Chinese Activist's Escape Like Hollywood Thriller

Blind human rights activist and attorney Chen Guangcheng, who fellow activists say escaped from house arrest last weekend, had worked to expose forced sterilization and other abuses by Chinese authorities charged with family planning until he was arrested and confined in 2005.


Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch China director, said the abuses that Chen revealed have continued, even though the Chinese law requiring families to have only one child is enforced unevenly. Forced abortions, sterilizations, detentions, beatings and firings for those who violate the rules have been reported, activists say.

In Linyi, where Chen exposed abuses, the families of women who fled to avoid losing their babies faced punishment, according to lawyers and residents. Officials seized the women's parents, nephews or cousins to try to force the women to return, The Times' Mark Magnier wrote six years ago:


A woman who would only give her family name as Wang said one of her husband's relatives had two girls and got pregnant last year in hopes of having a boy. When family-planning officials couldn't track her down, they detained Wang and her husband, Xia Jingshan. Wang said that she was released quickly but that her husband was kept for almost a week.


"They beat him with a leather stick until he couldn't breathe," she said. "He was beaten so hard he could barely walk, but the officials propped him up and forced him to go looking for his relatives anyway. He still feels pain in his waist on cloudy or rainy days.

Chen also recorded a video as a direct address to Premier Wen Jiabao, condemning the treatment of him and his family and accusing local Communist Party officials by name. Activists sent the video Friday to the overseas Chinese news site Boxun.com, which posted part of it on YouTube. Activist Hu Jia met with Chen after his escape and said the people with Chen later called him. “They said, `He is in a 100 percent safe place,”’ Hu said. “If they say that, I know where that place is. There’s only one 100 percent place in China, and that’s the U.S. Embassy.” Claims of Chen’s location could not be verified. Hu’s wife, Zeng Jinyan, posted a photo Friday on Twitter of Chen and Hu together. Chen is wearing the same clothes he wore in the video. Both men are smiling. Chen’s escape, if ultimately successful, would boost a beleaguered civil rights community, which has faced rising arrests and other harassment over the past year. But Chen’s flight unleashed a police crackdown on his relatives and the people who helped him flee, activists said. “I am now free. But my worries have not ended yet,” Chen said in his video. Speaking to a camera in a room with an off-white curtain drawn behind him, he said, “My escape might ignite a violent revenge against my family.” A self-taught lawyer blinded by fever in infancy, Chen served four years in prison for exposing forced abortions and sterilizations in his and surrounding villages. Since his release in September 2010, local officials confined him to his home, despite the lack of legal grounds for doing so, beating him up on several occasions.