From Fujian to Mountville: How a Chinese dissident made Lancaster County his new home | Local News

Wu Shaoping had already beaten the odds by getting admitted to the top middle and high school in Zhenghe County, Fujian Province. From a poor family in the countryside, Wu was on track to punch his ticket to China’s economic renaissance.

But at the end of his junior year in 1998, school administrators suddenly imposed a 150 yuan fee for computer classes. Wu and several other students from rural villages were incensed. Many families in their hometowns at the time survived on about 1,000 yuan a year, according to Wu. That is equivalent to about $120 in 1998 dollars, according to data from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

“For students like us, from rural backgrounds, it was a massive expense, and for me personally, it was an especially heavy burden,” Wu wrote in a narrative of his early life that he shared with LNP | LancasterOnline.

Wu, who is still learning English, used translation apps and bilingual friends to share his dangerous path to becoming a human rights advocate in China, and how he and his family escaped to the U.S. and eventually landed in Lancaster County.

Both of Wu’s parents had died of illness by the time he was 11. Wu’s sister joined him in moving to Zhenghe County in the early 1990s to find work and help Wu survive.

“My sister and I lived a very hard life,” Wu wrote in the narrative. “We rarely ate meat — perhaps once a month — and often ran short of cooking oil and food staples.” Wu’s sister sold fruit on the street while he went to school. “Selling fruit brought in only a few yuan daily – barely enough to scrape by.”

To protest the 150 yuan fee, Wu and four other students from rural areas printed and disseminated flyers at the school urging their fellow students to oppose the fee together. “Soon the entire student body was refusing to pay the fee,” Wu wrote.

The protest came at enormous risk. The owner of the print shop the students used to make flyers told them police later came to the shop to investigate.

Ultimately, the protest delivered a partial result. Students and their families paid the fee the following year, but instead of entitling students to take one class a week, the fee covered two classes a week. But Wu had learned that injustice could be challenged.

“The Chinese government showed a complete disregard for the hardships of life at the bottom of the social ladder,” Wu wrote. “It was precisely this kind of grueling existence that exposed me to the harm public authority inflicts on ordinary people and to the inequalities within society.”

Crackdown

After graduating from high school in 1999, Wu became a commercial attorney and moved his family to Shanghai in 2010 to further his career.

At the time, Shanghai was experiencing explosive growth. In the decade prior, the city’s population had grown by 37% to 23 million. But while Chinese government officials promoted Shanghai as an incredible success story, Wu saw poverty and marginalization beneath the glittering skyline.

In the ensuing years, Wu began to defend individuals against government actions. His clients included families who had been evicted from their homes by the government and received little compensation, and religious dissidents who were accused of disobeying tight regulations regarding religious expression.

In May 2019, a video circulated online of Wu being accosted by a judge in a Chinese courtroom.

“Judge, please let me finish my defense,” Wu says in the clip, according to an English translation from the U.S.-based news service NTD News, formed by members of Falun Gong, a Chinese religious movement that was banned in the country during the 1990s. The clip is from May 2019, according to NTD News.

The judge then orders law enforcement officers to remove Wu. Police grab him and pull him out of the camera’s frame.

“That is kind of everyday life for human rights lawyers in China, even much worse,” said Maya Wang, deputy China director at Humans Rights Watch, a nonprofit that investigates and reports on human rights abuses worldwide. The retaliation campaign has not let up in the years since, she said.

Wu’s controversial legal work coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s assent to power in the 2010s. Under Xi, repression and harassment of religious and ethnic minorities intensified in China, according to Wang.

“We’ve seen a wholesale crackdown on human rights” in China since then, Wang said.

International human rights organizations fear that because of his legal work defending religious minorities and political dissidents, Wu likely would be subject to arrest, torture and a long prison stay if he returned to his home country, Wang said.

“It’s an incredibly tough environment and it’s gotten even tougher in the last few years” for lawyers willing to challenge Chinese officials on the law, Wang said.

‘Arbitrary’ arrests

In December 2019, Wu was one of about 20 human rights lawyers who met over a weekend to discuss strategy for their embattled pro-democracy human rights movement in China.

Shortly after the meeting, several of Wu’s colleagues disappeared. Chinese officials later announced charges against three lawyers for “subversion of state power,” including Cheng Yuan, a prominent civil rights lawyer in China who was known for founding an organization that defended individuals against health-based discrimination, such as getting fired for being HIV-positive.

A panel of experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council called the arrests “arbitrary” under international law.

In a secret 2021 trial, Yuan was sentenced to five years of imprisonment, according to Yuan’s wife, Shi Minglei. Shi, who now lives in Minnesota, has closely followed Wu’s case and publicly advocated for him. She has served as an interpreter for LNP | LancasterOnline during interviews with Wu and his wife, Li Caoliu.

After Yuan’s arrest, Chinese authorities interrogated Shi for hours, put her on house arrest, froze her bank accounts and expelled her daughter from school, Shi said.

Yuan was released from prison in 2024, Shi said, but he is banned from leaving China.

Still under surveillance, Shi said she and her five-year-old daughter were able to evade Chinese authorities by traveling to Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport during Lunar New Year celebrations in 2021, when many Chinese citizens travel to usher in the holiday with family. Shi also said the regional security forces in Guangzhou were less likely to arrest her for bureaucratic reasons.

Shi and her daughter flew to Turkey in February. With help from the U.S.-based nonprofit ChinaAid and U.S. government officials, Shi was able to get temporary permission to enter the U.S. under a “parole provision” in U.S. immigration law that allows the secretary of Homeland Security discretion to allow certain individuals to enter the U.S. without a visa “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that publishes research and analysis for U.S. lawmakers.

Shi and her daughter arrived in the U.S. in April 2021, she said. Shi still advocates for justice for her husband from the U.S.

