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, an NYU spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that, while he could not discuss financial specifics, “I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that there have been significant offers of philanthropy regarding Mr. Chen.”

With Chen and his family finally out of China, diplomats involved in the wrangling that secured their departure anonymously disclosed their account of the negotiations to The Washington Post.

Over the course of the negotiations, the Chinese never put any proposals on the table. Their role was strictly reactive. At the end of each meeting, Cui would leave to report the latest terms to Chinese leaders. At times, he would enter the next meeting having come directly from the compound reserved for China’s highest leaders.

“We would put something forward, and were getting answers back almost immediately from the highest levels,” one senior administration official said. “I have never seen the Chinese government working this rapidly and efficiently.”

Meanwhile, the 12-hour time difference with Washington meant U.S. negotiators were getting little sleep, spending most of their night hours briefing the White House and State Department via secure lines at the embassy.

Negotiating with Chen could sometimes be as difficult as negotiating with Chinese officials. Conversations with him could be deeply moving. He often seemed fragile — a blind man with few possessions, sleeping in a small unadorned room in the barracks of the embassy. He talked of how much he missed his wife and worried about his children.

But he could pivot in an instant, displaying a steely shrewdness as he detailed the demands he wanted conveyed to Chinese officials.

One Chinese scholar quoted by the South China Morning Post drew a pessimistic conclusion from the episode:

“It was an acceptable solution among the three parties after a series of negotiations between Beijing and Washington,” Professor Shi Yinhong , a Sino-US expert at Renmin University, said. “But I hope Chen’s incident is just an isolated case, not a trend.”

Shi said mainland scholars were more suspicions about US intentions towards China’s internal issues after Chen’s case. It came at a sensitive time, just before the Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

“I think our leadership should remain vigilant … because the Chen case showed Washington doesn’t watch us only on our human rights,” Shi said.

“It also wants to affect our politics at the highest level.”

But Orville Schell was among many who pointed to encouraging signs for the crucial US-China relationship in the two sides’ conduct during the crisis.

… China showed either a new maturity, or a much keener sense of realism, perhaps recognizing that relations with the U.S. are even more important than the fate of a single dissident, even if his flight is represents a sublime loss of face ….

In many ways, it is tempting to look back at the whole transaction as something of a hopeful breakthrough. With a minimum of posturing, the two countries did manage to work their way through a very difficult problem. Evidently, each saw sufficient common interest to find a mutually agreeable solution. That is a very hopeful sign.

At The New Yorker, Evan Osnos saw similar grounds for cautious optimism in Chen’s expression of gratitude to the Chinese government for their “restraint and calm”:

… It might not have been the first thanks on everyone’s lips. One could read that as a diplomatic comment, intended to protect those still in China, including his mother (whose house is reportedly being fenced off by local officials) and the fellow dissidents who helped him escape.

But it must also be read as the measure of a man with extraordinary presence of mind. He is, after all, correct: by the standards of official Chinese conduct in many other areas, its handling of Chen’s departure was restrained and calm. And that is one of the modestly encouraging facts to emerge from the final accounting of this whole complicated business: presented with diplomatic dynamite, neither China nor the United States succumbed to its worst instincts. The American handling of the affair was far better than the fevered early indictments suggested, and the Chinese have, so far, kept their promises to Chen and the United States. Those involved should take confidence from that ….

And from Bloomberg:

… With Chen now in New York, the two sides can return to nurturing a relationship that has progressed to a point that a case like his can be handled without a serious rupture, said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“It reinforces the trend since late 2010 for the two leaderships to find a way to steer around sensitive subjects and promote pragmatic near-term relations,” Paal said ….

“I think this brings the matter to a close,” Bonnie Glaser, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an e-mail. “Both countries will focus on their domestic politics, upcoming elections in the U.S. and the 18th Party Congress in China later this year.”

While many headlines hailed Chen’s arrival in the US as an ending, Perry Link told NPR that although “the tangle is finished for this particular case, it seems … the problems of human rights in China are not problems of one or two people whose cases have to ‘be resolved,’ quote-unquote. It’s a very deep, underlying long-term problem and we should view it that way.” As others stressed, the news brings no resolution for family and supporters still in China. From Jonathan Watts at The Guardian:

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said Chen’s departure was no cause for celebration as his family remained under pressure and there may be less incentive for the central government to investigate wrongdoing by the local authorities.

More importantly, Bequelin said, it raised questions about the wider environment for activists. “This is a reflection that there is no room for human rights defenders in China. We don’t know if this will turn into a temporary stay or exile, but in either case it begs the questions why someone like Chen Guangcheng cannot freely operate in China. What is it that stops the authorities from tolerating or even embracing someone like Chen?”

