AN Australian citizen who has spent the past eight years in a Chinese jail on spying charges returned home today.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Wang Jianping arrived in Australia today, after spending the two weeks since his early release from prison battling to return home.
"We are delighted to have been able to assist with his release from prison," Mr Downer told journalists.
"I'm also pleased that Wang Jianping has been able to get his exit documents and come back to Australia and be reunited with his mother, who of course is quite an elderly woman."
Mr Wang, now 55, was jailed in 1983 after being accused of passing Chinese state secrets to an Australian diplomat with whom he had developed a close friendship.
But he managed to escape in 1986 and the then Labor government approved his passage to Australia where he became a citizen in 1988.
He returned to China in 1995 on a business trip but was sent back to jail to serve the rest of his sentence plus an additional term for escaping.
Chinese authorities agreed to release him earlier this month, three years before his sentence was up, after Australian representations during the visit by China's president and foreign minister.
Mr Downer defended Australia's handling of the case.
"In this particular case the government's invested a great deal of time to get Wang Jianping released," he said.
"He was imprisoned under Chinese law and we don't run the legal system in China.
"We don't run the legal system of any country except Australia, and when people travel overseas they have to be very careful in how they deal with the legal situation there."
Mr Wang's mother lives in Canberra.
