 A former US Pentagon official says asylum would have already been granted to defecting Chinese embassy official Chen Yonglin if he was in America. Dan Blumenthal, a China analyst for the American Enterprise Institute, was the Pentagon's senior director on China. Mr Chen claims China is using its trade agreement to apply pressure on Australia to ignore human rights issues and he has offered more specific information to help his case for asylum. But Mr Blumenthal has told the ABC's Lateline program he is surprised Mr Chen's plea has so far failed. "The Congress [in the US] would be pushing very hard to provide him with protection status or asylum," he said. Mr Blumenthal believes the US is following Mr Chen's case and Australia's handling of it very closely because of tension between China and Taiwan. |