Harassed Chinese protester fighting 'state machine'

Chen Yonglin is chasing political asylum. Picture / Reuters

SYDNEY - Chin Jin is a marked man. His home telephone is tapped, his mobile is monitored, and his computer is routinely hacked into and bombarded with strange viruses.

The harassment reached a peak three months ago when Chin, 48, who lives in Sydney, was organising a conference on promoting democracy in China.

"Other delegates received nonsense emails from my mailbox and I had to tell them to scan everything they got from me," he said. "I am fighting against a state machine. They are very smart. They leave no evidence."

"They" are Chinese Government agents whose unseen presence Chin, as head of the Australian chapter of the Federation for a Democratic China, has long learned to tolerate.

Originally from Shanghai, he came to Australia in 1988 and has since dedicated himself to campaigning for democratic change in China and organising demonstrations outside the Chinese consulate in Sydney.

It was through those protests that Chin first came to the attention of Chen Yonglin, the bespectacled, neatly dressed first secretary at China's consulate.

Chen made headlines around the world three weeks ago when he attempted to defect, saying he could no longer stomach spying on Chinese dissident groups and claiming that Beijing runs a network of more than 1000 informers in Australia.

His plea for political asylum was brushed aside by Australian authorities and he was forced into hiding - fearful, he said, of being kidnapped by vengeful Chinese agents.

After going to ground with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, Chen chose as his spokesman Chin - ironically one of the activists he had spent the last four years of his career trying to monitor and subvert.

Chen's attempted defection was the highest profile of any foreign diplomat for more than 50 years, and immediately threw the Australian Government into an embarrassing position.

The Government's sluggish response to Chen's bid to come in from the cold was widely interpreted as a desire not to endanger the lucrative trade relationship with China.

"Australia and China need this like a hole in the head," said Warren Reed, a former officer in the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and a commentator on intelligence matters. "The whole world wants to trade with China and Australia is no exception."

Reed, who was trained by the British intelligence service MI6 and served for 10 years in Asia and the Middle East, believes China has around 15 to 20 full-time agents in Australia.

He said their duties were to monitor pro-democracy activists and dissident groups such as Falun Gong, as well as to gather intelligence on military and commercial technology that could be of use to China.

"Australia is an inventive country, and several European and American companies do a lot of research and development here - everything from new generation pharmaceuticals to defence-related stuff," he said.

Australia is also a highly attractive target because it receives top-secret intelligence and regular high-level briefings from the United States and Britain.

"Australia is regarded as an easy back door into American and British intelligence," Reed said.

"There's a laid-back attitude here and a general lack of suspicion [of foreign agents] in Canberra."

Chen's claim of a 1000-strong web of informants has been backed up by analysts and two other recent Chinese defectors to Australia: former security official Hao Feng Jun, who fled his posting in Tianjin after witnessing the torture of Falun Gong practitioners, and Yuan Hongbing, a professor of law at Beijing University who was imprisoned for six months in 1994 for his support of pro-democracy activists.

While Chen waits for the Australian Government to decide whether to give him some sort of protection visa, he makes occasional forays from his secret safe house to speak at public events.

On Sunday he addressed a crowd of around 1000 who had gathered in Sydney to mark World Refugee Day. He denounced the repression of the Chinese Communist Party and said many Chinese wanted to flee persecution.

Democracy campaigner Chin believes that the recent spate of attempted defections are a sign that the Communist regimes days are numbered.

Despite the constant monitoring of his movements, he said he was optimistic of sweeping political change in China.

"The Communist Party is going against the tide of history. China will change, definitely," he said.

"I think it will happen by the time I'm 60. That gives me 12 years to keep fighting."