Advertisement
Advertisement
Human rights in China
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Ti-Anna Wang, daughter of democracy activist Wang Bingzhang, was barred from entering China last week and detained by airport security staff during a layover at Beijing while travelling from South Korea to Canada. Photo: Handout

Chinese dissident’s daughter ‘detained and bullied’ by Beijing airport security staff while en route to Canada

  • Ti-Anna Wang said detention was a ‘shocking, terrifying and senseless ordeal with no purpose but to bully, punish and intimidate me and my family’

A Canadian woman whose father is a dissident jailed in China was briefly detained and “bullied” by security officials while transiting through Beijing’s main airport on Wednesday, the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper said.

Ties between China and Canada have been strained since the December arrest in Vancouver of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, on a US arrest warrant, which was followed by China’s detention of two Canadians on suspicion of endangering state security.

In the most recent incident, the woman, Ti-Anna Wang, was taken off a plane by six police officers, separated from her husband and detained with her daughter for almost two hours while travelling through Beijing en route to Toronto from Seoul, South Korea, the paper said.

“It was a shocking, terrifying and senseless ordeal with no purpose but to bully, punish and intimidate me and my family,” Wang was quoted as saying in an email to Irwin Cotler, head of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

China has expressed anger over Canada’s arrest of Meng, who is alleged by US authorities to have deceived international banks into clearing transactions with Iran in contravention of US sanctions against Tehran.

In what many analysts and diplomats believe to be tit-for-tat arrests, China has detained two Canadians and, on Monday, sentenced a third to death on drug smuggling charges after a hasty retrial.

The Chinese foreign ministry denied there was a link.

The Globe and Mail said Wang was denied use of her phone and computer, and refused access to the Canadian embassy. Chinese officials told her she was not allowed to return to Canada and put her on a flight back to South Korea, it said.

Wang’s father, Wang Bingzhang, is a pro-democracy campaigner who was abducted in Vietnam in 2002 by Chinese agents before being imprisoned for life in China on charges of espionage and terrorism, the campaign group Human Rights in China said.

The Globe and Mail said Ti-Anna Wang was barred from entering China last week when she arrived at Hangzhou airport in Zhejiang province despite having obtained a visa in August to visit her ailing, jailed father.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Canadian daughter of dissident briefly detained
Post