Bequelin’s comments were echoed, perhaps surprisingly, in a weibo post by Global Times editor-in-chief, Hu Xijin, quoted by Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times: “Today, Chen and his family have already taken an American airplane to New York. It makes people feel regret and sigh that in China today this is the only way to solve his problem.” His wistfulness was not matched by an editorial in his paper, which took a dismissive tone: “The drama around Chen is a colorful bubble. Nothing is left when it bursts.” Otherwise, as Tatlow wrote, Chinese media were largely silent about his departure, focusing instead on athletic victories, the South China Sea, or the ongoing clean-up of ‘foreign trash’. The famously independent Caixin did publish a report on Chen’s arrival in New York, but William Farris noted on Google+ that this was quickly taken down.

While some expressed reservations or disappointment, there was broad approval of Chen’s decision to leave from activists remaining in China. The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts spoke to several:

He Peirong – who played a key role in the escape by driving Chen from Shandong to Beijing – said she sympathised, even though the reverberations of Chen’s flight remain unclear. “I support any decision made by Chen, but it’s too early to say whether his departure is a good thing for China’s rights movement. Things are not settled. Problems are not solved. His family is still in China. The people who helped him escape are still in China.”

He – who was detained for several days after Chen’s escape and remains under surveillance – spoke of her admiration for Chen.

“He has done more than you could expect from any individual … Although he has experienced so much injustice and so many threats, he sticks to his beliefs. He is like a piece of jade: always smooth and warm.”

Chen’s lawyer Liu Weiguo said similarly that, despite his reservations about the outcome, “for the Chinese rights movement he has done more than enough. We can’t ask him to do any more. Now he needs time to rest.” Teng Biao, who precipitated the second phase of the diplomatic crisis by persuading Chen to abandon the idea of remaining in China, stood by his earlier position, telling Watts that “[Chen's] safety and freedom are the priority. Whether this is a good thing for the rights movement is secondary now.”

None seemed to entertain any hope that the concessions granted to Chen and his family were signs of a wider easing. From Reuters:

“There won’t be any big changes for us now that Chen Guangcheng has left. There are still many reasons to keep up control and stability preservation,” Jiang Tianyong, a Beijing human rights lawyer, said in a telephone interview, referring to the Communist Party’s terms for controlling dissidents.

Jiang, a long-time campaigner for Chen’s freedom, said he remained under house arrest, despite police officers’ earlier promises that he would be released after Chen left.

“I still don’t know when they’re going to let up,” Jiang said of the police restrictions. “This is no way forward, but especially with the 18th party congress, the high pressure will probably only grow, not decrease.”

As in recent days, the most urgent concern was for Chen Kegui, Chen’s nephew, who faces charges of intentional homicide for attacking intruders into his father’s home when Chen Guangcheng’s escape was first discovered. From The Wall Street Journal:

Lawyers who have taken up the case of Mr. Chen’s nephew said it wasn’t clear how Mr. Chen’s departure would affect the outcome.

“It’s hard to say, since China never plays its cards in the proper order,” said Chen Wuquan, a Guangzhou-based lawyer whose license was revoked by local authorities just as he was preparing to travel to meet with Chen Kegui this month.

“I think [the authorities] will be more strict in dealing with Chen Kegui,” said Liang Xiaojun, another of the lawyers involved in the case. “They won’t care about the international viewpoint.”

While a number of lawyers volunteered to defend Chen Kegui, his family’s eventual choice of Ding Qikui and Si Weijiang was rejected by local officials, supposedly at his own request. Chen Guangcheng told The Financial Times that similar obstruction had occurred before his own sentencing to four years in prison in 2006. “That this naked, shameless abuse can still happen again six years later …,” he said, adding that he suspected Chen Kegui had been tortured to make him accept a public defender in place of the lawyers appointed by his family.

The longer term fear arising from Chen Guangcheng’s departure is that he may, like others before him, be barred from re-entering China and find himself trapped and increasingly powerless abroad. Wang Dan argued in a recent New York Times op-ed, and Human Rights Watch’s Phelim Kine told The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, that the Internet had changed the nature of political exile. Nevertheless, worry about Beijing’s enthusiasm for exporting dissent muted Orville Schell’s optimism about the state of Sino-US relations. From Asia Society:

The tactic of facilitating the most prominent critics of the Party to go into exile was something like the outsourcing of the manufacture process of a very polluting and unwelcomed home-based industry. There might initially be some complaints from dispossessed workers, but ultimately all, or almost all, would be forgotten, and the ongoing problem, if there were one, would be someone else’s.

