Chen Guangcheng’s older brother, Chen Guangfu, has also escaped their home village of Dongshigu and made his way to Beijing, where he met with his son’s would-be lawyers. Chen Kegui is in custody awaiting trial for the attempted murder of a guard involved in a raid on the family’s home. From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:

“I met Chen Guangfu this morning. His health situation is okay,” said Ding Xikui, a lawyer authorised by Chen Kegui’s wife to represent her husband.
“His family are not allowed to leave the village. Chen escaped secretly. He came here to tell us what happened that night [when people broke in] and seeks help from the lawyer. He also supports the request from Chen Kegui’s wife to engage us as his lawyer in this case.”
Chen Kegui’s wife hired Ding and Si Weijiang after two other lawyers she had appointed were intimidated and harassed. But officials told the men that they could not act for Chen Kegui unless his wife came to the police station to file paperwork. She is currently in hiding due to fears for her safety.

Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee met with Chen Guangfu to discuss his son’s case, his own reported… Read more

At The Daily Beast, Melinda Liu described the beginning of Chen Guangcheng and his family’s life in New York as they embraced the spring sunshine while avoiding, for now, the glare of the media.

Feeling the warm sun on his face, blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng relaxed in an outdoor playground with his family Sunday, basking in perfect spring weather—and not having to worry about being beaten or harassed for the first time in years.
Chen, his wife, Yuan Weijing, and their two kids started a new life in a quiet, leafy Greenwich Village neighborhood full of university students sunbathing in grassy parks and yuppies walking their dogs. It’s a long way from their rural Shandong farmhouse—a virtual prison with blocked-up windows, surveillance cameras, and dozens of guards who threatened and beat would-be visitors ….
A TV-satellite truck has materialized outside Chen’s apartment block, which has also been staked out by reporters and photographers who scrambled when he appeared in the playground. (“It’s exciting. I’ve never heard so many police sirens as I did last night,” said one of Chen’s new neighbors about his arrival in the building.) But Chen didn’t want to grant media interviews on their first day… Read more

Chen Guangcheng, who arrived in New York on Saturday, greeted a cheering crowd outside New York University with a short speech. From NTDTV, via Shanghaiist:

From the Associated Press:

“I believe that no matter how difficult the environment nothing is impossible if you put your heart to it,” he told a cheering crowd at NYU shortly after arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport on Saturday evening.
“We should link our arms to continue in the fight for the goodness in the world and to fight against injustice. So, I think that all people should apply themselves to this end to work for the common good worldwide ….”
“For the past seven years, I have never had a day’s rest,” Chen said through a translator, “so I have come here for a bit of recuperation for body and in spirit.”
Chen thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, along with the embassies of Switzerland, Canada and France.

Some Americans welcomed Chen not with cheers but, in comments collected by Offbeat China, with complaints about the burden he would place on the US taxpayer. The combined hourly rate of the several US officials who negotiated on his behalf is likely quite high; however,… Read more

Following his sudden departure last night from his hospital in Beijing, legal activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in New York and greeted the media near New York University, where he is expected to take up a fellowship. From CNN:
United Airlines Flight 88 landed at New York/Newark Liberty International Airport to little fanfare after the U.S. State Department prohibited public and media access.
Less than two hours later, Chen, 40, spoke from New York University, where he will participate in a fellowship.
“I am very grateful to the assistance of the American Embassy and the promise of the Chinese government to keep protection of my rights as a citizen in the long term,” Chen said to a mob of reporters and onlookers. “I am very gratified to see the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm.”
The activist indicated he had been granted partial U.S. citizenship and asked people to “promote fairness and justice in China.”

Passengers, including reporters, on the flight were not permitted to speak with Chen and his family, but a New York Times reporter did have a brief interview with him:

Mr. Chen left Beijing with his wife and two children, and… Read more

 
In his latest contribution to his series for CDT, cartoonist Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm celebrates the news that activist Chen Guangcheng is reportedly on a flight headed for the U.S. after his long saga involving a dangerous escape from de facto house arrest, refuge in the U.S. embassy, and then two weeks in a hospital in Beijing while his fate was decided. When Chen spoke with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upon his departure from the embassy, it was reported that he told her, “I want to kiss you!” Later, Chen clarified that he had said, “I want to see you.”
Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series. Hexie Farm also runs the Dark Glasses. Portrait website in support of Chen Guangcheng. More of his cartoons featuring Chen Guangcheng are part of a Foreign Policy Magazine slideshow. “9 Ways of Looking at Chen.”

