About a month ago, the Chinese dissident Dong Guangping spent 36 hours at sea in an inflatable rubber boat with a sputtering engine, a peeling face and a dying phone before getting detained in South Korea.
But on Saturday, Mr. Dong, 68, told The New York Times that he had flown to Toronto, ending a treacherous and decade-long search for freedom. He also recounted details of his voyage across the Yellow Sea from China to South Korea for the first time.
Mr. Dong, a critic of China’s ruling Communist Party, had been trying for more than 10 years to escape his country, where he was imprisoned several times and faced police surveillance and an exit ban. He was thrown out of Thailand and Vietnam, and picked up by mainland Chinese fishermen as he attempted to swim to Taiwan.
Mr. Dong’s friends hoped that his recent escape across the Yellow Sea to South Korea would end differently — and they were right.
His journey started before sunrise on May 24, when he set off from the coastal Chinese city of Weihai in a gray inflatable boat.
Three years earlier, another Chinese dissident had fled to South Korea by jet ski and was eventually permitted to leave after facing months of detention and legal limbo.
