."
In September 2000, Mr. Zhang joined a much-publicized protest at New York's Lincoln Center, wearing a sign that said "Eliminate the one party dictatorship in China"--and his picture appeared in the Chinese-language World Journal. This past March he attended a meeting of the Overseas Chinese Democratic Movement and appeared in a group photo, along with such famous dissidents as Wei Jingsheng, on the cover of another U.S.-based Chinese-language publication, Beijing Spring.
Whatever impression all this might have made on Chinese state security agents, it has meant--officially--nothing to U.S. authorities. The immigration court's Ms. Shepard brushed aside his dissident activity, sniffing: "I give these almost no weight whatsoever." She further noted that Mr. Zhang couldn't even come up with a witness to prove his story of persecution in China.Undaunted, Mr. Zhang found fresh legal help. And this year, at last, he was able to locate the former U.S. diplomat, Mr. Martin, who in 1982 spoke with him during his brief interlude at the embassy and then saw him detained in the street. Mr. Martin, now working in the private sector, confirmed in a May 31 affidavit that Mr. Zhang was indeed the man who 20 years ago jumped the wall. Mr. Martin attested that Mr. Zhang has "been persecuted in the past on account of his allegiance to American ideals, and his protest activities since arriving in the United States would put him in even greater risk of persecution should he be forced to return to China."
No dice, said the board, which on July 15 rejected Mr. Zhang's application and ordered him booted. His lawyer, Kevin Reilly, plans to try another avenue of appeal, later this week. But barring interventions by Congress or the attorney general, he has little hope. America simply isn't that generous these days. This past year, U.S. immigration courts ruled on the cases of 46,824 applicants, and granted asylum to some 40%, including 2,624 Chinese--roughly one for every half million souls living under Beijing's tyranny.
Listening to Mr. Zhang, as he pleads the case that he is "looking for safe haven" but deeply scared by now of ending up in "a Chinese communist jail," it seems to me that surely America could find a little more room for those who risk so much to come over the wall.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Wednesdays here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe.
送交者: 智叟
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