BEIJING — For months, Chen Guangcheng, one of China’s best-known dissidents, played a cat-and-mouse game with the phalanx of guards encircling his home. He dug a tunnel to try to escape, a friend says, but was found out. And he sneaked out a video that alerted his supporters to the smothering confinement he said he […]

On Friday, the U.S. and China seemed to have forged the outlines of a tentative deal to end the diplomatic standoff that would let Chen travel to the U.S. with his family for a university fellowship. In the meantime, Chen’s fate still hangs in the balance.   So what exactly did he do to anger Chinese […]

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” That’s what Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, said 2,300 years ago. And that’s what Chen Guangcheng, the blind rights lawyer who escaped house arrest in rural China in a dash to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, tried […]

Over the years, the extraordinary journey of Chen Guangcheng has been an inspiration, a protest, and, at times, a dark farce. Now, through his own sheer will, his life has come to symbolize, for China and the United States, an opportunity. Sometime in the last few days, Chen slipped out of the stone farmhouse on the rural […]

Amid the scuffling and yelling, dozens more guards in olive-green, military-style overcoats – and two gray minivans – emerged from the other side of the checkpoint, all coming toward us. “Why can I not visit this free man?” Bale asked repeatedly, only to receive punches from guards aiming for his small camera as they tried […]

Beijing MOST dissidents risk the fate of falling into obscurity and irrelevance after leaving China to live in exile. It happened to Wei Jingsheng, one of the most prominent Chinese dissidents, who moved to the United States in 1997. His calls for democracy once inspired so many in and outside of China. Not anymore. When […]

For a decade, Chen Guangcheng – a blind, self-taught lawyer from northeast China – has been an icon of Chinese resistance to the state. In 2005, he brought a groundbreaking lawsuit against his local government in Shandong, for their savage and illegal enforcement of the one-child policy. In retaliation, party officials kidnapped him and sentenced him to […]

Yang Jianli is founder and president of Initiatives for China. He served a five-year prison term in China, from 2002 to 2007, for attempting to observe labor unrest. I have a suggestion for Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao: Invite Chen Guangcheng to voice his concerns about your government and its treatment of him. The blind Chinese civil rights attorney […]

Bob Fu is founder and president of the China Aid Association, a Texas-based Christian human rights organization campaigning for Chen Guangcheng’s freedom. The blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng climbed over the back wall of his home April 22 — and escaped nearly six years of torture, malnutrition and isolation. During his detention, Chen became a global star, his dark glasses emblematic […]

The prominent Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who triggered a diplomatic incident when he escaped house arrest and fled to the US embassy in Beijing last year, says he has been asked to leave New York University following “great, unrelenting pressure” from Chinese authorities. The university, which has hosted the blind, self-taught lawyer on a fellowship since […]