With dissidents like Fang Lizhi and Wei Jingsheng, Chinese officials learned that interest in the opinions of such activists and concern for their well-being quickly waned once they were abroad. The political oblivion usually followed rather rapidly. Moreover, a short while after they left China, these once-celebrated voices seemed to lose the requisite standing necessary to being taken seriously as authorities on Chinese affairs. The process of being exiled effectively turned them into political eunuchs. Far better, so the Chinese leadership seemed to have concluded, to endure a few days of high intensity bad press as a prelude to watching a dissident parked harmlessly and unheard in Queens, sink out of site. The alternative was to have someone like Liu Xiaobo stuck in a Chinese jail writing damning essays and winning Nobel Prizes. (At least so far, neither Liu nor the Chinese Government has shown any inclination to engage in such export tactics in his case.)

In his interview with NPR, Perry Link also described the history of this trend:

The record of dissidents leaving China has changed pretty dramatically over the last 23 years, since the Tiananmen Massacre. At the time, the Chinese government was angry to see people like Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi and Fu Xiao Jun and many, many others who fled and congregated at the time at Princeton University, where I was teaching. There were about 25 of them. And the government didn’t like that because they wanted them to come back. They were wanted and so on.

By now, I think we should say that the Chinese government’s policy has changed about 180 degrees. Now, they’re quite happy to see what they view as troublemakers like Chen Guangcheng be exiled, because the record over the last two decades of people who’ve come out has been that their influence inside China dramatically declines, and they feel frustrated. And their followers back in China feel frustrated.

So this exit of Chen Guangcheng is in one sense a win-win situation, because he and his family are now safe. And back in China they weren’t and didn’t feel that they were safe. And the Chinese government wins because it gets rid of a thorn in its side.

Link continued to describe Chen’s rural background, a potent contrast with that of the sterotypical Chinese urban-intellectual dissident. Sui-Lee Wee and Terril Yue Jones explore similar ground in a profile at Reuters:

“It was his own feelings of discrimination from the time he was a kid that really got him interested in law,” said Jerome Cohen, a China law expert and professor at New York University’s law school. Cohen has become a supporter and confidante of Chen.

“He felt the community leaders, instead of making blind people an object of sympathy, treated them as an unneeded burden on the community, people who didn’t pull their weight, people who claimed they shouldn’t pay tax like able-bodied farmers.

“That was what started him off ….”

“My first impression was I could be talking to a Chinese equivalent of Gandhi,” Cohen recalled. “This is a man with a quiet charisma, considerable intelligence, very articulate and a steely determination.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, diplomacy, Evan Osnos, exiles, Fang Lizhi, Global Times, homicide, human rights watch, Jerome cohen, Jiang Tianyong, jonathan watts, liu binyan, Liu Xiaobo, new york city, Nobel Prize, Orville Schell, perry link, Sino-U.S. Relations, South China Sea, Teng Biao, Tiananmen, wang dan
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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 of propaganda can hide the fact that blind human rights attorney Chen Guangcheng recently sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Update: In an article in Yale Global, Frank Ching similarly writes about how the recent scandals involving former Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng have undermined China’s soft power efforts. From the introduction to his article:

China invests billions on Confucius Institutes and CCTV broadcasts to spread Chinese language, culture and perspectives on world news. But China’s harsh authoritarian rule, exposed by a few incidents or individuals attracting global attention, can undermine efforts to build soft power through a stream of crafted messages, reports journalist Frank Ching. Recent events highlight internal struggles and absence of the rule of law: a brief stay at the US Consulate of a former Chongqing deputy mayor and police chief; abrupt removal of the Chongqing party secretary in March and investigation of his wife for the murder of a British businessman; and then the escape of a blind legal-rights activist from house arrest, who also turned to the US Embassy for refuge. China insists that the incidents are internal matters and blasts US interference. Censorship attempts only suggest infighting behind the public face of order and stability, undermining China’s effort to win global respect.

See also previous CDT coverage of Chinese soft power.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Olympics, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiaobo, Shanghai Expo, soft power
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“They are all free citizens,” Hu quoted the police officers as saying. “For them to come to Beijing and so on, there is nothing illegal about it. They are free to do so. They did not do anything wrong, they have no legal trouble. We just want to understand the situation and verify it ….”

The police acknowledgment is an indication that Chen’s troubles with the authorities have primarily been about revenge by local leaders, who had seemed especially bitter and personal in their mistreatment of Chen ….

