Chinese Christian dissident seeks U.S. exile

BEIJING (Reuters) - One of China's most prominent Christian dissidents, Yu Jie, said on Friday he has sought exile in the United States, vowing to give a graphic account of a year under house arrest and episodes of torture during a crackdown on dissent in China last year.

Yu said he would recount the abuse in testimony before a U.S. Congress panel as early as next week, highlighting the issue ahead of a possible visit to Washington by Chinese leader-in-waiting, Vice President Xi Jinping, in the coming months.

Yu said authorities became heavy-handed after his fellow dissident, Liu Xiaobo, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

"My circumstances dramatically worsened, and I experienced extremely cruel torture," Yu told Reuters by telephone from a location near Washington D.C.

"A few days before the ceremony for awarding Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Prize, I was kidnapped and several people stripped me and beat me to the point where I collapsed and had to be taken to hospital to be saved."

Yu said he then endured months of memory loss, sleeplessness and pain. Police, he said, kept him largely confined to his home on the outskirts of Beijing for much of 2011.

During the first half of 2011, Chinese police detained hundreds of dissidents, activists and protest organizers when the Communist Party sought to prevent protests inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Arab world.

Liu was convicted in 2009 on charges of inciting subversion and sentenced to 11 years in jail. His jailing and secretive house arrest of his wife Liu Xia, have become the focus of an international outcry over China's punishment of dissent.

China's Communist Party is preparing for a leadership handover late this year to Vice President Xi, and the party's determination to fend off challenges to its rule is likely to intensify before then.

Yu did not say whether he formally sought asylum in the United States for himself and his wife and young son, who both left China with him. He has visited the United States many times. Authorities had warned him to keep quiet ahead of his fastest trip, he said.

"Before I left, a senior officer with state security told me that I'd be allowed to go to the United States and can return, but I should know that if I do things in the U.S. that they don't like, they won't let me back," said Yu.

On Thursday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it did not know about Yu's flight into exile a day earlier.

"China has too many people, and I don't know each of them," the ministry spokesman Liu Weimin, said in answer to a question about Yu. "I don't know about this person."

A Christian for the past decade, Bookish-looking Yu, 38, has been among the most outspoken critics of the Communist Party's controls on religion and political criticism. In 2006, he and two other dissidents met President George W. Bush in the White House.

Yu's writings have been banned from published in mainland China for over five years after he drew nationwide attention as one of several young dissident essayists. He however continued publishing works in Hong Kong and abroad.

Yu told friends that he was dragged from his home by police who put a hood over this head and took him to a dark room, said one of those friends, Wang Yi, a writer and Christian pastor in southwest China.

"At night, some police -- it seems they were police -- rushed in, stripped off the hood and all his clothes, and began beating him," Wang told Reuters by telephone.

"A day or two later, an officer told him that they were acting under orders from the top, and that they would never allow another Liu Xiaobo to emerge."

(Editing by Ed Lane)