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

On Saturday, Chen Guangcheng, who has spent two weeks in a hospital in Beijing after escaping de facto house arrest in Shandong Province and then seeking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, is reportedly at Beijing Airport preparing to fly to the U.S. From the AP:
Chen Guangcheng told The Associated Press that he has left the hospital where he’d been staying and is at the Beijing airport. He expects to leave for the U.S. later Saturday.
He says his wife and two children are with him, but that they do not yet have their passports. Also with him are hospital and border control staff.
Chen escaped illegal house arrest in his rural town last month and sought the protection of U.S. diplomats. He had been awaiting permission to travel to the U.S. to study.
From the Twitter account of ITV’s Beijing correspondent Angus Walker:
#Chen left hospital in convoy of unmarked cars and one van with blocked out windows
— Angus Walker (@anguswalkeritv) May 19, 2012

And from NBC’s Adrienne Mong:
Lots of western media at Beijing airport: crews just scrambled to get a shot of luggage they think belongs to #ChenGuangcheng and family.
— Adrienne Mong (@adriennemong) May 19,… Read more

As activist Chen Guangcheng remains in Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital awaiting a passport to travel to the U.S. with his wife and family, his family back home in Linyi, Shandong is suffering the brunt of local officials’ anger over his escape earlier this month. His brother Chen Guangfu has told the media that he was tortured by security officers when he was detained for three days after his brother’s escape from de facto house arrest. Chen Guangfu spoke with isunaffairs magazine. From a BBC report on the interview:

“They put me on a chair, bound my feet with iron chains and locked my hands with handcuffs behind my back,” he said. “They pulled my hands upwards forcefully. Then they slapped me in the face.”
“They first asked me if I knew what this was about. I said ‘I don’t know’. So they beat me and slapped my face. Only on one side, not the other. And they trampled my feet with their leather shoes.”
He told them it was him who had helped Mr Chen because he did not want to implicate others involved, but then realised they knew more details.
”I resisted for a really long time,” he said. ”In… Read more

Following a series of damaging stories this year, notably the ousting of Bo Xilai and escape of Chen Guangcheng, The Atlantic’s Damien Ma argues that “for all the financial muscle thrown behind shaping its global image, Beijing may have squandered more soft power in the last few months than it has accrued in years“:

… The collective global attention paid to the world’s number-two economy has increased drastically in the media and within policy circles. Call it the “post-Olympics effect.” The triumphalism of the 2008 Beijing Games and the ensuing collapse of the global economy dramatically altered the extent and scope to which the world focused on China. Just a little over three years later, a “China story” is bound to splash across the front page of major U.S. papers week after week. The breadth and detail of coverage have increased significantly too. Many more Americans now likely know that there’s a gargantuan Chinese city called Chongqing and that its leader is in serious trouble. And many more will have heard of Vice President Xi Jinping. In 2002, how many people knew who Hu Jintao was or what a politburo standing committee was?
It is a given that this level… Read more

At The Los Angeles Times, Rosanna Xia interviews Melissa Chan, former Beijing correspondent for Al Jazeera English, who last week became the first accredited journalist since 1998 to be expelled from China.

“A lot of journalists have done black jail stories,” she said, but hers “was probably the first” to get coverage on TV [Chan refers here to a 2009 report, not, as the story implies, one from March this year]. “It’s also the first time that we got a government official to respond to a question about the existence of black jails.” The official denied the black jails existed, “but it was on the record, Chan said, “so that was useful for human rights groups. And that could be one reason why there’s the perception that I’m a go-getter ….”
But Chan said she doesn’t consider herself the most hard-hitting reporter in China. She admires the many journalists who covered last year’s pro-democracy protests in China, and those who sneaked across the border when Tibetans set themselves ablaze in resistance — both stories she did not pursue. For all of April, she was stuck in Hong Kong, unable to report on the breaking story of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng… Read more

Since news broke of activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest late last month, Chinese-born and Texas-based Pastor Bob Fu and his organisation ChinaAid have often featured prominently. Fu was a major conduit of early information on Chen’s situation, and acted as his interpreter when he addressed a session of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China by telephone. At The New York Times, Andrew Jacobs describes Fu’s work, history and growing political influence:

If the drama over Mr. Chen’s fate has placed a harsh spotlight on China’s capacity for repression and created a diplomatic migraine for the White House, it has also been something of a boon to Mr. Fu, 44. His organization, ChinaAid, is at the crossroads of a growing movement among American Christians agitating for religious freedom in China and the wider dissident network inside the United States, as well as members of the underground church in China trying to practice their faith in a hostile environment ….
But some critics say that Mr. Fu’s high-profile role as an advocate for religious freedom is a double-edged sword. It has raised awareness of human rights abuses. But his close association with Republicans and evangelical Christians, the critics say, risks stoking… Read more

While Chen Guangcheng remains under guard in Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital, awaiting permission to travel with his family to the United States, a broad range of reprisals have been visited upon his family and supporters elsewhere. Chinese Human Rights Defenders has catalogued detentions, house arrests, violence, denial of medical treatment, cancellation of passports, threats and warnings; other reports include the threatened or actual revocation of lawyers’ licenses and the suspension of microblog accounts.
Perhaps the most immediately urgent situation is that of Chen’s nephew. Chen Kegui is now being held on charges of attempted murder after he took a kitchen cleaver to guards breaking into his father’s house in the middle of the night.

