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Chen Siming, an activist who fled China, has been camped out at an airport in Taiwan for nearly a week, hoping to gain asylum in the West. He is willing to wait for much longer, as long as he is not forced to board a plane back to China.<\/p>\n
Mr. Chen, 60, is among a wave of activists and human rights defenders who have recently attempted bold and hazardous escapes from the country as a crackdown on civil society has widened. In July, a Chinese human rights lawyer fled to Laos<\/a>. Last month, a critic of China\u2019s ruling Communist Party fled to South Korea, apparently by jet ski<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Chen\u2019s predicament in Taiwan is unusual. While the self-ruled island is an attractive refuge for people fleeing Chinese state oppression, it is also wary of raising tensions with Beijing by accepting too many critics of its Communist Party.<\/p>\n Mr. Chen was reluctant to leave the mainland, eager to continue his activism there.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe that people have to put in the work in order for society to improve,\u201d Mr. Chen said in an interview on Thursday. \u201cThat\u2019s why I always wanted to stay in China and fight.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A taxi and truck driver from the southern city of Zhuzhou in Hunan Province, Mr. Chen said his interest in activism grew after he befriended a leading human rights lawyer online in 2016.<\/p>\n He joined a network of about a dozen loosely organized activists in the region and began commemorating the deadly 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square every year. He also sought to raise awareness of the plight of a woman in the province who had filmed herself splashing ink on a poster of Xi Jinping<\/a> in 2021 and was later reportedly forced to enter a psychiatric facility. <\/p>\n Zhou Fengsuo, the executive director of Human Rights in China, a group based in New York, said that he had been in communication with Mr. Chen for more than five years and that the type of activism he engaged in was becoming increasingly rare in the mainland. The police have conducted mass raids on civil society organizations, Mr. Zhou said, and Mr. Chen\u2019s fellow activists in Zhuzhou have gone missing. <\/p>\n Over the years, Mr. Chen had become accustomed to living in fear of the authorities. Since 2018 or 2019, the police often visited him, sometimes detaining him for days at a time, most recently around this year\u2019s June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. The turning point came weeks later, when on July 21, national security agents threatened to send him to a psychiatric facility, he said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Chen said he escaped China on July 22, first traveling to Laos and then making his way to Thailand. Even outside of China, he did not feel safe, especially after learning that Lu Siwei, a human rights lawyer<\/a>, was detained by the authorities in Laos and forcibly deported to China<\/a> in September, where experts said he was likely to be tortured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n