Page 1 of
3 Chen's
switch spoils daring US
dance By Peter Lee
With
news reports that legal activist Chen Guangcheng
has agreed to be resettled inside China with his
family away from his tormenters in Shandong
province, to an as yet undisclosed university
where he can pursue his legal studies, Washington
and Beijing probably both breathed sighs of
relief.
The United States does not have to
scupper the new round of Strategic Economic
Dialogue (SED) with China (which started on
Thursday in Beijing as scheduled) in order to live
up to its role as human-rights champion and
scourge of communist authoritarianism by granting
asylum to Chen.
The People's Republic of
China (PRC) can, however belatedly and grudgingly,
have an opportunity for its Judge Bao moment:
acting as the benevolent protector of deserving
innocents suffering at the hands of brutal and
corrupt local authorities (as that venerable
jurist has done in
countless books and TV serials).
But not
so fast.
The sheen went off the deal with
alarming speed as reporters and skeptical
activists communicated with an increasingly
agitated Chen in Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing.
Reunited with his family, he learned from his wife
of her harsh treatment in Shandong after his
flight, and her desire not to stay in China. Chen
is now saying he wants to go to the United States
with his family, in a switch certain to embarrass
and irritate the Barack Obama administration.
Chen, 41, blind from an early age and
self-taught in the law, advocates for women's
rights and the poor. He is best known for exposing
alleged abuses in official family planning policy,
often involving claims of violence and forced
abortions.
In 2005, he organized a
class-action lawsuit against the city of Linyi in
Shandong for excessive enforcement of the
one-child policy. As a result of this lawsuit,
Chen was placed under house arrest from September
2005 to March 2006, with a formal arrest in June
2006. On August 24, 2006, Chen was sentenced to
four years and three months for "damaging property
and organizing a mob to disturb traffic".
He was released on September 8, 2010, but
remained under house arrest or "soft detention" at
his home in Dongshigu Village. On April 22 this
year, Chen escaped his house and fled to the US
Embassy in Beijing. After negotiations with the
Chinese government he left the embassy for medical
treatment on May 2.
Chen is receiving a
sympathetic hearing, if not encouragement, from
Bob Fu of China Aid. China Aid is a non-profit in
Midland, Texas, that lobbies for religious freedom
and on behalf of Christian house churches in
China. Fu has spoken proudly of his organization's
close relationship with Chen during his difficult
years in China. Fu was perhaps the first person
overseas that Chen contacted after his escape.
Fu would prefer that Chen Guangcheng go to
the United States "for some peaceful time" instead
of remaining in China, as he told the Texas
Tribune well before the deal began to unravel.
Even though Chen declined the offer
to come to the United States after his escape,
Fu said Chen should reconsider.
"I
cannot feel there is a viable option for him to
continue in China given the current
environment," Fu said. "My hope is, if Chen is
able to get permission from China to have his
family members come to the US for some time,
some peaceful time, and receive some medical
treatment, the US can facilitate that effort."
[1]
One hears echoes of Fu's argument
in Chen's statement after he entered Chaoyang
Hospital:
The British television program
Channel 4 News also interviewed Mr Chen, who
reportedly said: "My biggest wish is to leave
the country with my family and rest for a while.
I haven't had a rest day in seven years." [2]
The US State Department, however, is
pushing back across the board at the implication
that they slighted Chen's desires and dumped him
back into Chinese hands.
What started out
as a muted triumph for US diplomacy may turn into
an episode of unexpected and unwelcome
estrangement between the US government and the
human-rights and democracy activists it wishes to
champion, and a win for China if Chen slides
uncertainly into exile and irrelevance, his heroic
legacy tarnished by an embarrassing fiasco. [3]
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is
allowing Chen to have free access to the press to
make a spectacle of his handwringing. Most
recently, CNN:
"I would like to say to President
Obama - please do everything you can to get our
family out," Chen told CNN, according to a
translation of his quote. He also accused US
Embassy officials of pushing him hard to leave
on Wednesday.
