Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Osnos Evan

Author:Osnos, Evan [Osnos, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781448190607
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

THE GERM IN THE HENHOUSE

The people in sunglasses did not immediately attract attention. When the first portraits appeared on Chinese social media sites in the fall of 2011, they encompassed a few dozen men and women. Soon there were more people in sunglasses, including kids, foreigners, and cartoon avatars. Bloggers noticed, and word spread. By the time the number passed five hundred, the censors were striking them down, but they continued to circulate anyway, and to those who knew what they were seeing, the pictures were a milestone: arguably China’s first viral political campaign. It was a tribute to a man whom virtually none of the participants had ever met: the blind peasant lawyer Chen Guangcheng.

Six years after I’d tried to see Chen at his home in Dongshigu village, his local government had not wavered in its determination to contain the spread of his ideas, even if it meant sequestering him like the carrier of a fever. Around the time of my visit, in the fall of 2005, he was summoned to a meeting with Liu Jie, the local deputy mayor. Liu demanded to know why Chen was speaking to foreign reporters about abuses of the one-child system. “Why could you not address the matter through the normal official channels instead of talking to hostile forces in overseas countries?”

By that point, however, it was becoming clear that, in going public, Chen had crossed a line that the state could no longer tolerate. He was not yet charged with a crime, but he was put under house arrest and his phone was cut. After a couple of months, there was a routine power outage—a common problem in parts of the countryside that were growing fast—and to his surprise, the blackout disabled the phone-jamming equipment that was keeping him in isolation. Chen was able to get a call out to his lawyers in Beijing, who called me, and I dialed Chen’s phone. He laughed at the strangeness of the circumstances, and then he paused, as if trying to summon a properly momentous tone for the occasion. “I want to tell the whole world,” he said grandly, “that this local government doesn’t obey their own law.” He was mystified that his attempts to alert the government to abuses of the law had landed him in seclusion. I asked him what was the biggest question on his mind. He said, “I am only wondering if the central government doesn’t want to stop this, or doesn’t have the ability to stop this.”

In March, after Chen had been under house arrest for nearly six months, his brother and fellow villagers fought with police over the conditions of Chen’s confinement. Chen was charged with “destruction of property” and “assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic,” though his supporters found this hard to square with his physical limitations. The night before his trial, his lawyer was detained; Chen was represented by court-appointed attorneys, who called no witnesses. He was found guilty of destroying property and disrupting traffic and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

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