Dong, 68, described the 40-hour journey as terrifying. His rubber dinghy was 3.3 meters long, equipped with an engine. He set out from Weihai in Shandong province with only a few hours of sailing practice under his belt. The sea was choppy. He suffered severe sunburn, his phone battery was running low, and his portable charger had gone flat. Without a digital compass, he said, he feared drifting back toward China.
At one point he dozed off and woke to see his boat bobbing past a large cargo ship. “I would have crashed into it if I stayed asleep for 20 more seconds,” he told BBC Chinese.
On the night of May 25, he spotted a fishing boat and shouted for help. The fishermen alerted authorities. He was pulled ashore in Taean County, South Korea, and later transferred to a refugee center in Incheon. Canada granted him political asylum.
Dong’s path to dissent began in 1999, after 13 years as a police officer. He was fired for signing a petition commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, according to the BBC. In 2001 he was imprisoned for three years for “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge documented by Amnesty International. He was jailed again in 2014 for participating in another Tiananmen commemoration event.
In 2015, Thai authorities deported Dong to China just days before he and his family were scheduled to resettle in Canada after the United Nations granted them refugee status. Chinese authorities sentenced him to 3½ years for inciting subversion and illegal border crossing.
After his release in 2019, Dong attempted to swim to Taiwan’s Kinmen island but was picked up by Chinese fishermen and handed to police. He was barred from leaving the country. In 2020 he fled to Vietnam and lived in hiding in Hanoi for two years, but Vietnam deported him back to China, where he served nearly a year in prison.
Dong was freed again in 2023. The failed attempts steeled his resolve. He planned to journey more than 300 kilometers across the Yellow Sea and along South Korea’s coast toward Japan. Poor weather forced him to reroute to South Korea.
His wife and daughter were already in Canada, where they had been living. Dong said he did not tell his 95-year-old mother about his plan, calling the inability to fulfill his filial duties his “greatest, greatest regret.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told the BBC that the government “handles the entry and exit of its citizens in accordance with the law and that Chinese citizens must abide by the Constitution and the law.”
Dong is not the first Chinese dissident to escape by sea. In 2023, activist Kwon Pyong fled to South Korea on a jet ski and later resettled in the United States.