Weekend Reads: The impossible but true story of Chen Guangcheng

It’s a story that is impossible to believe, except that it’s true: A blind Chinese human rights lawyer snuck past the gaze of 70 guards, surveillance cameras, and bright floodlights surrounding his home in rural Dongshigu, China. Breaking his foot after a scaling a neighbor’s wall, he continued to crawl his way to the next village and to safety.

International news media (including WORLD) carried the story of Chen Guangcheng’s April 2012 escape to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and then on to American soil, yet Chen’s autobiography, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt and Co., 2015), starts back at the beginning, to the dusty paths of rural China where a blind boy swam in the river and climbed trees with his brothers, doing whatever others said he couldn’t do. With deep-set discrimination against the disabled, Chen never was expected to do more than become an itinerant storyteller, but instead he went to college, taught himself law, and won court cases for the disabled and marginalized in the rural areas of China.

It was his work on a class-action lawsuit against local officials for their aggressive enforcement of China’s one-child policy that led to Chen’s arrest and imprisonment. Documenting story after story of illegal forced abortion and sterilization, government officials saw him as enough of a threat to send him to prison for four years, then another three years of house arrest before his escape.

In the book Chen recalls the interrogations, constant monitoring, beatings, and abuse he and his family suffered at the hands of his handlers.

But once he finally made his way to Beijing and the U.S. Embassy, Chen was disappointed to find the Americans pressuring him to leave and return to the hands of the Chinese government that had condoned his imprisonment all these years.

“When negotiating with a government run by hooligans, the country that most consistently advocated for democracy, freedom, and universal human rights had simply given in,” he writes.

Chen’s account differs from then–U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s in her book Hard Choices, which claims that she and her staff did “all Chen said he wanted every step of the way.”

After so many years under the dictatorial government, Chen said that only the “apologists and wishful thinkers” would believe that the Communist government has actually changed. The book reveals how the blind can sometimes see injustices and truth better than the sighted.