But the central government has never shown much inclination to stop the authorities in Shandong province’s Linyi city, which oversees Chen’s village of Dongshigu. The Chinese government has a long history of ignoring its own laws.

Guo Yushan, another activist involved in Chen’s escape, told The Wall Street Journal that “they asked every question they could about Chen Guangcheng and wanted every detail about his escape” during the 50 hours he was detained in Beijing, and that his interrogation was “civilised”. (Guo has since been ordered not to talk to foreign media.) Of those detained outside Linyi, He Peirong—profiled by Oiwan Lam at Global Voices—remains missing after being taken from her home in Nanjing on Friday.

In Linyi’s Dongshigu village, meanwhile, the substantial security machinery assembled to guard Chen has been at work rounding up members of his family instead. From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:

On Monday, the European Union urged China to avoid harassing the activist’s family and associates. But many are already in the hands of furious officials; Chen Kegui fled after lashing out with a knife at men who had broken into his home and detained his father. Shortly afterwards, two police officers marched his mother away from the hospital where she was caring for his sick child. Chen Kegui’s wife is now too frightened to reveal her location.

“She’s afraid she will be next and the whole family will be taken away. She’s terrified,” said lawyer Liu Weiguo, whom she hired before she left.

Liu, possibly under pressure from the authorities, recruited a band of other lawyers who have volunteered to aid Chen Kegui. From David Pierson at The Los Angeles Times:

“Shandong policemen are famous for violating the law,” said Liang Xiaojun, one of the volunteers and a regular defender of activists. “I don’t know if Keguis rights will be protected, which is why we’re getting together. We are concerned about the case and we want to help. We’re hoping we can create enough publicity to pressure the relevant parties.”

Another volunteer lawyer, Teng Biao, said Chen Kegui’s whereabouts are still unknown. It is also unclear whether he was in the hands of police or local thugs (human rights activists argue that there’s often not much difference).

Despite his own reported wishes and the alleged acknowledgement of his innocence, it may be impossible for Chen to remain in China. From Josh Chin at The Wall Street Journal:

In fleeing and seeking U.S. protection, analysts say, Mr. Chen has elevated his case, taking what had been home confinement of Mr. Chen under local authorities and turning it into a national issue, which makes it more difficult to find a resolution that lets him remain in China—something activists say he prefers to safe passage out of the country.

“What he’s done almost ensures that he has to leave,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human-rights researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, noting that Beijing is unlikely to want to keep around such a high-profile critic of the country’s legal system. “It would be very difficult to imagine any other end game to this ….”

U.S.-based activist Bob Fu on Monday raised the possibility that the U.S. and China would come to a “face-saving” arrangement that would allow Mr. Chen and his family to travel to the U.S., not as asylum seekers, but under the pretext of seeking medical attention. Mr. Fu is the founder of Christian human rights group China Aid, which he says facilitated Mr. Chen’s escape.

(Fu, who says he learned of Chen’s escape three days before the guards themselves and has been a major conduit of information since the news went public, is also the subject of an article at MSNBC, which calls him “God’s double agent“.)

Kellie Currie, a fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, suggested a possible compromise to The Diplomat’s Jason Miks:

“One possible face-saving solution for everyone would be for Beijing to allow him and his family to lawfully immigrate to Hong Kong. He would arguably be much safer there, away from the reach of the horrible Linyi officials who have been tormenting his family, and would be able to attend law school, have access to international media, diplomats, etc., while technically remaining on Chinese soil and able to continue his work in support of the rule of law in China.

“If Chen would agree to this, it would probably be the best possible outcome for all the parties involved.”

If not, exile to the US would at least avoid what the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Lieberthal described to NPR as “the worst possible outcome“: for Chen to remain trapped in the US embassy in Beijing for months or years, with his presence there “a long-term major irritant in our bilateral relationship”. This prospect echoes the 13 months that physicist Fang Lizhi—who died last month—spent with his wife Li Shuxian in a windowless embassy basement following the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. At The New York Review of Books, Perry Link recalled his own part in Fang’s “temporary refuge”:

The eventual solution of the Fang case was to negotiate Fang’s and Li’s exile: As Fang later wrote in The New York Review, Deng Xiaoping’s key demand in the negotiations was that the US lift its economic sanctions on China—a condition the US was unwilling to meet. But in June 1990, the Japanese government promised to resume loan programs to China, and with that Deng agreed to release Fang and Li as part of the package. The Chinese government demanded in addition that Fang agree to “no anti-China activity” after his release. Fang accepted this demand, but repeatedly made it clear that to criticize China’s ruling regime was hardly “anti-China.” He persisted with his criticisms, which he saw as supportive of China.

