By Philip Lenczycki
Daily Caller News Foundation
A political dissident fled China on a jet ski last week after being jailed for over a year for likening Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Quan Ping, a 35-year-old man, arrived in South Korea on Sunday after traveling approximately 200 miles on a jet ski from China’s eastern Shandong province across the Yellow Sea in search of political asylum, according to the Washington Post. Communist China’s draconian laws and collapsing economy have allegedly contributed to a massive exodus of dissidents and wealthy citizens in recent years.
The South Korean coast guard stated that they’d detained an individual for illegally crossing the nation’s border who had been found in the wetlands outside of Incheon, which is located west of Seoul, The Post reported. The man was reportedly wearing a life jacket and helmet, and was outfitted with binoculars and a compass, near a beached, red 1,800-cc jet ski carrying over 50 gallons of fuel.
A South Korean human rights activist who’d visited the man while in detention at the coast guard facility told the Post that the individual was an ethnic Korean with relatives in South Korea named Kwon Pyong, who went by the Chinese name Quan Ping.
Quan is “in good health and good spirits” and is now seeking political asylum in Britain, Canada or the U.S., having previously studied as a college student in Iowa, the human rights activist told The Post.
In 2017, a Chinese court ruled that Quan had insulted the “state authority and the socialist system” and imprisoned him for “inciting subversion of state power” after he allegedly shared content on social media critical of the Chinese government, including a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt that satirized Xi Jinping as Adolf Hitler, according to Front Line Defenders.
After serving 18 months in prison, Quan was slapped with an exit ban and subsequently failed to secure political asylum in South Korea in 2019, the human rights activist told the Post.
Quan’s daring jet ski voyage was apparently precipitated by being unable to lawfully emigrate.
A protester holds a picture of Xi Jinping with a “Hitler moustache” in Germany in 2022. (Photo by Omer Messinger/Getty Images)
Although Quan may have escaped China, his fate remains unclear given that the South Korean government has previously declined high-profile political asylum requests.
In October 2019, over 60 members of the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church in China sought political asylum in South Korea, after the CCP prohibited Chinese Christians from preaching to minors, the church’s leader, Pastor Pan Yongguang, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in March 2022.
While in South Korea, CCP agents allegedly stalked and attempted to intimidate members of the church, representatives from the human rights organization Freedom Seekers International told the DCNF in March 2023.
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The South Korean government ultimately declined to grant the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church asylum, which resulted in the church trying for asylum again in Thailand in August 2022, according to human rights group ChinaAid. After Thai authorities arrested the church members for overstaying their visas, the U.S. government intervened and arranged for the church to resettle in Texas in April 2023.
Neither the Chinese or South Korean embassies immediately responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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