The Economist
March 14, 2015
The story of Chen Guangcheng illustrates how a single determined dissident in the Chinese countryside can take on a repressive government—and win.
The departure from Beijing on May 19th 2012 of Chen Guangcheng, his wife and two children on a plane bound for America marked the end of the most dramatic story of a dissident’s escape from persecution in Communist-ruled China. Mr Chen’s flight from imprisonment in his own home, where he had been kept under watch by hundreds of guards; his arrival at the American embassy in Beijing with Chinese agents in hot pursuit; and the high-level wrangling between America and China that eventually allowed him to head into exile, had the trappings of a Hollywood thriller. And to cap it all, he is blind.
“The Barefoot Lawyer”, Mr Chen’s memoir of his struggle with the thuggery of the state in the poor village in eastern China where he grew up, and of his eventual flight, is a powerful reminder of how some aspects of the country remain unchanged despite its rapidly growing prosperity. The tyranny he describes in his part of the countryside is perhaps at the extreme end of a range of rural, political climates. But many farmers across China will recognise the untrammelled power of local officialdom that Mr Chen endured, even if their own dealings with it may not always be so grim.
There is an encouraging theme in Mr Chen’s story, too. Despite the horrors that he and many of his fellow villagers experienced, some ordinary Chinese are growing more daring. Mr Chen’s efforts, as a self-taught expert in the law, to expose one particular abuse—the subjection of 130,000 people in his prefecture, Linyi, to forced abortions and sterilisations—is an example of a kind of grassroots activism that has become increasingly common in recent years. The penalties for such outspokenness can be severe: Mr Chen was imprisoned for four years before he was put under house arrest in 2010, with goons deployed to prevent him escaping or receiving visitors. Those who tried to penetrate the cordon were often roughed up.
But it is Mr Chen’s dogged determination to scale another wall around him—the ubiquitous prejudice against the blind—that makes his memoir truly inspiring. “People had looked down on me from the time I was small: I was defective, incapable of providing for myself, not worth investing time and effort in,” he writes. Mr Chen began his primary-school education around the age of 18 at a state-run boarding school for the blind, where he had too little money to afford to buy enough food; he ended up severely malnourished.
Such injustices turned Mr Chen into a campaigner. He and his wife, Yuan Wei-jing, toured rural areas to record abuses by the local family-planning authorities, against whom they attempted to bring a class-action lawsuit. Ms Yuan’s courtship of Mr Chen in defiance of her parents’ wishes (his blindness and poverty did not endear him to them) is another remarkable subplot. So too is their own decision to defy the one-child policy, for which officials tried to fine them tens of thousands of yuan—the equivalent of several years’ income for the average Chinese farmer. He put them off, saying he would have to borrow the money. They gave up; he was confined to his home and could not leave.
Mr Chen’s combative spirit seems never to desert him. His flight from his village to the American embassy is gripping. Only his wife knew about the escape plan, he says; he considered it too dangerous even to tell his mother. On his own, over the course of several hours in daylight, he climbed a series of walls from one neighbouring house to the next, choking back the pain of a broken foot. After nightfall, he made a break for it, under the spotlights set up by his captors. Beyond the village, relatives and friends helped him make it to Beijing, where one of them persuaded him to seek refuge at the American embassy.
American diplomats saw his firmness; to their frustration he changed his mind about a plan, painstakingly agreed on with Chinese officials, that he stay in China and be allowed to study at university. Not trusting the government, he asked to leave for America instead. Negotiations between the two countries had to begin afresh. This was an embarrassment for America’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who was visiting Beijing at the time.
The realpolitik of America’s diplomacy with China irks Mr Chen, who says he once believed “with every cell” in his body that America had “both the commitment and the strength to protect the rights of the individual over the interests of a dictatorship.” He believes that American officials wanted him to leave the embassy as soon as possible in order to avoid harming their country’s relations with China. He suspects them of trying to sell him a plan based on weak assurances from the Chinese that his persecution would end. “When negotiating with a government run by hooligans,” he writes, America “had simply given in”.
But the administration did manage to persuade China to let him leave the country. This was a climbdown by Chinese officials, who were said to be so enraged that they wanted to brand him a traitor. Numerous dissidents had made it to America before, but since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 none had been helped so overtly by the Americans.
It would have been easy for Chinese police to seize Mr Chen: he had left the embassy for treatment in a Beijing hospital. Realpolitik, however, pervades the diplomacy of both countries. China was clearly as anxious as the Americans were not to let the case damage a vital relationship. Mr Chen, for all his grumbling, picked the right embassy to run to.