Today, for Chen Guangcheng, the two governments might agree that exile is the least awkward solution from their points of view, but Chen may not accept it. Chinese dissidents have learned over the past two decades that exile leads to a sharp decline in a person’s ability to make a difference inside China. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is now in his third year of an eleven-year prison sentence for “subversion,” made it clear after his arrest that he would not accept exile as an alternative to prison. From what friends of Chen in Beijing have been saying in recent days, it seems that Chen is taking a similar position.

Link gave further details of Fang and Li’s stay at the embassy to The Guardian’s Tania Branigan:

“It had comfortable furniture and food and so on, but in terms of personal freedom it was no better than a prison.

“Their son Fang Zhe went in with them, but about four days later left because he couldn’t stand it.”

In an essay, Fang, who died last month, wrote: “All the windows were nailed shut by planks and it was isolated from outside. The garbage would be put into the medical briefcase and carried out by the resident doctor for processing. The food was purchased by the nurse.”

Regardless of Chen’s eventual destination, the irritant factor looks set to persist through this week’s Strategic and Economic Dialogue, for which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Treasury counterpart Timothy Geithner have travelled to Beijing. From NPR:

This time around, human rights issues will certainly “interfere” with Clinton’s agenda. And they should, says Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican of New Jersey.

“My hope is that this week will be a game-changer for the administration, which has been very weak and enabling of the Chinese dictatorship,” Smith says. “You know, hope springs eternal — this is the week to make a difference and be very strong with Chen Guangcheng ….”

The Obama administration has raised concerns about Chen’s harsh treatment under house arrest in the past. Administration officials wouldn’t comment Monday directly on Chen’s case. Clinton would only say she’s working on — as she puts it — a “constructive relationship” with China.

One former senior diplomat defended the lack of specific comment, telling Reuters that “the quieter we are officially, the better the outcome likely will be“. But both Clinton and Obama have stressed that human rights have a central place in their negotiations with China. From Reuters, via The Guardian:

Global Times took a moment to enjoy the Americans’ dilemma, and the fact that Chen is now at least partly someone else’s problem.

In the Western media, Chen is a hot potato for Chinese authorities. Now he is making Washington uncomfortable. Chen, unlike other dissidents who made abstract human rights goals in China, has many detailed complaints about the country’s grass-roots governance. He travelled to the US embassy from Linyi, Shandong, and now these problems have entered the US sphere of import.

All countries are plagued by various public complaints. Chinese petitioners are motivated by various incentives. If petitioners’ requests are not met by domestic authorities and turn to the US embassy, this is not only embarrassing to China but also puts the US in an awkward position.

The US embassy would have no interest in turning itself into a petition office receiving Chinese complaints. It is easier just preaching universal values to the Chinese public, and occasionally, helping a few exemplary cases that best illustrate US intentions. It is never willing to involve itself in too many detailed disputes in Chinese society.

The editorial is an exceptional break in the blanket of silence thrown over China’s official and, as far as possible, social media. From China Media Project, on Saturday:

CMP was able to find no coverage of Chen Guangcheng whatsoever in traditional media, and so far (as of 6pm today) there has been no official word from official outlets like Xinhua News Agency.

Following a flurry of discussion of Chen Guangcheng on Chinese social media Friday, we see far more robust controls today. Nearly all possible searches have been blocked, and even the Chinese word for “blind person”, or mang’ren (盲人) — Chen Guangcheng lost his sight during his early childhood — turns up the familiar warning that: “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, these search results cannot be shown ….”

But we did happen across this post by Chinese professor Zhu Dake (朱大可), who wrote cryptically:

[The Story of the Mole] Once upon a time there was a mole who was surrounded by a pack of wolves, but with the help of some mice he managed to escape. The wolves were furious. The mole’s older and younger brothers, his mother and his baby still lived in the burrow. They became the hostages of the wolves. The escaped mole hid in the forest and called out to the lion, but the lion could not hear his fragile voice. The mice in the walls and the mice in the field all passed along the welcome news, but they couldn’t decide whether the [mole's] escape was a victory, or whether it was just the beginning of more hardship.

Moles, wolves and lions are now all on a list of censored terms compiled by the AP: see also two recent instalments of CDT’s own Sensitive Words series. Other entries include “Blind Man”, “A Bing” (a blind musician), “Shawshank Redemption”, and many other code words pressed into service by netizens trying to stay ahead of the censors. Others have joined foreign supporters on Twitter, from where Al Jazeera’s The Stream compiled a roundup of reactions and rumours.