"The embassy kept lobbying
me to leave and promised to have people stay
with me in the hospital, but this afternoon as
soon as I checked into the hospital room, I
noticed they were all gone."
CNN
correspondent Stan Grant said he had interviewed
Chen in his Beijing hospital bed at around 3 am
Thursday (1900 GMT Wednesday) with his wife
[Yuan Weijing] sitting by his bedside.
[4]
While events sort themselves out
in Beijing, conspiracy theorists can start their
engines and explore the interesting question of
how a blind man, allegedly under video
surveillance and with local blocking of cell
phones, was able to escape house arrest, evade
dozens of goons charged with keeping him bottled
up, and rendezvous with a sympathizer to drive
away from the town ... and have his departure not
detected for several days.
Local security
was pretty extensive, as Chen himself stated in
his video addressed to Premier Wen Jiabao, which
he recorded in Beijing after his escape. As
translated by Steven Jiang of CNN:
From what I learned, other than
various officials, each team guarding me has
more than 20 people. They have three teams with
a total of 70 to 80 people. When more netizens
tried to visit me recently, they had several
hundred people at one time and completely sealed
off my village.
Starting with my home,
they station a team inside the house and another
one outside guarding the four corners. Further
out, they block every road leading to my house,
all the way to the village entrance. They even
have 7 to 8 people guarding bridges in
neighboring villages. These corrupt officials
draw people from neighboring villages into this
and they have cars patrolling areas within a
five-kilometer radius of my village or even
further.
Besides all these layers of
security around my house - I think there are
seven to eight layers - they have also numbered
all the roads leading to my village, going up to
28 with guards assigned to them daily. The whole
situation is just so over the top. I understand
the number of officials and policemen who
participate in my persecution adds up to some
100 people. [5]
Reggie Littlejohn,
president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, a
non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to
ending forced sterilization and abortions, told
Asia Times Online that Chen's escape was "a
miracle". That was a characterization that China
Aid was happy to echo.
Artist, dissident
and gadfly Ai Weiwei puckishly declared that
Chen's blindness was an advantage in his
night-time escape: "It's all the same to him." But
clearly it wasn't, at least in the matter of
physical impediments like ponds and rivers.
Littlejohn told Asia Times Online that she
learned via a Skype session with He Peirong,
driver of the vehicle that spirited Chen to
Beijing, just prior to her detention by public
security personnel, that Chen had taken a spill in
some water on his way and showed up soaking wet;
news reports in Beijing reported he had also hurt
his leg climbing over a wall.
These
circumstances raise the question of why he did not
bring his (sighted) wife and child along on the
escape, especially since an activist claimed that
Chen's subsequent decision to remain inside China
was dictated by the threat that his wife would be
beaten to death if he tried to leave.
In a
video statement Chen made before entering the
embassy, he called on Premier Wen to order an
investigation of his case and the brutal
circumstances of his detention, and to assure the
safety of his family.
For want of more
facts and a better explanation, some news outlets
speculate that perhaps Chen's escape was
orchestrated or enabled by the relatively liberal
faction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that
is now in ascendancy with the fall of Chongqing
kingpin Bo Xilai. The theory is that Chen's escape
would make security chief and one-time Bo ally
Zhou Yongkang look like an idiot, thereby further
weakening the hardline faction.
Perry
Link, the well-known scholar of China's democracy
movement who assisted Fang Lizhi's refuge in the
US Embassy in 1989, commented to ATol on the
questions surrounding Chen's escape:
It's impossible, obviously, that he
did it alone. And clear that some idealistic
rights-advocates helped him. The open question
is whether people "inside the system" helped,
and if so at what level. It seems to me
plausible, as some have said, that hirelings in
Shandong helped; it seems to me less plausible,
but still possible - as others have speculated -
that people at the top let it happen, as part of
the mafia back-stabbing at that level.
[6]
The situation was apparently
resolved in Beijing after four days of intense
negotiations under the aegis of US Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and
input from noted China lawyer and Harvard
professor Jerome Cohen.
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