Three decades ago, a secret operation called Yellow Bird was smuggling dissidents out of China. But, as one of them tells the BBC, Beijing is still pursuing them.
June 1992: It was midnight in the South China Sea and a Chinese patrol boat was approaching a ship heading from the communist country to the then-British colony of Hong Kong.
When border troops came aboard to speak with the crew, a group of people crowded in a secret compartment below deck could hear their voices.
A few minutes earlier, when the patrol car was sighted, these secret passengers had received an urgent order. “They told me to hide,” remembers one of them, Yan Xiong. “Do not make any noise!”.
Most of those who were hiding were economic immigrants who hoped to find work in Hong Kong, but not Yan. He was a political dissident and if he was discovered, he would be in serious trouble.
Yan was being smuggled out of China as part of a secret operation.
The patrol eventually moved away, and in the early hours of the morning, Yan, who had never traveled by boat before that night, arrived in Hong Kong.
risky trip
After a hearty breakfast, he was taken to a detention center. They told him this was for his own safety. Walking the streets could be dangerous.
Being detained was not something new for Yan. It had already happened 19 months in prison China for its participation in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The students had asked for more democracy and freedom, but the Communist Party sent tanks to crush them.
By the end of June 1989, the Chinese government claimed that 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel had been killed. Other estimates range from hundreds to many thousands.
Upon his release, Yan headed to southern China where, in scenes that could have been taken from a spy movie, he was sent from one public phone booth to another, to be put in touch with the people who could get him out of there. .
He was not the only dissident who undertook this risky journey. In conversation with the BBC, Chaohua Wang remembers his escape.
Despite ranking 14th on a list of the 21 most wanted people after the Tiananmen Square protests, he managed to evade capture, hiding in small rooms for months before traveling south and joining the secret Yellow Bird scheme.
“It was like a package moved from a [persona] to another,” he says. “I didn’t even know the name Yellow Bird for several years.”
Yellow Bird
Yellow Bird may seem like a classic spy operation, and many believed that an intelligence service (MI6 or the CIA) had come up with the idea. But it was not like that.
In fact, it was a private company undertaken by groups of Hong Kong citizens motivated by a desire to help those who were fleeing. Among them were the local film and entertainment industry and (more usefully) organized crimein the form of triads.
“They had a lot of Chinese police in their pockets,” says Nigel Inkster, who at the time was an intelligence official based in Hong Kong. This is what allowed them to take people from their hiding places in Beijing and smuggle them across the border.
The UK and US only got involved when people arriving in Hong Kong needed to decide where to go next. Yan remembers the visit of whom he describes as an “English gentleman” who never gave him his name but helped him with the paperwork.
“It is better for you to go to the US, not England,” the man told him. A few days later Yan was in Los Angeles. Chaohua Wang also ended up in the US.
Why not the United Kingdom?
Former officials told the BBC that Britain was reluctant to host Tiananmen protesters because they wanted avoid disturbing China at all costs in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.
The UK had signed an agreement in 1984, but the events in Tiananmen Square five years later raised difficult questions about the future of Hong Kong.
In 1992, a few weeks after Yan’s arrival in the colony, former British Conservative minister Chris Patten became the last governor of Hong Kong.
He says he was determined to establish greater democracy, hoping it would last after the handover, and so announced proposals for democratic reform of Hong Kong’s institutions, aimed at broadening the voter base in elections.
There was opposition to the reforms not only from Chinese leaders but also from those in London who did not want to antagonize Beijing.
“My main responsibility was to try to give the people of Hong Kong the best chance to continue living in freedom and prosperity, and to do so after 1997,” the former governor, now Lord Patten, tells me. He adds that he was also aware of Yellow Bird, but was not involved in the operation.
The reluctance to allow dissidents to come to Britain – and the anger in some quarters at Patten’s reforms – answers a central question of the 1990s that still matters today: How far should the West go to avoid angering China? and adapt to its rise, especially when it comes to values like human rights and democracy?
Turn
Yellow Bird concluded on the rainy night of July 1997 when Hong Kong became a sovereign Chinese territory. For a few years, the freedoms Patten had been trying to guarantee were maintained.
But in the last decade, China – under Xi Jinping – has taken a more authoritarian turn and tried to keep Hong Kong at bay.
Yan He obtained American citizenship and lived a model life. She joined the us army and served in Iraq as a military chaplain.
He may have thought that the hand of the Chinese Communist Party could not reach him in his new home, but he was wrong.
In 2021 he decided to run for public office. He ran as a candidate in the Democratic primary for New York’s 1st Congressional District.
Yan began to notice some strange things during your campaign. Strange cars followed him and lurked outside where he was staying at three in the morning. At campaign events, the People tried to stop him from speaking.
He found out what was happening when the FBI came to talk to him. An American private investigator had told them that an individual in China had approached him and asked to keep an eye on Yan. It seems that the idea of a former Tiananmen protester entering the US Congress was unacceptable.
“I had specifically told our private investigator that they needed to undermine the victim’s candidacy,” says FBI agent Jason Moritz.
The FBI was able to monitor the events when the individual based in China proposed to the investigator to dig up Yan’s dirty laundry. And if he didn’t find any, he ordered him to invent some. If that didn’t work, he suggested giving her a beating or even simulate a car accident.
“They wanted to stifle and end my campaign,” Yan explains.
The person who instructed the private investigator, as assessed by the FBI, was working on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The conspirators were charged but could not be arrested because they were outside the US.
China has consistently denied accusations of political interference. But this is not the only case in which it has supposedly become more assertive in locating those it considers dissidents in other countries.
There have been complaints of “overseas police stations” in the UK and USA and of people pressured to return to China or remain silent.
Yan’s story reveals that as China has become more secure and controlling at home, it has also sought to expand its reach abroad. And that is causing more and more friction over issues of espionage, surveillance and human rights.
Meanwhile, Yan’s message to Western governments when dealing with China is simple: “You must be careful.”
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