In China, justice is blind, barefoot, and under arrest. BY JENNIFER CHOU
ON OCTOBER 10, a lawyer and three assistants traveled from Beijing to Linyi, a city of 10 million roughly 400 miles southeast of the Chinese capital, to participate in a historic class-action lawsuit. Organized by the charismatic blind activist Chen Guangcheng, 34, the lawsuit targets local officials who compelled people to undergo abortions or vasectomies in overzealous pursuit of China's "one-child" population policy. When the delegation from Beijing reached the place appointed for the hearing, they were informed that a defense attorney had suffered acute appendicitis and the proceeding had been cancelled.
Chen himself had already been sidelined. Held under house arrest since the summer, he had attempted to evade his guards on October 4 in order to meet with three lawyers from Beijing. Quickly surrounded by about 60 men, mostly thugs and gangsters but also some local officials, the lawyers had been beaten, and Chen had been left bleeding in the street.
Eyewitnesses told Radio Free Asia that one of the lawyers, Li Fangping, was pinned to the ground and beaten up, and only narrowly escaped being thrown into the river Another lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, was also pushed to the ground and beaten. A local resident told RFA that Chen suffered cuts and injuries to his arms and a leg and also lost a tooth. His requests to go to the hospital were denied. Instead, local authorities sent a doctor to check his blood pressure. The three visiting lawyers were interrogated by police for 15 hours, then put on a train for Beijing. In a cell-phone interview with RFA during the train ride back to the capital, Xu Zhiyong reported that the beating incident seemed to him to have been "organized," and that during his interrogation the authorities warned against further interference because the case against Chen "involved state secrets."
The case Chen is attempting to advance against local authorities certainly does. A self-taught jurist and defender of the rights of the disabled, Chen is known around Linyi as the "barefoot lawyer." In March 2005, he began recording testimony from men and women who had been forced to undergo sterilizations or submit to abortions.
Officially, abortions and sterilizations must be voluntary. But in practice, local officials are under intense pressure to meet population-control targets. In an interview in April 2005, one township-level family-planning official told RFA that illegal actions had been taken in Linyi to help meet population targets. "If people have more than the allotted number of children," he explained, "it affects the overall family planning results. Here in Shandong Province, each level of government has the responsibility for overseeing the level below it. From the city level upwards, you start getting fines for exceeding the target."
Chen's work showed that local officials were requiring women expecting a third child to end their pregnancies and their husbands to undergo vasectomies. In some cases, individuals went into hiding rather than submit, only to see their relatives arrested, beaten, and held hostage in city prisons until the escapees turned themselves in. By one estimate based on lawyers' investigations, at least 7,000 people in the Yinan district of Linyi alone were forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations between March and July 2005.
Chen's determination to document and publicize such abuses became something more than an annoyance to Linyi officials when he filed his lawsuit against them. By August, authorities had set up roadblocks near Chen's home in the Dongshigu precinct and posted guards at the local train station to prevent visitors from reaching him. In a mid-August telephone interview with RFA, Chen said he had been threatened and harassed by public security personnel.
Then, in late August, on a night so dark that a blind man was at an advantage over others, Chen managed to slip through the security cordon around his house and travel to Beijing. There, he met with foreign journalists, U.S. embassy officials, and lawyers who had volunteered to help with the class-action suit.
On September 6, however, while still in the capital, Chen was abducted in broad daylight by unidentified men as he left an apartment building, He was dragged across a parking lot, punched, gagged, and pushed into the back of an unmarked car with tinted windows. Held in a hotel room for 38 hours, Chen was interrogated, threatened with charges of illegally providing intelligence to foreign countries, and visited by the head of the Linyi public security bureau and the city's deputy mayor. His abductors turned out to be policemen from Linyi.
Chen was escorted back to Dongshigu. In a cell-phone interview with Radio Free Asia after he arrived home, Chen said the authorities had disconnected his landline and confiscated his computer. Shortly after the interview, his cell-phone connection was cut as well.
By then, however, Chen's campaign was apparently already bearing fruit. On September 19, the National Population and Family Planning Commission, a cabinet-level entity that manages population growth in China, announced that it was joining with the Shandong family-planning agency to send teams to investigate claims of forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi. The commission said in a statement that some local officials in Linyi "did commit practices that violated the law and infringed upon the legitimate rights and interests of citizens while conducting family planning work." It was announced that several health officials had been removed or punished.
Whether this amounted to a real victory, however, remains unclear. In interviews with RFA, Linyi residents and activists insist that, to their knowledge, not a single local official has been sacked or disciplined.
For the moment, then, the contenders are at a sort of stalemate. It won't last. A few years ago, Chen Guangcheng visited Washington. Though slender and soft-spoken, in his sunglasses he looked like a rock star. Now, as he sits at home nursing his injuries, it is safe to assume he is contemplating how he can press forward with his work.
Must sacrifice additional children to Hypnotoad. All glory to the Hypnotoad!