Chen [Guangcheng], who is now receiving treatment in a Beijing hospital and preparing to go to the United States to study, said his nephew was a scapegoat of officials angered by Chen’s audacious escape and demands that they be investigated.
Asked why police in his home province of Shandong in east China would arrest his nephew, Chen said, “Revenge.”
“I think this is revenge gone wild, and it’s their final battle,” he told Reuters by telephone from the Beijing hospital where he is being kept ….
“They… Read more

The convergence of the two high-profile cases involving former Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai, who is being detained on suspicion of corruption, and Chen Guangcheng, a legal activist who escaped de facto house arrest, is bringing the issue of legal justice in China to the forefront. Two essays examine what these cases tell us about the status of the rule of law in China. In the New York Times, Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin argues that the law does matter in China as citizens become more active in speaking up for their legal rights:

Both cases are widely seen as emblematic. Bo’s embodies the corruption of an unchecked political elite: Communist Party members are investigated by the party’s own disciplinary committee, and not by the courts. Chen’s case is rife with the predatory behavior of local officials whose conduct is more reminiscent of China’s feudal past than of the “new socialist countryside” Beijing leaders claim to be building.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the law doesn’t matter in China.
First, while Chen’s case entails the catalogue of unlawful measures that are used against government critics, it also embodies the rising assertiveness of a citizenry that is… Read more

Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye Jr. grades China’s efforts to spend heavily on its soft power resources over the past five years, arguing that it has “had a limited return on its investment.” From The Wall Street Journal:
Great powers try to use culture and narrative to create soft power that promotes their national interests, but it’s not an easy sell when the message is inconsistent with their domestic realities. As I told the university students, in an Information Age in which credibility is the scarcest resource, the best propaganda is not propaganda.
The 2008 Olympics was a success abroad, but shortly afterward China’s domestic crackdown on human rights activists undercut its soft-power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but it was followed by the jailing of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo. His empty chair at the Oslo ceremony was a powerful symbol. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Television into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda.
Now, in the aftermath of the Middle East revolutions, China is clamping down on the Internet and jailing human rights lawyers, once again torpedoing its soft-power campaign. No amount… Read more

Tea Leaf Nation recently reported that an Iowa county attorney had dropped witness tampering charges against two Chinese parents, citing “cultural differences”. The pair had flown to the US after their son was charged with sexual assault while studying there, and had allegedly tried to buy off his accuser. The implication that bribery is an integral part of China’s culture was “like a hard slap on Chinese people’s faces” according to Sina Weibo user @Y如墨, quoted by TLN.
At The New York Times, Murong Xuecun explains his own view of corruption’s place in Chinese society, recalling an encounter with an entrepreneurial road builder in Sichuan some fifteen years ago. “Like most Chinese people,” he writes, “he was harmed by corruption yet he dearly wanted in.”

I will never forget something Mr. Zhao said to me: There’s not a single straight road in China; they were all built with kickbacks ….
If corruption is inevitable, then people inevitably force themselves to get used to it, and even defend its legitimacy. Most of us Chinese go from being shocked to being numb ….
The leadership in Beijing needs corruption and actually encourages it. Corruption is the system’s natural lubricant, without which everything… Read more

Al Jazeera English has been forced to close its operations in China after authorities refused to renew the journalist visa of its Beijing correspondent, Melissa Chan. From The New York Times:
She declined to be quoted about her departure, and the government’s motive was not explicitly stated. But among other broadcasts, officials were said by some to have been angered by an English-language documentary on Chinese re-education through labor camps that Al Jazeera produced outside China and broadcast on its network in November ….
Jazeera English officials expressed regret at the closing of their China operations, and said in a statement they had sought additional visas for journalists to expand their coverage here without success ….
Ms. Chan is believed to be the first accredited foreign correspondent to be denied reporting privileges since the October 1998 expulsion of Yukihisa Nakatsu, a journalist with Japan’s largest daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. Mr. Nakatsu was accused of obtaining state secrets, apparently stemming from his contacts with a Chinese economic journalist arrested earlier by state security officers.

Al Jazeera has announced its determination to resume reporting from China:
Melissa Chan has been Al Jazeera English’s China correspondent since 2007. Chan has filed nearly 400… Read more