MCLC: modern-day knight helped 6/4 activists

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: modern-day knight helped 6/4 activists
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/6/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/world/asia/a-modern-day-knight-who-helped
-fleeing-tiananmen-activists.html

A ‘Modern-Day Knight’ Who Helped Fleeing Tiananmen Activists
By Chris Buckley

HONG KONG — WHEN tens of thousands of people gathered in Hong Kong this
week to mourn the military carnage against protesters in Beijing 25 years
ago, Chan Tat Ching stood among them, holding a candle and bowing to honor
the dead.

A life on the fringes of the law has left him with a worn face and a
partly paralyzed left arm, and few in the mostly young crowd recognized
him as the celebrated figure he became, rescuing fugitive democracy
activists after the 1989 crackdown.

Friends, though, stopped to shake Mr. Chan’s right hand and exclaim
“Brother Six,” the name under which he won fame.

“My era has already passed,” Mr. Chan said. “But people in the rescue
operation back then remember me, and some people we saved send thanks
every year.”

These days, Mr. Chan, 70, collects rent from several properties and helps
friends in the trading business. But in 1989, he helped create a secret
lifeline to freedom after the armed suppression of protests centered on
Tiananmen Square.

Using midnight boat runs to isolated inlets in southern China, coded
messages and copious bribes, Mr. Chan led a team of Hong Kong smugglers
who spirited out more than 130 students, academics and officials wanted by
the authorities, according to histories of the operation and his own
account. Like Sun Wukong, the unruly magical monkey king in an ancient
Chinese novel, Mr. Chan and his men outsmarted the “armies of heaven,” he
said.

“One monkey doesn’t add up to much, but a group of them is terrifying,”
Mr. Chan said. “We were like a group of monkeys who were able to get away
with what nobody dreamed was possible, helping the biggest ‘black hands’
escape from the mainland,” he added, using the Beijing government’s term
for the dissidents it denounced the most heavily in 1989.

The mass protests that year were broadly demanding democracy and political
accountability, but they drew support from people whose motivations defy
simple descriptions, few more so than Mr. Chan.

IN his cluttered office, he keeps a picture of an actor playing Mao
Zedong, but he also proudly shows photos of himself meeting the Dalai
Lama, who is reviled by the Chinese government, as well as books and
tributes from dozens of people he helped to escape, including one who
called him a “modern-day knight.”

Mr. Chan denied belonging to one of the “triad” crime gangs of the Hong
Kong underworld, but he said he was familiar with the triads’ ways and
that the gangs had helped Chinese political fugitives escape after the
Tiananmen crackdown. Even so, he said, some triad members mistook him in
1996 for a crime world figure and cracked his skull with cleavers, leaving
his left arm permanently weakened.

Like many residents of Hong Kong, which was still a British colony in
1989, Mr. Chan said he was shocked when Communist Party leaders sent
soldiers to clear Tiananmen Square of student protesters and enforce
martial law in the capital by shooting civilians. Mr. Chan said his anger
made him ill, and he had his youngest son’s head shaved in a show of
disgust. “I was doing business, so I couldn’t shave my own head,” he
explained.

His sympathy for the students, he said, sprang from anger with corruption
and grudges from his former life in mainland China. Born in 1944 in
Guangdong Province, adjacent to Hong Kong, Mr. Chan said his childhood was
blighted by the political persecution of his parents, whose merchant
backgrounds marked them as “class enemies.” He was the sixth son among 13
brothers and sisters — hence the nickname that has followed him — and his
eldest brother largely raised the family, he said.

As a teenager Mr. Chan studied electrical engineering at a vocational
school and later worked in a printing plant that produced Mao Zedong’s
works. He fled China in 1972 by swimming to Hong Kong, after Chinese
officials refused to dismiss political charges against him. After that he
taught and did factory work in Hong Kong and did a stint as a technician
in Nigeria.

As China began to open up in the early 1980s, he found his métier as a
smuggler. He made a fortune slipping into China by sea with pocket
calculators, cheap jewelry, liquor and even cars, loaded from cargo ships
onto speedboats that could outrun the Hong Kong police and Chinese
patrols. Generous bribes to mainland border guards helped lubricate the
business. “I was very successful because I was careful,” he said.

His skills and connections became very valuable to the Chinese protest
movement after the crackdown of June 4, 1989, when the Communist
authorities sought to arrest hundreds of people for taking part in
protests or for objecting to their violent suppression.

IN mid-June a group of activists in Hong Kong invited Mr. Chan to a hotel
room and asked for his help. They had already talked to a triad boss, but
he demanded extortionate fees, and Mr. Chan’s grudges against the
Communist party made him seem a safer choice, according to Lau Tan Man, a
magazine editor involved in the rescue effort.

Mr. Chan said he agreed without hesitation. “If you thought too much about
it, you wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

Mr. Chan and his partners put together a plan, with preferred escape
routes, secret signals and contact points, disguises, fake identity cards
and money to bribe mainland officials and guards. They dispatched
speedboats to pick up fugitives who had managed to get to Guangdong
Province with the help of a network of sympathizers who hid them in homes,
factories and warehouses.

Code phrases or matching halves of a torn photograph allowed the fugitives
and smugglers to recognize one another. But payoffs were essential to make
sure that border patrols looked the other way and let the boats slip in
and out, Mr. Chan said.

Still, it was dangerous work. Two of Mr. Chan’s smugglers and an escaping
student died in a crash at sea. Mr. Chan said he went on two runs himself,
but left dozens more to his team of about 10 men, while he did the
organizing and planning.

In their most audacious act, the smugglers spirited Chen Yizi, a former
adviser to the ousted party leader Zhao Ziyang, out of Hainan Island on a
cargo ship. A sailor guarded Mr. Chen by sitting on the hatch to his
hideaway with a loaded pistol, Mr. Chan said.

The rescue operation, which later came to be called Operation Yellowbird
in a reference to an old Chinese poetic phrase, slowed down late in 1989,
when two of Mr. Chan’s men were trapped by Chinese police officers using
false information about two wanted intellectuals. He went to Beijing in
1990 and struck a deal, obtaining the two men’s release in exchange for
his promise not to help any more fugitives.

Mr. Lau said that other smugglers and organizers kept up the work, but
more slowly as security tightened.
Some organizers have since accused Mr. Chan of selling out to the Chinese
authorities or overstating his importance in the operation, accusations
that he brushed aside.

“I had to make sure my two men were freed,” he said. “If you’re not loyal
to your own people, what’s the point of doing anything?”

A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2014, on page A6 of
the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Modern-Day Knight’ Who Helped
Fleeing Tiananmen Activists