Yu's imprisonment -- after he threw eggs with red paint on a portrait of Mao Zedong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 -- drew international attention as human rights groups pressed for his freedom. But he was released a different man, battered by abuse, with diminished mental and verbal abilities.
Yu, 46, was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 2009. He and his sister emigrated to Indianapolis that year, and he has spent much of his time at the spa.
He has a habit of wandering off, apparently. On this occasion he was found by a nice lady who gave him a drink and something to eat. He nested on her patio until she eventually called the cops.
The desperately sad thing is that Yu and two friends who also defaced Mao's portrait were caught and handed over to the Beijing police by demonstrating students, who wanted to show that they were orderly and patriotic and would have nothing to do with 'hooliganism'. Much good it did them.
Kudos to the yanks for taking him in, by the way. I dread to think how he'd have been received had he tried to come to the UK.
With a well founded fear of persecution, I would imagine he'd have been granted asylum. Why wouldn't he? This is the kind of case my mate the asylum lawyer dreams of getting.
Posted by: ajay | July 18, 2013 at 07:28 AM
Along with a lot of others, including Jamie and many of the regulars here, I spent over a year of my life trying to gain asylum rights for Iraqis who not only had a very well founded fear of persecution, in the shape of death threats from militias who had actually killed rather large numbers of people, but who had received those death threats because they had worked for the British military and diplomats.
The response of the Blair Government (pre the UK campaign, but very much post the first reports of employees being murdered, and the first pleas for asylum by the Iraqis) was to do precisely nothing.
Only slightly better was the response of the Brown Government was to do nothing for several months, set up a review body in the face of media and public pressure, after some time announce a limited asylum scheme hedged about with as many limiting conditions as they could think of, and then to implement it in the slowest, most pettifogging way imaginable, while rather a large number of Iraqi employees of the British were hiding from death squads.
None of this should be news to anyone who was reading Jamie's blog in 2007 and 2008, as he was one of the very best writers on the subject, and in fact it was one of his blogposts that started the whole damn campaign.
My faith in the British Government's determination to do the right thing for those in fear of their lives is consequently a little limited.
Posted by: Dan Hardie | July 18, 2013 at 09:12 AM
Quite a large number of Chinese refugees got granted asylum after 1989, IIRC - in the UK and elsewhere (Australia particularly comes to mind). Unfortunately the first British one that comes up on Google is this chap
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/court-crime/wang_yam_who_murdered_allan_chappelow_appeals_life_sentence_at_european_court_1_1794378
but I'm fairly confident that there were plenty others who didn't murder people.
Overall, about 20-40% of refugee-status applications are successful (asylum, leave to remain etc) on first attempt. And being a high-profile refugee, if one can use that phrase, from something like 4 June is great for your chances of a successful decision.
Posted by: ajay | July 18, 2013 at 09:35 AM