{"id":82,"date":"2023-05-03T14:09:10","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T18:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/?p=82"},"modified":"2023-07-05T21:15:28","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T01:15:28","slug":"the-barefoot-lawyer-by-chen-guangcheng-review-a-story-of-imprisonment-escape-and-tenacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng review \u2013 a story of imprisonment, escape and tenacity"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a decade, Chen Guangcheng<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a blind, self-taught lawyer from northeast China \u2013 has been an icon of Chinese resistance to the state. In\u00a02005, 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 more than four years in prison. After his official release, he and his family (including his young daughter) were kept under house arrest and periodically brutalised by party officials and their thugs for another 19 months, during which time Chen became the beleaguered figurehead for the Chinese\u00a0weiquan<\/em>\u00a0(civil rights) movement. In 2011, Chinese citizen-activists began expressing their support for Chen by printing T-shirts bearing his face or by\u00a0posting pictures of themselves on the\u00a0internet wearing sunglasses, in imitation of Chen\u2019s own trademark spectacles. Chinese and foreign journalists and celebrities who tried to show their solidarity by visiting Chen\u2019s village were hustled away, sometimes violently, by the party\u2019s goons.<\/span><\/p>\n

Detention came to an end only with Chen\u2019s\u00a0dramatic escape<\/a>\u00a0in April 2012. Despite breaking his foot descending a wall, he managed to drag himself under cover of darkness to a nearby village, from which he was secretly taken to the\u00a0relative safety of Beijing. After a car chase involving the Chinese security service, he was given shelter by the American embassy. From there, he negotiated his and his family\u2019s safe passage to the United States.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n

Chen has barely paused for breath since arriving in the US: studying law at New York University, giving interviews and lectures as well as producing this fascinating volume of memoirs in English. The book is vital reading for those hoping to understand the struggles of China\u2019s disabled people to gain fair treatment, the party\u2019s continuing stranglehold on the implementation of\u00a0the law, and the pressures and compromises involved in human rights negotiations in China.<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s extraordinary tenacity is the keynote of the book. He was born in 1971, midway through the Cultural Revolution. In the 1970s, starry-eyed western admirers of Mao made much of the way in which essential medicine was taken to China\u2019s rural masses by \u201cbarefoot doctors\u201d trained in basic medical skills. The reality was less utopian. When the five-month-old Chen, fully sighted at birth, developed a mysterious high fever, there was no\u00a0money to get him the treatment he needed; within two days, the illness had taken his sight. Two years previously, Chen\u2019s older sister had died after seven days of sickness. Chen and his four surviving brothers grew up thin and hungry.<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s sightlessness intensified his difficulties. \u201cPeople with disabilities,\u201d he recalled, \u201cwere considered intrinsically lacking; they were thought of as\u00a0not whole, not even fully human.\u201d While his friends began school at six or\u00a0seven, Chen was barred from education because of his blindness. But thanks to the support of his parents, he\u00a0was enrolled at 17 in a school for the blind, where he learned to use braille. A fast learner, he accelerated through the grades over the course of eight years to reach university, where he studied Chinese medicine and massage. Though warmly appreciative of the financial sacrifices his family made to\u00a0send him to school, Chen was never\u00a0meekly grateful to China\u2019s educational system. Ever the activist, at his first\u00a0school he was elected student representative and petitioned the school authorities for basic rights \u2013\u00a0access to running water, freedom of\u00a0movement. He was precociously alert\u00a0to the power of the media to expose injustice: in the 1990s, he and his classmates called a radio phone-in programme to complain about a physically abusive teacher.<\/p>\n

On graduating from college, Chen abandoned medicine and returned to\u00a0his village to become a \u201cbarefoot lawyer\u201d: defending ordinary people against the depredations of local functionaries. Since China emerged post-Mao from the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, its government has claimed to re-establish stability and authority through \u201crule of law\u201d. Yet the heritage of the Mao era \u2013 during which the law served as a tool of party authority \u2013 has remained resilient. Early in Chen\u2019s career as an autodidact lawyer, a cynical acquaintance told him that \u201cChina has no law. The legal system is under the control of the administrative branch of government, which answers to the party.\u201d When Chen was sentenced to prison for his legal fight against one-child policy abuses, his judge admitted to him that \u201ceveryone knew my case was a fraud but there was nothing he could do about it \u2026 the court had to listen to party orders\u201d. Chen believes that in China \u201cthe Cultural Revolution has never ended \u2013 it has simply metastasised\u201d into other campaigns designed to terrify the populace into submission to the party. One official declared in 2010 that the party viewed Chen as a \u201ccounterrevolutionary\u201d \u2013 an old Maoist designation that, between the 1950s and 70s, usually ended in death for the individual concerned.<\/p>\n

The book movingly describes a growing consciousness of legal rights in rural China. Chen\u2019s aim, he writes, was to give \u201cordinary people a nonviolent outlet for pursuing and resolving their grievances; we tried to make the rule of\u00a0law a reality in a country that lacks it, under a party that disingenuously claims to embrace it \u2026 I wanted to instruct my fellow farmers and peasants and the disabled about what should be available to them, and to encourage them to advocate for themselves and for their rights\u201d. Chen\u2019s important work rebuts the cliche, often trotted out by its intellectual and political elites, that China\u2019s rural masses are incapable of understanding the concepts of democracy or rule of law. Quite the contrary: the individuals Chen describes helping have an acute grasp of the benefits of political and legal transparency, for the\u00a0toothlessness of the law in\u00a0China today leaves them too often at the mercy of\u00a0rapacious party officials.<\/p>\n

The book contains shocking details about the horrors of the Chinese penal system: the \u201cblack jails\u201d into which critics of the Chinese state can disappear for months on end; the overcrowding, violence, exploitation and maltreatment rife within prisons; the arbitrary terror that servants of the party can unleash on those designated \u201ccounter-revolutionaries\u201d. In early 2011, for example, after Chen smuggled on to the internet a video describing his illegal detention, the party dispatched a gang of policemen to beat him and his wife, and to strip the house bare of their few possessions. \u201cWe don\u2019t care about the law \u2013 we can do whatever we want,\u201d one security officer told him. \u201cWe\u2019re here on party orders,\u201d another revealed. \u201cYou\u2019re just like the SS, then,\u201d Chen replied, with characteristic courage.<\/p>\n

Yet Chen also writes bitterly of his experiences after taking refuge in the US embassy in Beijing. Having once idolised the United States as a global policeman of human rights, he alleges that American officials too easily submitted to Chinese government pressure while negotiating for his safety for fear of damaging relations between the US and China. The failure of the Americans to fight for his and his family\u2019s personal safety within China, Chen accuses, left them no option but to leave their country of birth.<\/p>\n

Since vocal dissident groups emerged in mainland China in the late 1980s, the government of the People\u2019s Republic has found an effective way of minimising their impact: driving them into exile abroad, where former activists grow increasingly isolated from the Chinese communities whom they want to reach. Hopefully, Chen\u2019s exceptional energy, determination and talent for publicising his causes will enable him to avoid a similar fate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a decade, Chen Guangcheng\u00a0\u2013 a blind, self-taught lawyer from northeast China \u2013 has been an icon of Chinese resistance to the state. In\u00a02005, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4","category-report-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chenguangcheng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}