Chinese wife goes after Yahoo to free her husband from prison

Yu Ling’s eyes well up and her hand instinctively pats her heart at the mention of her husband.

Wang Xiaoning, her partner of 27 years, has been sitting in a Chinese prison since September 2002. He is serving a 10-year sentence for using the Internet to advocate democracy.

Two weeks ago, Mrs. Yu, 55, came to the U.S. to find a lawyer and sue Yahoo Inc.

She blames the Sunnyvale, Calif., search giant for providing evidence that helped Chinese authorities convict Mr. Wang, 57.

“I have to help my husband,” she explains through a translator. “Yahoo is wrong. … I hope Yahoo is punished and the other companies learn from it.”

Mrs. Yu, who is in Fairfax to meet with lawyers, has yet to file her planned lawsuit.

As early as 2000, Mr. Wang had written articles critical of the Chinese Communist Party and distributed them through a Yahoo Group function and, when that stopped working, e-mails. His pro-democracy essays — with titles like “To Correctly Understand China’s Constitution and Propel the Democratization by Using the Constitution” — labeled the socialist government an “authoritarian dictatorship” and called for multiparty elections.

Mrs. Yu says she was aware of her husband’s writings, but stopped short of asking him about them. Government agents had previously visited their home to interview him, but Mr. Wang’s Sept. 1, 2002, arrest came as a shock.

That day, a Sunday, Mrs. Yu was upstairs cleaning her Beijing home while her husband sat at the computer. The telephone rang, her husband picked up, and the caller asked if he was at home.

“He said ‘Yes, I’m here,’ ” she recalls, trembling. The caller hung up and minutes later, a group of Beijing security officials barged in, arresting Mr. Wang on the spot. “They give me notice of detention and take pictures, everything. They take away two computers, disks, information.”

The next time she saw him was March 15, 2004. He was in a Beijing detention center following his conviction by the First Intermediary People’s Court for inciting “the subversion of state power.” His appeal was rejected later that year.

Both court opinions cited information provided by Yahoo Hong Kong.

Mrs. Yu says the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who in 2005 was sentenced to 10 years in prison for distributing an internal Communist Party document to an overseas Web site, inspired her to sue Yahoo. That case, in addition to at least two others, Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun, relied on evidence supplied by Yahoo Hong Kong.

Mrs. Yu, who is allowed to see her husband once for 30 minutes each month, last saw him March 5. She told him she was going to the U.S. but did not tell him the purpose of her trip, which was arranged by outspoken Chinese dissident Harry Wu.

The China dilemma — the question of whether a company should, as a cost of doing business in a repressive but potentially lucrative country, cooperate with government officials and agree to censorship — is an issue that Internet companies in particular are grappling with and not unique to Yahoo. Rival Internet companies Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are required to filter content in China as well.

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