A federal appeals court has granted asylum to a Chinese bureaucrat whose job was to confiscate pro-democracy books but who engaged in acts of private protest against the communist government.

Xu Sheng Gao, 45, once led a contingent of 36 inspectors tasked with scouring the bookstores of the Chinese seaport of Qingdao, formerly known as Tsingtao, for democratic texts and pornographic titles alike. By 1999, after seven years with the Cultural Management Bureau of Qingdao, Mr. Gao’s resolve to enforce censorship had weakened, his lawyer, Gang Zhou, recounts in court papers.

Mr. Gao began to take an interest in books that “tell peoples the freedom of the Western Countries,” according to his testimony in the court record. He brought the banned literature home and on several occasions loaned the books to friends, according to court documents.

A routine inspection of a bookstore set in motion Mr. Gao’s flight from China. On the morning of October 3, 2000, Mr. Gao told a bookseller to throw away a certain banned political title that he had found. His failure to ticket the seller or confiscate the book was noticed by a colleague, who reported the oversight to higher-ups, according to Mr. Gao’s asylum application.

While being questioned by the police, Mr. Gao was beaten and pistol-whipped, according to court documents. Fearing prosecution for helping booksellers avoid the censor, Mr. Gao fled the country, coming to New York via San Francisco. His wife later joined him.

Yesterday a panel of judges on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan granted Mr. Gao’s asylum plea, overturning two lower courts that had classified Mr. Gao as a “persecutor” due to the nature of his government job.

Justice Department lawyers had sought his deportation. “Without his written reports of the evidence elicited by himself and his subordinates, the Chinese Communist Government’s policy of persecution of these vendors for selling books and materials expressing political opinions in opposition to the official Communist Party line could not succeed,” the government wrote in a brief.

The 2nd Circuit opinion, written by Judge Rosemary Pooler, pointed out that Mr. Gao never actually carried out any arrests or prosecutions of booksellers; nor were Mr. Gao’s citations of booksellers ever known to have led to their jailing.

“While there is no question that political dissidents can face harsh treatment in China, the record must contain some evidence connecting Gao’s specific actions to those acts of persecution before he can be labeled a ‘persecutor,'” Judge Pooler wrote in her opinion, which was joined by Judges Barrington Parker and Richard Wesley.

Mr. Gao is still in an immigration lock-up in Elizabeth, N.J., where he has been held since March. In a letter to the court sent in June, he reported that since being detained he had grown ill and considered suicide.

“My spirit is very bad and at times I even have the thoughts of hurting myself,” he wrote, according to a translation of the letter. At one point he had even sought to withdraw his appeal so he could be promptly deported back to China, according to documents.