Another Chinese human rights activist who fled from the People’s Republic of China to the United States has been detained for allegedly violating immigration rules. Forty-eight-year-old Wu Shaoping (shown above) is being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center near Philipsburg, Pennsylvania.
“I came here not only for my freedom, but for the freedom of other Chinese people,” he says, speaking through a translator, his friend Shi Minglei (Lancaster Online, July 21, 2026).
In 2019, he fled China after the government launched a crackdown on human rights lawyers like Wu, who were challenging authorities in civil rights cases on behalf of religious and ethnic minorities. Now, he was being held in a large room with about 60 other detainees in Clearfield County—at a detention facility run by the government he had relied on to protect him from Chinese authorities and support his advocacy….
After arriving in the U.S. on a six-month tourist visa, Wu applied for asylum and received authorization to work. He has been working full-time as an Amazon delivery driver since April of last year to pay the bills, he said, and continues his advocacy work and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party from abroad….
On Tuesday from the federal detention center, Wu said he is struggling to sleep, but the conditions at the facility are much better than the Chinese prisons in which some of his friends and past clients have languished.
Many Chinese prisons lack the basic medical care and meals provided at the facility, he said.
“I’m allowed to talk to my attorney, I’m allowed to talk to my wife, it’s a very big difference,” Wu said. But, he added, “Many people detained here are not criminals, they are ordinary people.”
The Epoch Times reports that just a couple of weeks before being arrested, Wu told the publication “that new laws imposed by China’s government to punish supporters of ethnic minorities in the country were aimed at dissidents of the regime, like himself, who are living overseas.”
There should be a faster way to resolve these cases, and without detention, when all relevant considerations are in the immigrant’s favor. Wu stayed longer than his six-month visa permitted. But he has also applied for asylum, an application that has been pending for years. And he deserves asylum.
Press coverage will help, and Wu seems to be getting it. Chinese dissidents and activists around the world have petitioned for Wu’s release.
Meanwhile, AP reports that Germany “has deported a Uyghur man to China where there are concerns he could be detained as a member of an ethnic group that has been targeted by the Chinese government.” The man is Arafat Adil, “a dual Chinese-Turkish national who has lived in Turkey with his family since they moved there from China in 2017 and who was seeking asylum in Germany.”
Also see:
The Associated Press: “Chinese national who exposed human rights abuses in his homeland is granted asylum to remain in US” (January 28, 2026)
In 2020, Guan Heng “secretly filmed detention facilities in Xinjiang, adding to a body of evidence of what activists say are widespread rights abuses in the Chinese region, where as many as 1 million members of ethnic minorities, especially the Uyghurs, have been locked up.”
The Associated Press: “Germany has deported a Uyghur man to China, his mother says” (July 22, 2026)
