Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught lawyer, began his human rights work by defending the economic rights of farmers and arguing for the rights of the disabled for the use of free public transport.  He was also active in exposing forced abortions and sterilizations in and around Linyi City in Shangdong Province.  In June 2005, Chen went to Beijing to file a class-action lawsuit against the Linyi authorities on behalf of women who had been subjected to abuse at the hands of family planning officials.  The suit was rejected by the court.  In August 2005, Chen and his family were placed under house arrest.  In March 2006, Chen was taken from his home by police and disappeared for three months.

      

Chen was formally arrested in June 2006 and his trial took place in Yinan County, Shandong province, in August 2006.  The night before the trial, three members of his defence team were detained, and a fourth was beaten by unidentified men.  His lawyers were prevented from entering the courtroom and in their places, Chen was defended by a court-appointed lawyer who was unfamiliar with the case.  In a trial which lasted two hours,   Chen was sentenced to four years and three months imprisonment on charges of damaging property and “organising a mob to disturb traffic”.  An appeals court ordered a retrial in November 2006, but the original verdict was upheld when the retrial took place the following month.

    

While he was in prison, Chen’s wife, Yuan Weijing, was denied the monthly visits that are officially permitted and was only rarely allowed to see Chen.   Chen’s health deteriorated in prison, where he developed chronic diarrhoea and, according to Yuan Weijing, was beaten by other inmates.

 

House arrest

Chen was released, having served his sentence in full on 9 September 2010.  On his release, Chen was taken to his home village, Dongshigu, in Shanghou Town, Yinan County, Shandong Province.  He was immediately placed under house arrest along with his family – his wife, his mother and his six year old daughter. His ten year old son is in the care of relatives in another town.  According to Chinese law expert, Prof. Jerome Cohen, there is nothing in Chinese law that he is aware of which allows for Chen’s continued detention.  Phone lines in the house were cut and CCTV cameras were installed in the village.  A group of men also blocked access to the village and chased anyway any journalists, friends, foreign diplomats or other human rights defenders who tried to access Chen.  The only person allowed out of the house was Chen’s elderly mother, in order to buy food.  Relatives were initially permitted to visit after being strip-searched, but since October 2010, these visits have these stopped.  Equipment to block mobile-phone signals were also installed outside the house to ensure that the family could not communicate with the outside world. 

  

In the past 12 months, the family’s situation has deteriorated drastically as their treatment has steadily worsened.  On 9 February 2011, a video smuggled out by Chen and Yuan Weijing in which they detail the conditions of their house arrest was made public by the US-based NGO China Aid.  In it, the couple describe how their house is watched by three teams of 22 people 24 hours a day.  Chen states, “I have come from a small prison and walked into a larger one”.  Following the release of the video, reports began to surface that Chen and his wife had been severely beaten in a reprisal attack. 

    

These reports were confirmed on 15 June 2011 when a letter written by Yuan Weijing and successfully smuggled out of the house was made public describing the beating the couple received.  She writes that on 18 February 2011, a group of over 70 unidentified men stormed their house and beat the couple for two hours.  She alleges that the group was led by Zhang Jian, the vice-secretary of the Communist Party in Shuanghou Town.  She describes how she was covered in a quilt and kicked in the ribs and face, fracturing a rib and causing her left eye to be swollen and ‘filled with blood’, leaving her unable to see for five days.  Chen was beaten into a coma.  Yuan was permitted a once-off intravenous injection from a village doctor on 19 February, while Chen was denied any medical treatment.  That day, and twice again in the following month, their house was stripped bare of nearly all possessions, including Chen’s blind cane, all books, their daughter’s toys and drawings done by the couple’s children.  Two more CCTV cameras were installed.  Furthermore, Yuan writes that their then five year-old daughter had been prevented from leaving the house since 24 February, and Chen’s mother, since mid-March, had also been stopped from leaving, even to go grocery shopping.  She ends her letter by highlighting Chen’s deteriorating health situation and with an appeal for help.

    

In July 2011, Chen and Yuan were subjected to another four hour beating, witnessed by their daughter, and details of which only became public on 28 October 2011.  This time the assault appears to have been in response to a number of phone calls that the couple were able to make after an electrical storm disabled the phone-jamming equipment outside their house.  On 28 July, a group of men, again allegedly led by Zhang Jian, carried out an extensive search of the house, following which they found a phone card hidden in a pile of ashes.  The couple were then reportedly beaten from 4pm to 8pm.  Later, a village doctor was permitted to give some basic medical attention to Chen. On 16 September, Chen and Yuan’s young daughter, Chen Kesi, was finally allowed to start attending classes again.  Guards bring her to and from school every day, and they are stationed at the school gates while she is in class.  Unlike other students, Chen Kesi is not permitted to go home for lunch.

    

Domestic campaign

Since his house arrest began, a small number of human rights defenders in China have been running a campaign to raise awareness of Chen’s case and to demand his release.  This has been coordinated mostly online, though blogs, Twitter and Weibo, but it has also included trips by individual human rights defenders to Dongshigu village in an attempt to visit Chen and his family.

 

The campaign initially gained little traction outside the small community of human rights defenders in the mainland, but since October, an increasingly large number of so-called netizens have been getting involved, both on- and offline.  It is estimated that up to 100 people have attempted to go to Dongshigu; all have been turned away and many have been assaulted.  After each trip, details of what happened are blogged and posted on Weibo and Twitter, further raising awareness of the treatment to which Chen and his family are being subjected, and the treatment which is meted out to people trying to visit him.

 

The campaign has also attracted a number of high-profile supporters.  On 16 October, Murong Xuecun, a well-known author - he has over one million followers on Weibo - tried to visit Chen with three friends.  Their group received a similarly violent reception and he wrote a detailed account of the trip on his blog, as well as posting regular updates on Weibo.  He commented afterwards that "I sent one tweet that was retweeted 11,000 times before it was deleted.  I guess that day at least a few million people knew what we were doing”.   Also in October, a Xinhua journalist, Shi Yu, tried to visit Chen without success.  He reported being hooded, pushed into a car, taken to a room and being repeatedly beaten.  He was detained for 20 hours.  Shi Yu resigned from his job at Xinhua following the publication of his ordeal.

    

Also speaking out have been scholars, media commentators, writers, at least two academics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Yu Jianrong and Lei Yi), and famous economist Mao Yushi.  A photo blog of self-portraits of people wearing sunglasses or blindfolds has been created to express support for Chen, while another blog posts updates with the latest information and translates articles from the international media about Chen into Chinese.

    

From the human rights defenders that Front Line has been in contact with about Chen’s case, all insist that more international pressure must be placed on the Chinese government, to compliment the domestic pressure which is currently being exerted.