A Chinese dissident who fled after the Tiananmen Square massacre only to return last summer and be arrested has come under harsh criticism from some of his former associates.
They say Shen Tong endangered dozens of activists by contacting them while they were in hiding. And some say Shen misrepresented his role as a leader of the 1989 student uprising."He got dozens of people in trouble," said Gong Xiaoxia, a director of the Newton-based China Information Center. "Some got arrested, some lost their jobs, some had to escape - for what?"
Shen, 24, who graduated from Brandeis University in 1991 and is now a graduate student at Boston University, was detained by police in the Chinese capital on Sept. 1, less than a month after he returned to China.
He was arrested just before he was to announce the formation of a Beijing office of the Democracy for China Fund, a human-rights group based in the Boston suburb of Newton.
Stephen Ng, chairman of The Alliance of Hong Kong Chinese in the United States, said Chinese police rounded up some of the people who met with Shen and confiscated tape recordings he made of their conversations.
"He did a lot of harm by disrupting what we have managed to keep alive," said Ng, an assistant professor of clinical public health at Columbia University in New York. "That was a big blow to the underground movement.
"Most of the people disapproved of his activity. For the sake of unity they just kept quiet."