At NPR, Louisa Lim contrasted the attempted blackout with authorities’ approach to the recent Bo Xilai scandal(s), on which speculation was allowed to run relatively wild.

But in the case of Chen, the escaped lawyer, the strategy has been completely different. The censorship machine has tried to deny his existence rather than allow his demonization. That could be because sensitive negotiations with the U.S. about his fate are ongoing.

Charlie Custer of the translation website ChinaGeeks.org says another factor could be that his case is more potent.

“The whole Bo Xilai thing is sort of like watching an opera or watching a movie. It’s very entertaining and very interesting, but it doesn’t cause the average person to think, ‘Wow, that could happen to me,’ ” Custer says. “Chen Guangcheng comes from a rural, poor background, so he strikes a chord with a lot of people. Then seeing his family — these people who are completely innocent of anything — be arrested and held without trial or charges, that does resonate with a lot of people.”

See also ‘Activist’s Escape Tests Chinese & US Governments‘ at CDT, on the political implications of Chen’s escape within China and across the Pacific; Steven Colbert’s account of the episode, in which he comments that “apparently losing your sight doesn’t just make your ears better: it makes your balls bigger”; and an English-subtitled version of Chen’s video message.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: asylum, Barack Obama, Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, Christopher Smith, Deng Xiaoping, EU, exiles, Fang Lizhi, Global Times, Hillary Clinton, Hong Kong, Hu Jia, linyi, Liu Xiaobo, online censorship, perry link, police, refugees, Shandong, sina weibo, social media, Teng Biao, Tiananmen Square, Timothy Geithner, United States
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If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the CDT editors at CDT [at] chinadigitaltimes [dot] net.

活埋 (huó mái): buried alive

When the Chinese government allowed dissident and author Yu Jie to leave the country they were hoping to silence his voice. Little did they know, just weeks after he entered the United States, one of Yu Jie’s statements would be dubbed the “first Internet catchphrase of 2012.”

Yu Jie wrote that the night before Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he was wrestled into a car and taken to an unknown location where he was stripped naked, kicked and had his fingers bent back one-by-one. After that, the Domestic Security Department agent in charge made the following threat：

“If the order comes from above, within half an hour we can dig a pit and bury you alive. No one on earth would know… As far as we can tell, there are no more than 200 intellectuals in the country who oppose the Communist Party and are influential. If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture them all in one night and bury them alive.”

Other dissidents including Jiang Tianyong, Teng Biao, Liu Shihui, Zhang Lin and Liu Dejun have also reported being threatened by the Domestic Security Department that they could be buried alive.

The phrase “buried alive” quickly began to make the rounds on the Internet. One microblog user wrote, “They say in the event of a crisis they’ll bury 200 influential intellectuals. What a tragedy. Even when it comes to being buried alive, I don’t qualify.” A Ding, an online writer, included the phrase in his Chinese New Year Greeting: “Happy New Year–hope you make it onto the bury-alive list!”

Yu Jie is perhaps best well known for authoring the book, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: buried alive, bury alive, GMH Lexicon, grass-mud horse lexicon, Jiang Tianyong, Liu Dejun, Liu Shihui, Liu Xiaobo, meme, Teng Biao, word of the week, yu jie, zhang lin
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• Signing 08 Charter (the document for which Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 10 years in jail);
• Attending, or expressing interest in, Jasmine gatherings;
• Signing online appeals, in one case, for improving prison management; in another, against the detention of a Uighur scholar;
• Intent to attend events organized by Ai Weiwei (this was before Ai Weiwei was detained and held for 86 days last year);
• Attending the memorial of a woman who self-immolated to protest against violent demolition;
• Writing blogs or articles on the themes of democracy and freedom, about June 4th, Tibet or Xinjiang;
• Twitter expressions;
• Sending a bouquet to the Norwegian Hall of Shanghai Expo in connection to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo;

Cao’s second post describes the typical content of a tea-drinking session, and the spectrum of invitees’ reactions, from defiance to fear or sadness:

Hecha, it appeared, doesn’t involve beating or sustained verbal abuse. That’s because it is the “low end” of the government intimidation and persecution, and depending on how big a threat you are in their perception, things can become much worse ….

Some people dealt with their hecha sessions with composure and even playfulness, others left useful advice, such as “be firm and you have done nothing wrong ….”

