The Defectors : They Took a Few Clothes, Some Photographs and Their Chinese Herbal Medicines--and Went Over the Embassy Wall

WANG SHENHONG TOOK the first nervous step one day last June when he slipped away from the Chinese Embassy in a European capital to call friends in Hong Kong from a pay telephone. In his panic, he fumbled with his coins and the receiver. “It was the first time in my life I had ever used a pay phone,” he recalls.

At 4 o’clock one morning later that week, when his fellow Chinese diplomats were asleep, Wang jumped over the embassy’s 5-foot wall to hand a large old suitcase to a man in a waiting car. The bag was stuffed with his and his wife’s clothes, the family pictures of a lifetime, some Chinese herbal medicines and several cartons of cut-rate embassy cigarettes.

Then, after agonizing over their next move for three days, Wang and his wife, Li Mingming, also a Chinese diplomat, walked out of the embassy. Carrying no baggage, the couple looked as if they were out for a Sunday stroll. Instead, they hailed a taxi and defected to the West.

“Any dream or hope we had for the Communist regime had been dashed thoroughly” by the Tian An Men massacre, explains Wang (not his real name). “It made us not want to continue serving the regime. . . . This is not an ideological struggle taking place in China right now. It’s just a struggle between factions. People are fighting for their own power and self-interest, and that’s all. In China, you haven’t the right, the power, to speak and think. I enjoy very much the freedom here (in the West). Because freedom cannot be bought, not even with gold.”

AS WANG TALKED, HE SAT in the dining room of a modest row house on the outskirts of the city where the Wangs had worked as diplomats. It is the home of an ethnic Chinese artist, a friend of the Wangs’ contact in Hong Kong. The artist had never met the Wangs until they decided to defect. Responding to a plea from Hong Kong friends, the artist agreed to shelter the two Chinese diplomats for a few days.

Now, the days have turned into months, and still the Wangs are living in the artist’s home. They have nowhere else to go. Wang, a well-educated intellectual, hasn’t found a job, and the couple isn’t sure yet in what Western country they will be able to make their future. The artist who houses them is, by turns, amused and exasperated by these odd, idealistic defectors who have gradually taken over his life.

The defection of the Wangs is not an isolated case. Since their government cracked down on the pro-democracy movement in June, about 70 Chinese diplomats around the world, by unofficial estimates, have fled to the West--the largest number since the days of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. These defections are a serious embarrassment for the Chinese government--and a potential boon for Western intelligence agencies, which have carefully debriefed the former diplomats for details about Chinese embassy and consulate operations.

The largest number of defections has reportedly been from Chinese embassies and consulates in Canada and Australia. At least a handful of Chinese diplomats in the United States also have defected. In one dramatic and well-publicized incident in June, a couple who had been working at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco showed up unannounced at a rally for those killed during the violence in Beijing. The two diplomats told the crowd of about 5,000 that they could no longer support their government’s actions and announced that they were defecting.

U.S. officials won’t provide any details they might have about Chinese defectors in this country. The FBI, which handles the Chinese defectors here, is said to have helped some of them to relocate. “We just can’t discuss defectors in any way,” one U.S. official says.

The story of Wang and Li provides insight into some of the motivations, hopes, fears and confusion of the defecting Chinese diplomats. The pair agreed to talk about how and why they defected, but only on the condition that I not reveal their names or the country where they had been working. Despite these assurances, Wang and his wife were still nervous about being interviewed. Because they have been granted political asylum, they are seemingly safe. But they fear they may jeopardize the safety of their relatives and friends in China. Even if the Chinese government succeeded in guessing their identities, the Wangs explained, the regime might not be so insulted if I used fictitious names for them in my story. I didn’t quite follow this logic, but Wang knows the Chinese government much better than I do. He worked for it for most of his life.

Wang, thin and graying, is a careful person, a man seemingly born to worry. A friend says that Wang weighs every word he utters, then stays awake at night wondering what he should have said, calculating what he will say tomorrow. His dark-haired wife is a strong-willed, tenacious survivor whose support helps to keep Wang going.

In the Chinese Embassy, Wang says, the other diplomats considered him naive and otherworldly. Early last spring, Wang told a fellow Chinese diplomat he was certain Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping would negotiate with the students demonstrating for democracy and accept at least a few of their demands.

His colleague told Wang he was being foolish and unrealistic. “A politician doesn’t have any humanity,” the other diplomat said.

