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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/world/asia/chen-guangcheng-bl
April 27, 2012
Blind Activist Escapes House Arrest in China
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind rights lawyer who has been under
extralegal house arrest in his rural village for the past 19 months, has
escaped from his heavily guarded home and is in hiding in the capital,
rights advocates and Chinese officials said on Friday.
American officials would not confirm reports that Mr. Chen had entered the
American Embassy. A source in the Chinese Ministry of State Security said Mr
. Chen was believed to be there on Friday. Previously, early Thursday
evening, a Chinese analyst cited another State Security source who said that
Mr. Chen had taken refuge in the embassy.
Those who have spoken to Mr. Chen say he slipped away from his captors on
Sunday in Shandong Province, where he has been held incommunicado since his
release from prison in September 2010. They said Mr. Chen was not seeking to
leave China, but would try to negotiate his freedom with Chinese
authorities.
“He is reluctant to go overseas and wants only to live like a normal
Chinese citizen,” said Bob Fu, president of China Aid, a Christian rights
organization based in Texas that had been in touch with him as recently as
Friday morning.
The escape would represent a significant public relations challenge to the
Chinese government, which has long sought to deny reports that local
officials in Dongshigu village were keeping Mr. Chen and his wife locked in
their home even though there are no legal charges against him.
The case could also present a major new challenge to the United States,
which was thrust into another delicate internal political dispute in China
in February. At that time, Wang Lijun, a senior police official from the
region of Chongqing, sought refuge in the American consulate in Chengdu,
revealing details about the killing of a British businessman and setting off
a series of events that led to the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was a member
of China’s Politburo.
American diplomats said they determined Mr. Wang’s case did not involve
national security, and they turned him over to Chinese security officials,
setting off criticism in Washington about their handling of the case.
But if Mr. Chen is now on the grounds of the embassy in Beijing, Obama
administration officials are likely to be far more cautious in handling his
case, given that he is one of China’s most internationally recognized
dissidents and has been the subject of extralegal abuses in China for many
years.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman on Friday said he had no information about the
episode, but one Chinese intelligence officer expressed frustration and
bewilderment that Mr. Chen had evaded his captors and that he might have
entered the embassy.
“It’s still not clear how this happened,” the intelligence officer said.
“Was this happenstance, or was it planned this way? Are there others
planning to do the same?”
On Friday afternoon, a video appeared on YouTube with Mr. Chen describing
his life under house arrest. The video, in the form of an appeal to Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao, detailed the abuse he and his family suffered during
their confinement and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.
He described how his daughter was followed to school by three guards every
day and how guards had kicked his wife for hours on end. “Prime Minister
Wen, you owe the people an explanation,” he said. “Are these atrocities
the result of local officials violating the law or a result of orders from
the top leadership?”
It is not the first time that Mr. Chen has sought to publicize the details
of his extralegal confinement. Last year, he and his wife were reportedly
severely beaten after a video they secretly recorded inside their home was
smuggled out of the village and posted on the Internet. Friends say the
subsequent abuse by their captors had left Mr. Chen in frail health.
A self-taught lawyer once lauded by the state media for his work defending
peasants and the disabled, Mr. Chen, 40, angered local officials after
taking on the case of thousands of women who had been forcibly sterilized in
Linyi County. During a brief trial in 2006, he was sentenced to 51 months
in jail on charges of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt
traffic — charges that advocates say were trumped up given that he was
under house arrest at the time.
After his release, he was taken directly to his family’s stone farmhouse,
which was turned into a makeshift prison. His wife, and for a time his young
daughter, were also imprisoned inside the house, which was ringed by
surveillance cameras, floodlights and a rotating cordon of guards equipped
with walkie-talkies.
Reporters, diplomats and Chinese activists who tried to visit Mr. Chen were
violently repelled by men who stood sentinel at the entrances to Dongshigu.
Last December, the actor Christian Bale prompted a flurry of media coverage
after he and a CNN camera crew were assaulted outside the village.
Mr. Fu of China Aid said that Mr. Chen slipped out of the house and was
spirited away from Shandong by activists, among them He Peirong, a family
friend who detailed the escape on her microblog account. She said Mr. Chen
planned his escape weeks in advance and called her after fleeing the village
. She said she picked him up in her car and drove him to Beijing.
“Now Chen Guangcheng is either in a safe place or in the hands of state
security in Beijing,” she wrote early Friday, adding that he seemed to be
in good spirits. She did not answer her cellphone on Friday, and Mr. Fu said
she had been picked up by public security agents from her home in Nanjing.
Her microblog account was later deleted.
Ai Weiwei, the artist and government critic who has also been subjected to
residential detention, albeit far less draconian, said he had spoken to a
friend who met with Mr. Chen in Beijing on Wednesday. The friend said Mr.
Chen had climbed over a wall at night and evaded multiple cordons of guards.
“You know he’s blind, so the night to him is nothing,” Mr. Ai said the
friend told him. “I think that’s a perfect metaphor.”
Officials in Linyi County could not be reached for comment on Friday
afternoon but activists described a violent confrontation between local
officials and relatives of Mr. Chen as they frantically tried to track him
down. When officials, including the township chief, came to take away Mr.
Chen’s older brother, Chen Guangfu, the man’s son reportedly drew a knife
and swung at the men, injuring one or more of them, including the township
director.
On Thursday night, Cao Yaxue, a blogger at the Web site Seeing Red in China,
recorded a conversation with the nephew, Chen Kegui, as he was waiting to
surrender to police. The nephew said he attacked the men after they broke
into the house and failed to identify themselves. “I was defending myself,
” he said through sobs. “I was not attacking. I’m not a murderer. These
are my last words. Those men had no ID.”
Rights advocates on Friday expressed concern for the safety of Mr. Chen and
for his wife, Yuan Weijing, who was reportedly left behind. In 2009, the
family of another prominent rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, escaped from
residential detention in Beijing with the help of Christian activists. Mr.
Gao’s wife and two children traveled overland to Thailand and eventually
reached the United States, where they were given asylum. Rights advocates
say Mr. Gao — who has been repeatedly tortured over the years — had
planned to go with them but was stopped by his minders. He was later given a
three-year prison term for violating the terms of his probation.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong,
said that Mr. Chen could not stay hidden for long. “He’s in a very
dangerous position,” he said. “If he has to remain hidden, he will have
exchanged one form of house arrest for another.”
But Mr. Fu of China Aid said he was optimistic that Mr. Chen might be able
to negotiate his freedom. “The fact that he’s escaped will really shake up
Chinese security forces,” he said. “It tells them that they are not
almighty God.”
In the video posted Friday, Mr. Chen described how local officials had
profited from his detention, pocketing money from the county that was meant
to pay those responsible for guarding his family. At its peak, the effort
employed hundreds of people, he said, some of whom were spread along roads
about three miles from the village.
But he said his primary concern was the safety of those he left behind and
he called on China’s top leaders to guarantee that his escape would not
cause them further harm. “I ask that my family be kept safe,” he said.
Edward Wong contributed reporting and Mia Li contributed research. |
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