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During his closed trial on Monday, Boston-based Chinese dissident Yang Jianli will no doubt have been asked to explain why he returned to China. It's a question Yang must have asked himself often in his 15 months of virtual isolation since he was arrested in April 2002 after entering the country using a forged passport. Why would a man of his superior intellect, a man who holds doctorates from both the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard, do something so foolish? Why would a husband, a father with two small children and a comfortable home, act so recklessly? Why couldn't Yang have just stayed put?

The Chinese government's official answer to these questions, as expressed in an indictment handed down last month by authorities in Beijing, is that Yang was spying for Taiwan. According to Yang's wife, Christina Fu, and lawyers advising her, the evidence cited for this charge consists of little more than the fact that a foundation Yang ran for a few years until 1994 received funding from donors in Taiwan's Kuomintang political party and that Yang sent $400 to three relatives and one friend on the mainland. More likely, the charge of espionage is intended to get mainland authorities off the hook for their mishandling of Yang's case. They held him for more than a year without allowing him access to a lawyer or to his family and—in violation of China's own laws—refused during that time to charge him with a crime. But the charge fails to excuse the Chinese. And it fails to provide an honest answer to the question of why Yang, and many other overseas Chinese dissidents, choose to go back.

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When Yang, now 40, first left his homeland in 1986, he did so out of a sense of patriotic duty. The prevailing wisdom of the decade after the Cultural Revolution held that science, not politics, was the key to China's future. "Jianli decided to study math at Berkeley," says Fu, now a statistician at Harvard Medical School, "because he wanted to serve his country." But when the student democracy protesters began to flood Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Yang forsook his equations for late nights watching the TV news. And after Deng Xiaoping declared martial law several weeks later, Yang voluntarily returned to China to support the demonstrators. "He knew that something major was happening, and he couldn't bear the thought of not being a part of it," says Fu. The killings he witnessed firsthand became a part of him. Yang returned to the U.S. a political activist. He wrote prolifically about the massacre. He decided to pursue a second Ph.D. in political economy at Harvard. He testified before Congress and spoke at numerous international human-rights conferences. Still, he talked constantly of returning to China. He neither sought political asylum nor applied for U.S. citizenship. When his Chinese passport expired he attempted to renew it over and over again. But his activism had earned him banishment. "He desperately wanted to go back and try to effect political change," says Jared Genser, a Harvard classmate who is president of Freedom Now, a legal-advocacy group lobbying for Yang's release. In exile, Yang suffered from depression so severe that he was forced to drop out of school for a semester.

In the meantime, Yang feared, China was beginning to win its public relations war on human rights. He was outraged when then President Jiang Zemin was invited to visit Harvard. Later came China's accession to the World Trade Organiza-tion and Beijing's winning bid to host the 2008 Olym-pics. In this atmosphere Yang began to experience doubts. "The temptation to see for himself what was really happening at home became stronger and stronger," says Fu, "He was starting to feel too cut off." Yang told a distraught Fu that he'd just take a quick look around and be back in 10 days.

Ironically, his misjudgment has brought the issues he believed the world had forgotten back under the spotlight. Beijing might have achieved his marginalization by simply charging him with illegal entry, sentencing him to a maximum legal prison term of one year and then deporting him. Instead, China's failure to abide by its own laws with regard to due process will remain a constant irritant in its diplomatic relations. The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Lorne Craner, calls Yang "one of the particular cases we now mention in all our discussions about political prisoners." But unless Washing- ton and other democratic governments are willing to back up verbal opprobrium with serious diplomatic consequences, China's leaders may never honestly face the difficult truth that Yang came home because he is a patriot.

• Susan Jakes
• Yang Jianli returned to China to see how his country was faring—and was jailed