Like Wu, Shi and her daughter applied for asylum before their parole status expired. They are still waiting for an interview five years later, she said.

Wu was arrested by ICE on July 15 in Mount Holly Springs under the same pending asylum status as Shi’s. A borough police officer stopped Wu for allegedly failing to stop at a stop sign. After securing a bond payment, Wu was released Friday evening from the detention center.

Wu claims he did not fail to stop at the Mount Holly Springs stop sign and that police had no reason to pull him over.

The fact that U.S. authorities arrested Wu after he escaped the dragnet in China is troubling for other activists and their families seeking a safe haven in the U.S., Shi said.

“The only reason we’re here is because we don’t want our children to live in fear,” Shi said. Now, that fear has reached them in their adopted home, she said.

Stateside and Lancaster

Worried that he could be next, Wu went to the U.S. embassy in the aftermath of his colleagues’ arrests. U.S. officials approved Wu for a six-month tourist visa.

The U.S. requires citizens from certain countries, including China, to apply for tourist visas and sit for an interview. Citizens of nations allied with the U.S. are able to bypass that process.

He arrived in New York City on Dec. 30, 2019, according to ICE.

A few weeks later, Wu grew worried Chinese authorities would ban his wife and daughter from leaving the country as an intimidation measure.

In January 2020, Wu instructed his wife not to tell friends and family they were planning to flee the country. He told his wife to get a train to Shenzhen, which shares a land border with Hong Kong, and to buy tickets in person rather than online, to avoid detection by Chinese authorities. They bought a ticket to a closer stop rather than their actual destination of Shenzhen, Wu said, to further avoid suspicion from Chinese authorities. The plan worked. His wife and daughter flew to New York after staying a week in Hong Kong, Wu said.

After a couple years in New York, Wu and his wife began dreaming of a quieter lifestyle. They began to research homes outside New York and stumbled on Lancaster County, Wu said.

With no friends or connections in the area, Wu and his family visited and became enchanted with the landscape and lifestyle. They learned about Amish communities and how they lived peacefully in the area as a religious minority.

“We were captivated as soon as we arrived here,” Wu said.

Settling down in Mountville was an adjustment, Wu said, but he and his family are happy there.

“Our neighbors are so nice,” Wu said.

Christian community

At a Texas retreat for Chinese activists in 2021, Wu told Pastor Bob Fu that he was ready to be baptized.

Wu had become interested in Christianity after representing Chinese Christians against crackdowns by Chinese authorities. Christian churches in China are heavily regulated and monitored by the government, which has led to an unsanctioned church movement in the country.

International researchers in recent years have estimated that China is home to about 100 million Christians, though estimates vary.

Wu and his family have since become a regular presence at the Chinese Bible Church of Lancaster in West Hempfield Township.

“A lot of human rights lawyers in China are Christians, a lot of them also are Falun Gong practitioners because they believe people should not be persecuted, so a lot of them are strong religious freedom advocates,” Wang at Human Rights Watch said.

Pastor Fu, who had his own harrowing journey to the U.S. as a Chinese Christian dissident in the 1990s, has become a prominent voice against the Chinese Communist Party from abroad.

His organization, ChinaAid, helped coordinate a petition from Chinese activists calling for Wu’s release from ICE detention in Clearfield County. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey delivered the petition to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this month, according to Fu.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker also became involved in Wu’s case, according to Fu.

Eric Reath, a spokesman for Smucker, said the Congressman’s office remains in touch with Wu’s team, but declined to comment further. “We cannot comment on ongoing cases,” Reath wrote in an email Friday.

Asylum purgatory

Before his tourist visa expired, Wu applied for asylum in the U.S., a legal status created for individuals experiencing persecution or retaliation for political or religious reasons.

Six years later, Wu has yet to be scheduled for an interview with immigration officials regarding his application.

“A lot of times in life, it’s first in, first out — right now it’s first in, last out,” said John Visher, a Montgomery County-based immigration attorney representing Wu. “I just applied for another case less than two months ago, and their asylum interview happened last week.”

Visher, a former U.S. Navy lawyer who was based in Asia for almost three decades, said immigration lawyers like himself have witnessed the U.S. immigration system become more unpredictable since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, Visher said. People with no criminal record who followed the asylum process correctly are being arrested at seemingly arbitrary points in their case.

Visher said a fellow immigration attorney told him one of his clients was arrested by ICE at his asylum interview.

“There’s no pattern,” Visher said.

In Trump’s second term, federal immigration authorities have increasingly treated asylum applicants as illegal aliens in violation of immigration law.

“Pending applications do NOT confer legal status,” a DHS spokesman wrote in an email last week. “Wu entered the U.S. on a visa on December 30, 2019, and overstayed for six years after it expired on June 29, 2020. All of his claims will be heard by a Justice Department immigration judge and he will receive full due process. This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”

Immigration lawyers like Visher are running into due-process problems as a result, he said. If a judge denies a release on bond, he said, the only course of action is a habeas corpus petition in federal court to argue their client is being wrongfully detained.

“It’s really frustrating,” Visher said. “It’s like ICE just arrests my client and now there’s no way out.”

Other aspects of Wu’s immigration case following his arrest also had Visher scratching his head. During a bond hearing last week, an immigration judge agreed to release Wu on a $1,500 bond, lower than both the $11,000 bond a government lawyer requested and Wu’s own $5,000 request.

“That is so strange; I mean, that just doesn’t happen in immigration court,” Visher said.

The unusually low bond amount may be the product of a public pressure campaign from U.S. lawmakers – including Smucker – Chinese-American activists and newsmedia coverage, Visher said.

“In places like China, you know, it takes a lot of courage to stand up and it takes a lot more courage when you see others (like you) suffering in prison,” Wang said.