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Han Dongfang

Quinton Chan

HAN DONGFANG lives more like an expatriate than a Hong Kong Chinese. The exiled labour activist resides in the expat enclave of Lamma Island, works in a Wan Chai office with a full sea view, and his wife and children live overseas in the United States.

And the 37-year-old mainlander's Cantonese is not very good. 'I do feel very sorry about that,' he says haltingly in the local dialect during an hour-long interview.

Mr Han has not picked up common Hong Kong habits, such as going out for karaoke after work, playing the stock market, or queuing up to tour display flats at the weekend. Perhaps the only quintessentially Hong Kong thing about him is the mobile phone in his pocket.

So it seems odd that the dissident - who became stranded in Hong Kong in 1993 when he was refused re-entry to the mainland by officials at the Lowu border crossing - has, as of August, become a permanent Hong Kong resident and holder of an SAR passport.

'I am a Hong Kong citizen legally, but not in terms of my feelings,' he says. 'I have lived here many years, but my work is not about Hong Kong.'

Mr Han is a former railway worker who, amid the pro-democracy protests that swept China in 1989, formed the country's first independent labour union since the 1949 communist takeover.

When he became stateless in pre-handover Hong Kong, he went to work as a researcher at the Christian Industrial Committee, which monitors labour rights around Asia. Now he works as a commentator on mainland labour conditions for US-government-funded Radio Free Asia and has launched his own monthly publication, the China Labour Bulletin.

So his focus has remained very much on the mainland. But that has not kept him from developing a soft spot for his adopted home town.

'My career is here,' he says. 'And this city does give me a feeling of home. I miss Hong Kong every time I go out of town. As a matter of fact, this is the place I have stayed longest as an adult.'

Mr Han was born into a poor farming family in the north-central province of Shanxi. While he and his sister were still children, his mother moved the family to Beijing. In 1984, after graduating from secondary school and completing his service in the People's Liberation Army, Mr Han got a job as a worker with the Beijing Railway Bureau. As he travelled around the country on the trains, he witnessed numerous accounts of unfair treatment to other workers. It was to change his life.

By 1989, he had become a fully-fledged labour activist, convened the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, and was instrumental in setting up two tents and a broadcast station in Tiananmen Square at the height of the pro-democracy demonstrations.

After the bloody crackdown in June of that year, he was jailed - though never tried - on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. In 1992, Mr Han was allowed to travel to the US for treatment of tuberculosis contracted during his 22 months of imprisonment. In August 1993, he became waylaid in Hong Kong and over the next several months launched a series of futile attempts to gain entry to the mainland. So his decision to apply for permanent Hong Kong residency last summer was made only after an intense personal struggle.

'I thought long and hard about my 'identity problem' and had many discussions with friends,' he says. 'I wanted to be a Chinese national again, especially because the communists said I no longer qualified as Chinese when they kicked me out of the country.'

But apart from this dilemma of principle, a big practical problem also motivated Mr Han's application for Hong Kong residency. His Chinese passport, which the mainland authorities had long since refused to honour, expired in early 1997. Once that happened, he could no longer travel outside of Hong Kong unless he got an SAR passport.

Still, he resisted the impending administrative inevitability. 'I was worried that the communists would say: 'Han Dongfang is a Hong Kong person', that they would say I was a foreigner, an outsider in China's labour movement, and that my involvement in this campaign would lose legitimacy.'

Nevertheless, as soon as he became eligible to apply for permanent residency in August, he did so. His application was approved in just three weeks, and he had his SAR passport in hand before the end of the month. 'The reason I stayed here during the past seven years was to regain my lost Chinese identity,' he says. 'Hong Kong people are Chinese, too. How is being from Hong Kong any different than being from Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou?

'Hong Kong people are first-class citizens of China under communist rule. So many people are fighting for their right of abode in Hong Kong. They even sacrifice their lives. Why should I pass up this chance [to have permanent residency]?'

But Mr Han's new Hong Kong identity has not altered his largely 'un-Hong Kong' lifestyle. Apart from continuing to live like an expat, he also maintains a certain detachment from local politics, having little contact with democratic legislators and activists. His links with the Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China are limited, although he does attend every June 4 candlelight vigil in Victoria Park to honour those who suffered in Beijing's anti-democracy crackdown.

Mr Han says he recognises his personal limits and so plans to keep his focus on the mainland's labour movement. 'I know what I can do and what I can't,' he says.

He admits his influence on labour affairs on the mainland is limited. His China Labour Bulletin only publishes about 700 copies each month, and the entire Radio Free Asia station - which broadcasts on a short-wave frequency from Hong Kong that theoretically reaches everywhere in China - receives only about 70 calls a week from the mainland.

'This is limited,' he says. 'All we can do on my programme is offer advice to people having trouble at work. For example, if they have not been paid for more than a year, we tell them what they can do through existing legal channels. I would advise them to elect a representative and negotiate for their unpaid wages. The Chinese Government says the country is ruled according to the law. So we should use these channels.'

Despite the necessarily limited scope of his work, Mr Han does everything he can - often calling municipal authorities when labour disputes break out on the mainland - and savours every small victory.

'Not many people know about the China Labour Bulletin, so they often assume, because of my accent, that I'm calling in an official capacity from Beijing and so reveal details [they would not tell a Hong Kong-based labour journalist],' he says, laughing.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, most exiled dissidents vowed to return to the mainland within a few years on the wave of another democratic movement. That has not happened. Democrats, independent unionists and human-rights activists - and now members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement - are still harshly suppressed. The communist-controlled Government still rules.

Mr Han says people should be more realistic. 'The campaign for workers' rights is difficult enough in Hong Kong, even though there are many labour leaders here. So the labour movement on the mainland will take a long time.'

He says the mainland pro-democracy campaign was hampered because it was an elitist movement led by a small group of intellectuals who failed to unite with the masses. Even now, the country's dissidents act out their tragic roles on the political stage while ordinary people look on and cannot relate.

'It is no good just to shout slogans like 'Democracy, freedom and human rights!',' Mr Han says. 'We have to stay close to the life of the masses. We have to work more on issues concerned with people's livelihoods. I learned this from the problems Hong Kong's democrats have faced over the past few years. It is an important lesson.'

Mr Han is settling in for the long haul and admits - still wistfully - that he may be living in Hong Kong for years, maybe even a decade. This summer, his wife and two sons, who now live in a small town near Boston, Massachusetts, are going to join him in the SAR.

Ten years from now, he says, there are likely to have been some big changes on the mainland. Hundreds of labour-related disputes or demonstrations are already taking place each year. Society could explode as radical state-sector reforms swell the ranks of the unemployed.

Mr Han considers himself lucky compared with other dissidents. Most leaders of the crushed 1989 pro-democracy movement live in exile in the US. They have new outlooks on life and are following lots of different paths. Few remain in China.

For example, former student leader Li Lu has completed two degrees - one in business and another in law - at Columbia University in New York where she now works as an associate in a law firm. But Mr Han does not envy his high-profile former partner-in-protest. Instead, he is glad to be living in a Chinese city with a reasonable standard of living. He knows his situation is much better than those of many lesser-known dissidents who are scattered in foreign countries where they have to struggle to eke out a living. Meanwhile, other well-known activists quarrel frequently among themselves over the correct path for the democratic movement on the mainland.

'But I can still make friends with most of them and avoid politics,' says Mr Han. 'I think God has treated me quite well.'

Quinton Chan (qchan@scmp.com) is a staff writer for the Post's Editorial Pages



A voice that can't be silenced