From Tiananmen Square To Sydney
The Age
Saturday June 21, 2008
IN 1988 and 1989 Chinese society was grappling with the onslaught of Western and other foreign influences - ideas, fashions, trends - after Deng Xiaoping had 10 years earlier declared that China and the Communist Party had to embrace market reforms.
Bill Zhang, a driving instructor for a technical institute in a big east coast city, became involved with a group of outspoken, free-thinking students. Like millions of other Chinese, freed from the strictures of communism by Deng's exhortations to get the economy moving, Zhang was moonlighting from his state-ordained job, driving an unofficial taxi.He ended up driving the students from his home city to join their colleagues in Beijing in Tiananmen Square because he felt that society in 1989 was "inhumane". "We lacked freedom of speech, there was corruption everywhere, and a big gap between the rich and the poor. So I felt I must do something," Zhang said.After the student protests in and around Tiananmen Square were crushed, Zhang was one of thousands detained. He was relatively lucky. He was beaten up in detention and after his release he was sacked from his technical college job. He became a full-time taxi driver. A few years later, in 1994, in response to unfair taxes and corruption, he helped organised a citywide taxi strike that he says involved thousands of cars. As a strike leader he was jailed for six months and repeatedly bashed. Undeterred, after his release he joined a small underground group, the "(Name of city withheld) Democratic Workers Association" and organised a sit-in in front of the local Communist Party headquarters. Warned by friends that the authorities had had enough, in late 1996 he left China, a relatively easy thing to do then if you had money. He paid 80,000 yuan to bribe officials and get a passport and tourist visa for Australia. He arrived in Australia in January 1997 and applied for a protection visa two months later. This was refused and the refusal was confirmed on appeal. The Refugee Review Tribunal found him "not a credible witness". "He was evasive in answering a number of questions and he appeared to exaggerate his claims, particularly in relation to his own importance in events such as the taxi strike," the tribunal found on August 5, 1998 in affirming the decision not to grant Zhang a protection visa. Zhang spent the next eight years in Sydney working near Sydney airport, convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Australian government gave him permission to stay. Lawyers made various appeals on his behalf."I wasn't scared because I was confident that one day Australia would accept me, and because of my experiences in China and contribution to Australia I was never worried about being forced to leave," he told The Age last year.He was apprehended while visiting the Star City casino in December 2005. His name was called over the PA system after police issued an alert for him. He responded because he thought he might have won a prize. He did not consider being on a lapsed tourist visa as something that would get him into trouble. His naivety landed him in Villawood detention centre, where he participated in several human rights events that were covered in local English and Chinese-language media and that would later bring him to the attention of the Chinese authorities, including a 10-day hunger strike in support of human rights activists jailed in China.His case was taken up by Balmain for Refugees, a Sydney church support group. Requests for ministerial intervention, first made to then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone in 2006 and then to her successor Kevin Andrews in early 2007, were both refused on the grounds that he had been unable to provide evidence he faced a real risk of persecution in China for his pro-democracy activities. -- MARY-ANNE TOY
© 2008 The Age