EACH NIGHT LAST SPRING,the Wangs and the other envoys had gathered in front of television sets, watching the escalating drama of the student protests in Beijing. Cable television carried inside the self-contained world of the embassy the sort of information the diplomats could never have gotten from the telexes and coded messages of their government. Impatiently, the Wangs and their colleagues would switch from one TV channel to another, always looking for more news, more pictures from Beijing.

On Sunday morning, June 4, Li went out to visit an overseas Chinese woman she had met. The woman told her that on Saturday night the government had moved tanks into Beijing and that it appeared many people had been killed or injured.

Li was stunned. “We never thought the government would use tanks to crush this movement,” she says. “Millions of Beijing civilians supported this movement.”

She returned to the Chinese Embassy, where, at the same time, Wang and the other diplomats were learning from television the news from Beijing. “That day,” Wang says, “we cried.”

For the Wangs, the regime’s decision to crush the outpouring of dissent brought back memories of past repression. “We had had the experience of all the U-turns of the past years,” says Wang, now in his 50s. “You could say we are old sportsmen, old spectators of China’s political movements. We knew very clearly all the next steps, how everyone would be asked to report to their bosses and so forth.”

“We smelled the (political) atmosphere we have recognized so often in the past,” Li adds. “All the movements the Communist Party launched, we experienced.”

Their bad memories go back more than three decades. During the so-called “anti-rightist” campaign against Chinese intellectuals in 1956 and 1957--a campaign in which Deng, then general secretary of the Communist Party, played a leading role--Wang’s brother committed suicide after he had been accused of ideological errors.

At that time, Wang and Li were university students, eagerly studying the natural sciences they thought would benefit China. Li recalls that for nearly a year she was required to devote every school day to writing denunciations of people accused of having “rightist” political tendencies.

Li says she was a youthful believer in the Chinese Communist Party. “In the 1950s, I was very (politically) active,” she explains. “I wanted to be part of the Chinese peasant tradition. I thought if I could drive a (tractor) combine, that would be great. My father was a capitalist, and the first step for me toward becoming a (Communist) Youth League member was to struggle against my father.”

For political reasons, Li left her father and the city in which she was raised in 1957, when she was barely 20. She did not see her father again for 15 years, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. She and Wang married in the late 1950s.

Like millions of other Chinese, the couple was separated and sent to different areas in the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution. However, in 1972, Li was allowed to return to her hometown for a brief visit. After seeing her, Li’s father became so excited and agitated, Li says, that he died of a heart attack within a day after she returned to the countryside.

In 1979, three years after the death of Mao Tse-tung, Deng consolidated his control over the Chinese Communist Party. And until recently, Wang says, he looked upon the past decade as the most hopeful in China’s recent history. “After 1979, it seemed like a golden age,” he says. “People had a chance to go abroad, to attend international conferences, to travel to the United States.”

During a visit to the United States five years ago, Wang says, a Chinese-American relative offered to help him arrange to stay here, but Wang declined the overture. After all, life in China seemed to be both good and improving.

WANG AND HIS WIFE began their Western European posting in 1986. They found embassy life extraordinarily comfortable. The embassy supplied the diplomats with food, cigarettes and other items at discount. A special barber from China was even assigned to the embassy so that the diplomats would not have to endure European haircuts. Their embassy section of eight people had three cars and one chauffeur reserved for them. Until they defected, the Wangs did not know the cost of a taxi ride in the city in which they had lived for nearly three years.

Before last June, they say, the political atmosphere in the embassy was not particularly oppressive, although their movements were somewhat restricted. A few days after they first arrived, they were required to hand over their passports to higher authorities for permanent “safekeeping.” They had a nightly curfew of 10:30 p.m.

Their salaries were low--no more than $260 per month, of which they had to pay $72 for food. In China, such income would be a fortune; in Western Europe, it puts an ordinary person below the poverty level. Still, their needs were so few that they were able to save more than $100 a month.

In June, a few days after the bloody assault on Tian An Men Square, one of Wang’s superiors told him that the embassy would soon begin a new policy of having embassy staff inform on each other. “He warned us: ‘From now on, you should pay more attention to what you say. Keep your real thoughts to yourself,’ ” Li recalls. “I think, not all of our colleagues in the embassy would betray each other. But if there were only one or two, it would create big problems.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry sent the embassy about 60 copies of the government’s official account of what happened in Beijing. All the diplomats in the embassy were instructed “to stick to this document” in their conversations with foreigners, Li says. And there were signs that the embassy would start having internal party meetings and political study sessions, a return to practices of the past.

Over a period of days, Wang and Li, who had been scheduled to return to China late this year, concluded that they should flee to the West. But once they made the decision, the couple’s defection turned into a series of furtive moves, false starts and slip-ups. “It was like a really bad grade-B movie,” says the artist who ended up housing them.

