ESCAPING HONG KONG

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."

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