Yang Jianli, a former Chinese political prisoner who returned to Brookline after a five-year stint in a prison camp, said he plans to walk 500 miles from Boston to Washington, D.C., to honor those who helped bring him home and raise awareness of the Chinese government’s human rights violations.
Yang’s announcement came after Rep. Frank Smizik, a Brookline Democrat, honored him for his activism for democracy and human rights in China in a special ceremony at the State House yesterday.
Yang, who is also a Tiananmen Square Massacre survivor, said he will leave Boston on May 4 and will travel on his “GongMin Walk” through New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore before reaching Washington, D.C. on June 4, the 19th anniversary of the massacre, in which the Chinese government crushed pro-democracy protesters. Yang said with his 22.5-inch stride, he will take about 1.4 million steps during his walk.
Yang’s group, Initiatives for China, is a new Boston-based coalition committed to empowering Chinese citizens and pro-democracy groups in the Communist country.
The father of two said he had returned to China in 2002 to study the country’s labor unrest before he was arrested for treason. After a yearlong trial, he was convicted and sentenced to a five-year prison term, during which he said he was tortured and put in isolation for long periods. He finished his term last April and returned to Boston in August.
Yang called his walk a way of “throwing a little more tea in the harbor,” alluding to Boston’s role in the American Revolution.
“As Boston goes, so goes the nation,” he said. “As America goes, so goes the world.”
Yang said most Chinese do not find truth in the Olympic motto of Beijing, “One World, One Dream,” but think “One World, One Nightmare” is more accurate.
Fourteen-year-old Anita Fu, Yang’s daughter, said life was hard while her father was gone. “We’re just trying to get used to everything, with him back,” she said. “He’s adjusting, too.”
Initiatives for China spokeswoman Elaine O’Malley said Yang’s walk coincides with the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing this summer.
“In the coming Olympics, he wants to bring to everybody’s mind the moral incompatibility between their human rights violations and their role as host of the games,” she said. “He feels that America is the only country in the world with the both the moral strength and the political strength to do anything.”
Brookline resident Sarah Leinbach said she plans to host a fundraiser for Yang when he gets to Washington, D.C. She said she never met him before his imprisonment, but she and fellow All Saints Church parishioners sent him letters and postcards and prayed for him every Sunday.
“I really thought he would never return,” she said. “It still seems a miracle to see him.”