One way or the other, it is hard to exaggerate the kind of fear hecha can strike into ordinary people. It lays bare the fact that the state has every power over you, is prepared to use it in the most wanton way, while you no power, no rights, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself.

See more on tea-drinking at CDT, including the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon’s entry on the term, translations of several first-hand accounts, and some tongue-in-cheek advice for tea-drinkers.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, drinking tea, DSD, interrogation, June 4th, Liu Xiaobo, Tibet, Twitter, Xinjiang
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… He began thinking about leaving last spring, and got permission last month, he said. Officials probably believed it would be better to have him outside China in this transition year, Mr. Yu said. Officers accompanied him, his wife, Liu Min, and their son, Yu Guangyi, to the Beijing airport boarding gate and took their picture.

And how will he remain relevant while outside China? Mr. Yu said he believed the Internet would help. He has a Twitter account, @yujie89, with nearly [now over] 30,000 followers. (He said he preferred not to use Chinese microblogs because of censorship.)

Mr. Yu said his immediate goals were to apply for asylum and finish the two books due this year. Then he plans to work on a book about the history of Christianity in China.

“Maybe in a couple years I’ll have a green card, and maybe I’ll become an American citizen,” he said. “But I see my career and lifelong goal as achieving democracy and freedom in China. And so my goal is to eventually return to China.”

See more on Yu Jie via CDT, including his 2010 account of “drinking tea” with State Security, news of his move to the US, and a Global Times response insisting that “[Yu's] personal feelings do not conform with the overwhelming majority of people in China.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, Christianity, exile, Liao Yiwu, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, Twitter, United States, writers, yu jie
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One of the countries that might wish to challenge the status quo in the Arctic is China. Clearly, as a non-Arctic state, it’s difficult for them to advance their national interests in the region. What are your thoughts on how China can be properly accommodated in the Arctic?

When we think of China, we think about it as an Arctic issue. For Norway, China isn’t some place you get to by sailing through the Suez Canal or around Africa. It’s somewhere you get to by going over the top of the world. If you live in Africa, you may have a different geographic view. But for us, our Asian Century will be over the top.

So, we welcome the Chinese concerns. They will be sending ships to the Arctic along with many others. In fact, we had commercial routes through the Arctic to China last summer. Issues such as maritime transportation will need to be the joint responsibility of everyone. If you are going to send a ship up there and be commercially active, your involvement is necessary ….

… Are you optimistic that Arctic security can be better managed than the major maritime disputes in the South or East China Seas?

I don’t think that one can compare one geographic region to another. It’s not very helpful. The South China Sea is so far away. We can manage this area as our neighborhood. It might be a nice study to do in the abstract, but it’s not going to help those who are trying to manage the Arctic.

The ambassador’s conciliatory tone contrasts with recent speculation that Norway might thwart China’s ambitions to gain permanent observer status on the Arctic Council. Relations between the two countries have yet to recover from the selection of Liu Xiaobo for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize by an independent committee. But last week’s Economist suggested that the Norwegian side need feel little urgency in bringing about a thaw:

Earlier this month the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, lamented that ties with China have still not returned to normal. “It’s very static,” he said. But if Beijing is expecting an apology, it will have to wait. “That would be politically disastrous [at home] for us,” says one Norwegian official.

With a stable security environment (far from China), solid growth, a large budget surplus, low unemployment and one of the world’s highest living standards, Norway is well-placed to weather China’s deep-freeze treatment. Because China accounts for less than 2% of Norway’s exports, the economic consequences seem eminently manageable.

See also ‘China Sets Sights On Arctic Resources‘, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Arctic, Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize, norway, South China Sea
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If confirmed, Oslo’s move would mark a bold confrontation with the world’s fastest rising economic power and highlight the growing importance of the Arctic, which is opening up for navigation and mineral exploitation as it melts due to global warming.

China’s relations with Norway have been frosty since October 2010, when the Oslo-based Nobel committee announced that Liu, an imprisoned Chinese democracy activist, would be the next peace laureate.

Although the Norwegian government has stressed that the Nobel committee is independent, Beijing has punished its host nation by cutting political and human rights dialogues.

Until now, Norway has tried to use quiet diplomacy to ease the situation but, with little sign of progress, the Aftenposten, Norway’s best selling newspaper, claims the government is preparing to up the stakes.

