The Canadian daughter of a Chinese political prisoner is speaking out about “ruthless” communist authorities after being detained twice this week as she tried to visit her ailing father.
Ti-Anna Wang was blocked from entering China to visit her dad, who she hasn’t seen for ten years, despite having a valid visa.
Her pro-democracy father Wang Bingzhang was arrested by Chinese security in Vietnam in 2002 and has been in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison for the past 15 years.
He was convicted of espionage and terrorism during a closed-door, one-day trial and jailed for life.
Ti-Anna, from Montreal, believes the current tensions between Canada and China may have been a factor in her being refused entry.
“I can’t accept the fact that I will never see him again,” she told CTV News Channel on Saturday.
“It’s possible that it’s related to the current tensions between Canada and China, but at the same time in 2009 a similar sequence of events happened when I travelled to China with a valid visa, again to see my father and was turned around at the Hong Kong border.”
Ti-Anna and her family arrived in Hangzhou, China on Jan. 9, but while her husband and their 11-month-old daughter were allowed in, she was denied entry.
She and her family were eventually sent to a nearby South Korean island.
On Wednesday, Wang was trying to fly to Toronto from South Korea when her plane landed in Beijing, where she was supposed to catch a connecting flight.
Wang told CTV News that six police officers boarded the plane, did not allow her to use her phone, and barred her from contacting the Canadian embassy. The family was eventually sent back to South Korea.
Ti-Anna has become a vocal human-rights activist, and has been harassed by Chinese officials during a United Nations presentation. She has been unable to obtain a visa to visit China since 2009.
“This experience validates what my family has known about the Chinese government for many years,” she said. “That it is a government that acts arbitrarily and that is ruthless in the way they want to punish people. In my case, all I wanted to do was to go see my father who's been in prison for 16 years now.”
Despite the setbacks, Ti-Anna said her family will keep trying to see her father.
Wang’s abduction and widely derided trial in China in 2002 earned him a spot on a dubious list of 16 political prisoners that Amnesty International urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to advocate for during his most recent trip to China in late 2017.
With files from The Canadian Press
