ESCAPING HONG KONG

By JOHN COLMEY

As a small child, Betty Zhang watched zealous Red Guards beat her mother. At 16 she put up posters on Beijing's Democracy Wall and organized demonstrations in her home village. At 22 she was locked up in a Chinese gulag, judged without trial to be a counter-revolutionary subversive. For months she was confined to a dank room the size of a bed, spending her days in solitary silence, enduring torture with an electric prod and the painful, gratuitous removal of bone marrow from her spine. Released in March 1990 after more than six years in prison, Zhang was denied the right to marry and, when she became pregnant, was ordered to have an abortion. Facing a future where the child she bore in secrecy would never have any rights, Zhang, with her lover and her daughter, managed to slip over the border into Hong Kong in late 1993.

Now Zhang is in another kind of limbo. Still on China's list of wanted criminals, given only temporary sanctuary in the British colony, she has been forced to change her name and stay mostly in hiding, though now and again she mingles in street marches calling for the release of China's democracy activists. She is by no means free, even in Hong Kong. "The Chinese government knows everything I do," says Zhang. "My family back home has been warned several times that I must end my involvement in the democracy movement here." Soon after her escape, she applied for political asylum in any Western country. But she fears she will still be waiting for an answer when the colony rejoins the mainland on July 1. "I'm a nobody in the outside world. Unless I get asylum, I can only sit and wonder how long it will be before they come and get me."

Luckily, that shouldn't happen. One day soon a government official or diplomat is expected to arrive with a visa, a plane ticket, some cash, to drive Zhang and her family to the airport and put them on a plane to freedom. Sources tell TIME that over the next few months more than 40 Chinese dissidents and their families who have languished hidden in Hong Kong with Zhang will at last be granted asylum in the West and secretly flown out of the territory. These departures will mark the end of the legendary "Yellowbird" underground railroad set up to rescue activists after the June 1989 democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. For now, activists negotiating for the dissidents say it's too early to feel relieved. "None of us will celebrate yet," says one. "These are people who have lived years, even decades, in fear, always watching over their shoulders."

The government in Beijing has made little secret of the fact that it regards the exiles as wanted criminals or illegal immigrants, and will not allow them to remain in Hong Kong. Officials there have chastised Hong Kong for admitting dissidents and have demanded Western cooperation in "returning them to justice." More recently Beijing has demanded that the colonial government hand over the list of dissidents still in Hong Kong. Says Albert Ho, a democratic legislator in the colony: "It is obvious these people will not be tolerated after the handover. They must disappear by the change in sovereignty or face persecution."

The last asylum seekers should make it out of Hong Kong just in the nick of time. Countries that jostled one another to provide safe havens after the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations eventually lost interest in taking in little-known dissidents who might jeopardize their delicate relations with Beijing. Now at least eight countries have grudgingly accepted the last batch. France accepted the first dissident late last year, followed by the Netherlands, which accepted two more. Sweden, Denmark and Norway are in line to take a handful, with three more on their way to Canada. But they all--particularly Britain, which has agreed to take 10 to 15 dissidents--want to limit media attention to avoid affronting China. The U.S. has agreed to take as many as eight asylum seekers.

The pressure of the upcoming handover has led some nations that had never been involved, like Italy and Austria, to step forward. "This is not anti-China," says a diplomat. "This is an expression of commonly held ideas and principles about human rights."

When Beijing sought to hunt down the Tiananmen Square protesters, the rush to aid them was one of the international community's, and Hong Kong's, finest hours. Millions of dollars, raised for the protesters before the massacre, were channeled into a rescue effort that the press dubbed Yellowbird and that engineered more than 300 escapes. While well-known figures like Olympic swimmer Yang Yang were whisked away to asylum, less famous fugitives like Zhang were stuck in Hong Kong.

Beijing may raise a ruckus against Western countries that take in Zhang and the others, but privately the government may also be relieved. Kenneth Chow, a Hong Kong lawyer on Beijing's handpicked advisory committee, says the dissidents would probably be warned to toe the line. If they don't, "you either arrest them or let them wander about and create damage. You don't want to do either, so the best way is someone else's taking them."

--With reporting by Mary Binks/Hong Kong

With reporting by MARY BINKS/HONG KONG