At the Shanghai airport on August 8, 2006, Yuan Sheng, the co-captain of flight MU583/586, was about to take off for Los Angeles. What he did not know was that his life would change in the next 24 hours and that he might never see his wife and daughter again.
Yuang Sheng, 39, had been a pilot with the Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines for 18 years. He had an impressive record of 12,400 hours of safe flying. Since 1995, he regularly flew the Shanghai-Los Angeles route. This time he was the co-captain responsible for the return flight.
The 300-plus passengers began boarding at around 2 p.m. As the return route co-captain, Yuan did not have much to do. He saw a young man in charge of ground safety and noticed he had the accent of someone from his hometown—Shandong Province—so he began chatting with him. He talked to him about the book the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, the withdrawals of the Chinese people from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the persecution of Falun Gong in China. Yuan also suggested to him that he quit the CCP. They chatted for over half an hour before the young man left.
A moment later, the young man returned with four uniformed airport policemen. They then called two more local policemen to the site. First, they confiscated Yuan’s work ID and told him loudly, "You definitely can’t leave today! This issue concerns state security. It’s very serious!" They asked the crew to close the airplane door and leave without Yuan.
The passengers had already boarded and the airplane was ready to take off. The crew argued with the police and explained that it was too late to find someone to replace their co-captain.
The local police called in their supervisor, who took Yuan’s information and then said, "You will have to tell us all the details of this matter when you return from the United States." He returned the ID to Yuan and allowed him to board his airplane, as keeping an international flight from taking off was no small responsibility.
On the flight to Los Angeles, Yuan Sheng felt upset and dazed. Based on his knowledge of the CCP, he knew that real trouble awaited him when he returned to Shanghai. He thought a lot about what was happening in China.
He remembered how, at the end of 1997, he started practicing Falun Gong after a friend told him about the practice. He found his health improved, and he had more confidence. He remembered how, after the persecution started on July 20, 1999, when he flew back to Shanghai from the United States, Eastern Airlines made him go through forced brainwashing sessions because he practiced Falun Gong. His supervisors demanded that he write a guarantee letter to give up Falun Gong. If he refused, they would not have allowed him to continue being a pilot. He wrote the letter in order to keep his job, but he cried afterward. It was the only time in his adult life that he ever cried.{mospagebreak}
He remembered hearing of many cases of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners right in his own neighborhood. At the time of the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), the police secretly arrested many practitioners, including several living on Wuzhong Street near his home.
He also remembered how, in the building next to the Airline Office Building, the police arrested a Falun Dafa practitioner after a housekeeper found a copy of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party in an office. They didn’t have a warrant or follow any due process of law.
He knew from these experiences that the police took any incident related to the Nine Commentaries very seriously. The spread of the book and the withdrawals from the Communist Party scared Party leaders. He knew of people who had been sentenced to four-year prison terms just for possessing one copy of the Nine Commentaries.
After landing in Los Angeles, Yuan Sheng called his home. His 12-year-old daughter sounded happy on the phone. Yuan figured that the police had not yet gone there. They would wait for him at the Shanghai airport and arrest him once he passed through customs. Only then would they ransack his home. He was sure that he would not see his family again, even if he flew back to Shanghai.
He spoke to his wife, told her what happened, and explained to her why he could not come back. He asked her opinion. She said to him, crying, "Don’t speak any more! It’s not safe to talk on the phone; please make your own decision."
Flight MU586 was scheduled to arrive in Shanghai at around 6:30 p.m. on August 11, 2006, but its co-captain, Yuan Sheng, was not on board—he decided to apply for political asylum in the United States.
The defection of a Chinese airline captain has drawn attention to the Chinese people’s withdrawals from the CCP and the Chinese regime’s heavy-handed suppression, but not in China. For more than 20 months after the publication of the Nine Commentaries and the subsequent mass renunciations of the CCP, the Chinese regime has kept the facts hidden from the public. On August 11, a reporter from The Epoch Times called the Department of Propaganda and the Department of Security of China Eastern Airlines in Pudong to inquire about the incident. All responded, "We don’t know [anything about the situation]."
As The Epoch Times Commentator Zhang Tianliang points out, the Nine Commentaries has never been openly banned in China, but the Chinese police consider possessing or talking about this book to be an "issue concerning state security. It’s very serious!" After Yuan Sheng’s defection, China Eastern Airlines made a statement that carefully avoided any mention of the Nine Commentaries or the withdrawals from the CCP.
In the safety of the United States, however, Yuan Sheng is now free to talk openly and without fear about the Nine Commentaries and about the persecution. This couldn’t happen in China.