The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng

The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng

Author:Chen Guangcheng
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805098068
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.


CHAPTER EIGHT

Kidnapped

As we sped away from Beijing, I heard my captors talking among themselves and gathered that we were heading to Tianjin, about eighty miles southeast of the capital. They continued to pummel me while twisting my arms behind my back and gripping my neck in a painful choke hold, letting up only when we pulled over in Tianjin. When the rest of the Shandong retinue caught up, Zhu Hongguo and another man slipped into our car, replacing the men who had been holding my arms during the trip. Zhu Hongguo motioned his cohort to release my arms, and then began patting me on the back, as if to console me—he apparently regretted this violent, unseemly way of bringing me to heel. Although fully implicated in everything, he was a good man at heart, and in various subtle ways he tried to support and protect me while still following the party’s dictates.

Before long we got back on the highway, and by my reckoning we pulled up at our destination soon after midnight. My captors hauled me out of the car and through the lobby of what I later learned was the Victoria Resort in Yinan, an upscale spa hotel where corrupt local government officials went to spend their ill-gotten gains. I was taken to an ordinary guest room on the first floor; it contained two beds, a table, some chairs, and a TV, which no one turned on. I lay back on one of the beds, refusing to interact or cooperate with my kidnappers in any way.

By that time, I could hardly speak, my throat having been wedged in a crushing headlock during the earlier part of trip. My entire body was aching and bruised, and when my captors refused my request to see a doctor, I immediately made up my mind to begin a hunger strike, leaving the breakfast they brought to my room untouched.

As morning broke, cadres came and went. At one point Liu Jie, the vice mayor of Linyi and the head of its Public Security Bureau, arrived and ordered everyone out of the room except for two other officials.

“I’m here today to talk about some things,” he said.

I made no response.

“We’re equals,” he added, as though trying to appease me.

You kidnap me, and now you call us equals? I thought to myself, remaining silent.

“You ignore me,” he continued, sitting near the window, “but I still have something to say. I believe you can hear me and that you are listening. I brought you back here from Beijing in order to save you. You were surrounded by so many reporters there in Beijing, and you agreed to be interviewed by them. You agreed to an interview with the Washington Post and thus were in breach of article 111 of Chinese Criminal Law, illegally providing intelligence to foreigners.” Just one interview, he added, would be enough to earn me five years in prison, and two interviews would mean a ten-year sentence.

This was nonsense. According to this line of



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