ESCAPING HONG KONG

A SECRET PLAN TO GRANT ASYLUM IN THE WEST WILL SAVE DOZENS OF MAINLAND DISSIDENTS FROM BEIJING'S GRASP

As a small child, Betty Zhang watched zealous Red Guards beat her mother. At 16 she put up posters on Beijing's Democracy Wall and organized demonstrations in her home village. At 22 she was locked up in a Chinese gulag, judged without trial to be a counter-revolutionary subversive. For months she was confined to a dank room the size of a bed, spending her days in solitary silence, enduring torture with an electric prod and the painful, gratuitous removal of bone marrow from her spine. Released in March 1990 after more than six years in prison, Zhang was denied the right...

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