A Chinese critic of his country’s ruling Communist Party had already escaped to Thailand and Vietnam and tried swimming to Taiwan — only to be sent back to mainland China each time. He was jailed, prohibited from working and barred from leaving, despite international calls to let him seek asylum elsewhere.
Now the dissident, Dong Guangping, 68, is in custody in South Korea after escaping China by sea, two of his friends and his lawyer told The New York Times. They said he arrived in a rubber boat late Monday.
Such journeys are extremely rare. In the last known case, a Chinese dissident, Kwon Pyong, traveled to South Korea from China on a jet ski three years ago.
Coast Guard officials in Taean, a coastal county in western South Korea, said in a statement on Tuesday that they had detained a Chinese national who was spotted in an unidentified rubber boat by fishermen late Monday. A Coast Guard official said by phone that Mr. Dong’s last name and birth year matched those of the man in custody.
The man was found in an 11-foot-long, light gray rubber boat attached to a 9.9-horsepower motor, the official said, adding that the authorities were investigating him on suspicion of violating immigration laws.
Mr. Dong’s arrival in South Korea has not been previously reported.
His friends said they hope he will be able to join his family in Canada, a decade after that country granted him and his family permission to resettle. They see the case of the other activist, Mr. Kwon, as a potentially good sign. Mr. Kwon was convicted of unlawful entry and spent months in a South Korean jail but flew to the United States the following year to seek asylum.
One of Mr. Dong’s daughters, who lives in Canada, declined to comment through Sheng Xue, one of the two friends who confirmed his journey to South Korea. Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Embassy in Seoul and China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kim Joo-kwang, the lawyer representing Mr. Dong in South Korea, said that he had been detained in Taean. Mr. Kim declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
Sheng Xue, a Chinese Canadian activist in Toronto, said that Mr. Dong called her three times after he arrived in South Korea. But she did not pick up because the phone showed an unknown number.
She then received a call from Zhu Yufu, a Chinese dissident and a mutual friend in Los Angeles, who told her that Mr. Dong was trying to call her. Mr. Zhu confirmed in a text message to The Times that Sheng Xue (a pen name for Zang Xihong), was helping Mr. Dong.
But by the time Sheng Xue finally got on the phone, she could not speak directly with him.
She said she spoke by phone with a Coast Guard officer in South Korea, who told her that Mr. Dong had been detained there after arriving by boat. When the officer asked why he was there, she said that he was a human rights defender who had tried escaping China several times.
Mr. Dong was born in 1958 and raised in the household of a high-ranking official in Zhengzhou, a city in central China, Sheng Xue said. He worked as a police officer and a soldier before becoming a human-rights activist.
He was fired from the police force in 1999 after signing a letter about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, human rights experts at the United Nations wrote in a letter in 2022. They said he was sentenced to three years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge frequently leveled against dissidents and human rights lawyers.
In May 2014, the Chinese authorities detained and held him incommunicado for months after he participated in an event commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was arrested that July on a charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a criminal offense in China, and was released in February 2015, the U.N. experts wrote.
Then he fled with his family in September 2015 to Thailand, where he received refugee status from the U.N. Human Rights Commission. But just before they were scheduled to fly to Canada the next month to be resettled there, the Thai police detained Mr. Dong along with another Chinese man, the experts said.
The Chinese state news media said at the time that the Chinese government had worked with the Thai authorities to return him to China that November.
He was sentenced to more than three years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegally crossing national borders” in July 2018. He was released in August 2019, Sheng Xue said, but he kept facing police surveillance and harassment, and he had limited financial resources.
That December, he evaded the local police and traveled to China’s southeastern coast and began swimming toward Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan, a self-governing democracy. But he floundered at sea.
“Save me, Sheng Xue!,” he told her in a phone call while trying to stay afloat after about eight hours at sea, she recalled. “I’m swimming to Taiwan,” he said.
“Oh my god, swimming to Taiwan?” she said she told him. “That’s impossible.”
She said she asked the Taiwanese authorities to rescue him, but he was eventually rescued by mainland Chinese fishermen. She said she asked him to take a selfie from the fishing boat as proof of life. He did.
“The international community is calling on the mainland government to allow me to leave the country and reunite with my family,” he wrote in a text message to Sheng Xue at the time, according to a screenshot she provided to The Times. “It is precisely because I wanted to reunite with my family that I took this risk. They might sentence me again.”
The fishermen eventually turned him over to a local police station, where officers escorted him back to his home in the central province of Henan, the U.N. experts said.
Mr. Dong again fled China in January 2020 by crossing into Vietnam, where he sent Sheng Xue a selfie from a taxi. He lived in hiding there for over two years, she said. But the Vietnamese authorities arrested him in August 2022.
Sheng Xue said that she learned from Mr. Dong’s family members in 2023 that he had been taken into Chinese custody again. She said that he was eventually released after at least a year in custody and returned to his home in Henan, but that he still had no income or pension.
“He lost everything,” she said.
So on Monday, she was not surprised to learn that he had escaped to South Korea. In fact, she said, he told her last year that Mr. Kwon’s earlier escape to South Korea by jet ski had inspired him.
After confirming that Mr. Dong had arrived, she contacted Canadian officials, asking them for help keeping him safe.
“Dong Guangping’s life experience tells us how much freedom means to one’s life,” she said.