China has not shied away from its desire for involvement in the development of the rich deposits of natural resources in the Arctic, and recently enlisted the help of Denmark in its campaign to gain permanent membership on the Arctic Council. Still, Business Insider’s Adam Taylor wrote on Wednesday, Norway could be the key roadblock for China.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Arctic Council, Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Prize, norway
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In a lengthy statement, the 38-year-old said government censorship had made him “a non-existent person in the public space”, unable to publish any work on the mainland. But his problems escalated when Liu’s award was announced in October 2010 and “illegal house arrests, torture, surveillance, tracking, and being taken on ‘trips’ became part of my everyday life”.

His family was placed under house arrest and even their phone and internet connections were cut, leaving them in “an endless black hole”. The day before the Nobel ceremony in December, plain clothes officers hooded and abducted him and began beating him in the head and face, he said.

“They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online,” Yu added.

“They forced me to kneel and slapped me over a hundred times in the face. They even forced me to slap myself … They also kicked me in the chest and then stood on me after I had fallen to the ground.”

Yu devoted a large portion of the statement to describe his treatment after friend and fellow activist Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. The activist group Human Rights in China has posted the full text of the statement, in which Yu also explains his plans now that he has arrived in America:

After arriving in the U.S., my main writing plans for the near future are: publish the Chinese edition of Liu Xiaobo’s biography two months from now and various foreign language editions afterwards. I began writing the biography in early 2009, and it is the only biography of Liu Xiaobo authorized by Liu Xia. I hope, through this biography, to comprehensively introduce Liu Xiaobo’s life, philosophy, and creativity, and give readers around the world, including those inside China, a deeper understanding of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. I will use this book as an opportunity to call on people on every possible occasion to continue to pay close attention to Liu Xiaobo’s and Liu Xia’s fates so that they can be freed as soon as possible.

I also plan to publish a new book, Hu Jintao: Cold-Blooded Tyrant (冷血暴君胡锦涛), within the next six months. This will be the companion book to China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao and will be a eulogy for Hu Jintao as he exits the stage of history. Hu Jintao will be a comprehensive analysis of Hu’s governance and provide analysis and commentary on the major features of the Hu era, including “harmonious society,” “the rise of a great nation,” “China model,” and “stability maintenance.” It will enable readers in China and beyond as well as the international community to see the truth behind China’s economic growth—reckless autocracy, rampant corruption, deterioration of human rights, damage to the environment, moral decline—and that Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are sinners of history whose sins cannot be forgiven.

…

I am a true patriot. There is a line in Macbeth that goes, “I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; / It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds.” I worry and suffer about this. I will make exposing and criticizing the tyrannical rule of the CPC my life’s cause. For each day that this government that has robbed and plundered China’s riches and enslaved and crippled the Chinese people does not fall, I will not stop exposing and criticizing it. I further believe that in the near future I will return to a China that has achieved democracy and freedom. Then, our lives will be like those described in the Bible, “[Behold,] how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” And those kleptocrats and traitors who wrought tyranny, from Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to every wicked state security officer, will be put on trial to await an even more shameful end than that of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar al-Gaddafi. Let us work together so that that day may come as soon as possible.

See also an AFP video report on Wednesday’s press conference which has been posted to YouTube.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dissident, Liu Xiaobo, torture, United States, yu jie
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In over forty years of writing about China, I have been subjected to many forms of pressure. But this has never happened to me. What had I said this time that attracted the attention of the official shredder? The article, titled “China: Richer but Repressed,” mentioned Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist and designer of the Beijing Olympics’ Bird’s Nest stadium, who was detained last year for 81 days; Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, now serving eleven years; the blind civil rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, long under house arrest and prohibited contact with all visitors; and Wang Yi, who published exposes of tainted milk and enforced abortions, and spent a year in detention. I included quotes from books by Harvard scholars. Surely everything I wrote is well known in China, especially to the tiny number of English-reading urban people who buy Newsweek.

Then I learned that a few months earlier, on August 28, 2011, Ai Weiwei had also published a piece in Newsweek that the Chinese censors cut out. In it he called Beijing a “nightmare,” a city of “desperation” in which those who don’t have money or connections “hold no hope.” As for the authorities’ methods of suppressing information about those who are detained or made to disappear, he wrote:

They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

Of course, as a Chinese citizen, Ai Weiwei risks another round of detention by saying such things. But what is the worst that can happen to a foreign writer who displeases the Party? In China, he can be threatened, even when walking in the street, or his phone can be tapped, deliberately audibly. He can be banned; this is very rare. (It has happened to Perry Link and to me.) Or, if he lives and writes abroad, as I do now, what he publishes in China can be expunged. There are two messages here: we don’t like your ideas, and nothing like this is going to be published in China if we can prevent it.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, freedom of expression, jonathan mirsky, Liu Xiaobo, media censorship
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