China Blocking All Mention of Chen and His Daring Escape
View From Asia | By MARK MCDONALD |
HONG
KONG — The improbable late-night escape of the blind lawyer Chen
Guangcheng from house arrest in his rural village has thrilled
anti-abortion campaigners and human rights groups, while humiliating the
security forces who were charged with sealing off Mr. Chen and his
family.
“Friends of Mr. Chen, along with people in the Chinese
government, say he is now inside the American Embassy in Beijing,” my
colleague Andrew Jacobs reports from the capital.“His escape is nothing less than a miracle,” said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights campaigner.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government, as it presumably negotiates with American officials over Mr. Chen’s immediate future, seems to have issued a gag order on his flight from detention.
Online searches of Mr. Chen’s name also are being blocked inside China, including on the popular Twitter-like service called Weibo. Variations on his initials and the name of his prefecture are also off-limits, along with the words “blind lawyer,” “embassy,” “U.S. embassy” and “consulate.”
Banned searches turn up this message: “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, these search results cannot be shown.”
“Nearly all possible searches have been blocked, and even the Chinese word for ‘blind person,’ or mang’ren (盲人),” writes David Bandurski of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.
Mr. Chen, 40, blinded in infancy by an untreated fever, has campaigned for years against the harsh enforcement of the state’s one-child policy in eastern China, alleging that local officials have forced thousands of people to have abortions or undergo sterilization procedures.
The 15-minute video that he recorded about the harsh treatment of him and his family is now available here with English subtitles, and an English-language transcript is on The Shanghaiist site.
In the video, essentially an appeal to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao for justice, Mr. Chen describes the elaborate security system which — until one night last week — had so hermetically kept him a prisoner.
“The whole situation is just so over the top,” he says. “I understand the number of officials and policemen who participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people.”
And he names names: He specifically identifies about a dozen of the plainclothes guards who keep visitors away, often violently, from Dongshigu village. Christian activists, political supporters, foreign journalists, fellow Chinese lawyers and two U.S. diplomats have been physically driven off by the guards.
“The man who guarded the village entrance and attacked Christian Bale — I understand his name is Zhang Shenghe, an official with our township. He is the so-called ‘Military Coat’ (or ‘PandaMan’) in netizens’ descriptions.”
Mr. Bale, the British actor, was roughed up last year when he tried to visit Mr. Chen with a CNN crew. A burly man in a green, army-style parka led the assault, shown in this video report.
The provocative and Internet-savvy Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun also has written a moving account of his attempt to visit Mr. Chen in October.
As Mr. Murong and three friends approached Lingyi, the largest city near Mr. Chen’s village, they saw a video screen flashing the slogan, “A Civilized People Create a Civilized City.”
In his account of being shoved to the ground and turned away by the Dongshigu guards, Mr. Murong writes, “All I wanted to know was what it takes to visit a person, and I’d gotten my answer: as impossible as walking to the sky.”
He refers to “Believe in the Future,” a bleak and wistful poem from 1968 by Shi Zhi, the pen name of Guo Lusheng, who has been called “China’s Dante.” The poem, circulated in copies written out by hand, became a touchstone for millions of educated urban students sent to work on farms during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s.
Mr. Murong writes:
“Almost everyone in our generation has read ‘Believe in the Future’:
When cobwebs clog my stove
When its dying smoke sighs over poverty
I will stubbornly dig out the disappointing ash
And write on snowflakes: ‘Believe in the Future.’
This poem was written in 1968 during an abnormal time. That year, the historian Jian Bozan and his wife committed suicide. Tian Han, the lyricist of our national anthem, died in prison. That year, ordinary citizens silently endured a life of injustice.
But the real heroes were the ones who held onto hope, who still believed in the future, who still had faith that the world would turn back to normal.”
COPY : http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/
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