First, the artist met briefly with Wang. Next, he picked up their suitcase in the pre-dawn tryst outside the embassy. He and the Wangs worked out a coded telephone message that would signal they were about to flee: “We are coming over for tea.”

Two days after the artist picked up the bag of belongings, the phone rang at his home. It was a quiet Saturday afternoon. “We are coming over for tea,” Wang said.

Half an hour later, the artist’s phone rang a second time. It was Wang again. He and his wife had changed their minds, he said. They loved their country, they couldn’t bring themselves to leave it. The tea party was off.

“We walked out of the embassy, and then we came back,” Wang recalls. “I thought we should consider it more carefully.” Wang was prepared to go, but his wife was hesitant. They argued. She was particularly worried about the effect their defection might have on their relatives. Li says she was also afraid that “maybe we are too old to have a new start.”

Trained in the old Confucian virtues, the Wangs even debated how the timing of their defection might affect their boss at the embassy, whom they liked. Would he get into more trouble if they defected while he was at work, or should they vanish while he was out of town?

In those hours of indecision, they called friends overseas for advice. They thought about it once again overnight. They argued some more. “We had quite a lot of struggle, I think,” Li says.

Finally, at 2 p.m. the next day, a Sunday, Wang called the artist to say the tea party was back on. This time, Wang was able to persuade his wife to go with him. “He told me, ‘Go ahead, just put one foot in front of the other,’ ” Li says.

They hailed a taxi and, when they got to their friend’s house, were stunned by the high fare. Defecting to the West cost more than $15--much more than they had ever spent for transportation in the protected, chauffeur-driven world of the Chinese Embassy.

THAT NIGHT, THE Wangs and the artist notified authorities of the West European government, which agreed to help protect them. It, in turn, notified the embassy, which had already reported Wang and Li missing, that the couple was seeking political asylum. A few days later, Chinese officials passed on a request to meet with the Wangs. The couple turned it down.

Wang and Li admit that they were afraid the Chinese regime would try to get them back. They rarely ventured outside their protector’s house. Whenever the phone rang or the front door was opened, Wang jumped. At one point, he wore sunglasses when he went out for a brief nighttime walk, in a seemingly futile effort to conceal his identity.

Within weeks, Wang was subjected to four grueling debriefings, totaling about 20 hours, by intelligence officials of the European nation’s government. Wang says they did not even allow him to go to the restroom without an escort. The officials seemed especially interested in efforts by the Chinese government to obtain Western technology, a subject about which Wang claims he knows very little.

In August, the couple received political asylum. The lawyer who represented them says their request was granted with extraordinary speed. “They had produced cogent evidence as to how they would fear for their lives or liberty if they were to return to China,” the lawyer says. “Their seeing the intelligence people helped, too, I suppose.”

TALKING TO Western intelligence officials did not solve all the couple’s problems. Wang says one official suggested that he and his government could help the couple to find jobs. Instead, Wang and Li received only a form letter telling them to report to a government office that provides routine welfare, housing and employment services to immigrants and refugees. When they visited the office, they discovered that it was about to be closed for budgetary reasons.

“They gave us political asylum, and then they didn’t want anything to do with us,” Li says.

Wang says that, in his naivete, he expected it would be only a matter of weeks before he found work. “I have a deep understanding of China,” Wang says. “It’s worthwhile. They (Western officials) don’t know how to use me.”

After four months, Wang remains unemployed, though he did serve a two-week stint as a translator for a television program. This fall, Wang and Li have been exploring their chances of emigrating to Australia or United States. To do so, they would have to find jobs that would entitle them to obtain visas. So far, they have had no luck.

However, Li has found a job in a hospital, where she is learning to answer telephones. She leaves the house early in the morning, rides public transportation to and from the hospital, returns home tired at night, and still manages to cook dinner. In contrast to her embassy job, the hours are longer and the work more demanding. Nevertheless, she says, she does not regret the decision to defect.

“When I was back in China, I worked harder,” she explains. But “I didn’t have to use my mind. Now, you see, I use my mind every day, to struggle for life.”

Wang has no regrets, either. “Even if I have some difficulties now, I am glad for what I did,” he says.

Most of all, Wang says, he is happy to have stopped working for the Chinese government.

“During the last 10 years, we Chinese could hold up our heads to foreigners,” he says. “China had a bright future. After what happened in June, even people from the Third World looked down on us. They would say, ‘Even South Africa didn’t use tanks to kill its own people.’ Our government lost the respect of the world.”