Veteran Chinese dissident flees

One of China's longest-established dissidents, Wang Xizhe, is reliably understood to have evaded arrest and to have been been smuggled to Hong Kong. Sources associated with the secret Operation Yellow Bird underground escape route said he was preparing to leave for the United States.

His wife, Su Jiang, said yesterday that friends had told her that her husband was in Hong Kong but that she had not been in direct contact with him.

Mr Wang is seen as a formidable opponent because he was a factory worker and the Chinese Communist Party is particularly sensitive to opposition from workers.

Dissident sources in Hong Kong said he started to plan his escape after last week's arrest and sentencing of fellow activist Liu Xizhe. Mr Liu was sent to a labour camp for three years for writing a letter with Mr Wang which called for stronger action against Japan in the dispute over the Diayou islands. More sensitively, the letter accused the Chinese Communist Party of reneging on pledges to give the right of self-determination to the people of Tibet and urged talks with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader.

Many Chinese dissidents avoid talking about Tibet because they know protests on the subject are likely to provoke a sharp response. Last December Wei Jingshen, China's best-known dissident, was accused of attempting to "divide the motherland" by questioning China's role in Tibet. This formed a key indictment in a trial which ended with a 14-year jail sentence.

Mr Wang has served two long prison sentences for political crimes. He was jailed in 1974 after putting up a poster in Guangzhou, southern China which protested at the repression in the last years of Mao Zedong's rule. He was re-arrested in 1981 on charges of spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda and forming an opposition group. Some four years of his 14-year sentence were spent in punitive solitary confinement.

He was released two years before the end of his sentence in 1993 but remained defiant, saying he would prefer to go back to jail rather than loose his freedom of speech. Unlike most dissidents he is from the south of the country, where opposition activity is more confined.

Yellow Bird has smuggled hundreds of dissidents out of China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Up to 800 people are believed to have passed through Hong Kong since then.

The organisation is a curious amalgam of democracy activists and triad gang members who smuggle other people out of China purely for financial gain. At the height of its activities it appeared to have supporters strategically located in the Chinese government and security services.

Meanwhile, in Peking, Wang Dan, one of the leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, is expected to go on trial this week, accused of plotting to subvert the government. He is one of the few leaders whom Yellow Bird failed to get out of the country.