[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 181 (Tuesday, November 29, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2123-E2125]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            A HERO OF US ALL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of Virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 29, 2011

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I submit a copy of Jay Nordlinger's recent 
piece in National Review highlighting the plight of Chinese dissident 
Chen Guangcheng.
  Nordlinger writes, ``Many people in the world regard Chen as one of 
the greatest men we have known in the last decade.'' His courageous 
exposure of China's brutal one-child

[[Page E2124]]

policy earned him the ire of the communist government. He and his 
family have suffered immensely. His current fate is unknown.
  Nordlinger rightly calls a Chen a hero and reminds us that Chen is 
but one of countless other dissidents languishing in Chinese prisons. 
Their names may not be known to us, but their struggle is no less real.
  The United States must boldly and consistently stand with men and 
women like Chen who yearn for the basic human liberty and dignity that 
is our birthright as Americans.

               [From the National Review, Nov. 28, 2011]

                            A Hero of Us All

                          (By Jay Nordlinger)

       Last month, there were reports that Chen Guangcheng was 
     dead. That they had at last killed him. ``They''? China's 
     ruling Communists, who have tormented Chen for years. Other 
     reports said, No, he is not dead: just in very bad shape. Any 
     report about Chen is now impossible to confirm or deny. The 
     authorities are not letting anyone from the outside see or 
     talk to him.
       Many people in the world regard Chen as one of the greatest 
     men we have known in the last decade. These admirers work on 
     the assumption that Chen is alive. A furious international 
     campaign is under way to save him.
       Chen was born on Nov. 12, 1971, in the Linyi area of 
     Shandong Province. When a year old, he contracted a fever, 
     which left him blind. Just a peasant, he educated himself, 
     including in the law. He was ready and available to help 
     people. Jianli Yang, a dissident now in America, calls him a 
     ``born leader,'' someone who has always cared for others and 
     whom others respond to.
       To the extent he could, Chen helped the disabled petition 
     for their rights. He helped farmers, too. In the worldwide 
     press, he has been known as ``the blind lawyer,'' or ``the 
     barefoot lawyer,'' or ``the blind rural activist.'' Many 
     Chinese throughout the country know him simply as ``the blind 
     man.''
       What gained him his fame, and torment, was his exposure of 
     one fact: In the year 2005 alone, in just the Linyi area, 
     there were 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations. These 
     procedures are brutal. Moreover, relatives of those who 
     escaped the procedures were detained and tortured. Harry Wu, 
     a long-famous dissident working in America, says that few 
     outside China really understand the consequences of the one-
     child policy. Jing Zhang, another dissident, associated with 
     the Boston-based group All Girls Allowed, points out that 
     Chen touched one of China's most sensitive nerves.
       He organized a class-action suit against local Party 
     officials. At first, the government in Beijing seemed pleased 
     with him. In China, believe it or not, forced abortion and 
     forced sterilization are illegal, officially. Beijing 
     signaled that it would punish the guilty locals. But Chen was 
     getting attention in the international press, celebrated as a 
     whistleblower, and a blind peasant, at that. This displeased 
     Beijing, which left Chen to the mercies of the local 
     officials.
       They seized him in March 2006. They harassed, detained, and 
     beat members of his family and his lawyers. To him, they did 
     worse. Eventually, they gave him a trial, but it was the 
     usual sham. For example, his lawyers were forbidden to 
     attend. Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, said, ``There isn't much 
     hope. . . . We live in a nation without law, a nation without 
     morality.'' He was sentenced to four years and three months 
     in prison.
       There, he faced what political prisoners can be expected to 
     face. He was beaten over and over. He went on hunger strikes. 
     He was denied medicine.
       His wife, sometimes under house arrest, sometimes not, did 
     all she could to help him. The months before the Beijing 
     Olympics in 2008 were especially bad for dissidents and other 
     ``troublemakers,'' although Western supporters of those 
     Olympics had said the Games would do wonders for China's 
     liberalization. The guard around Yuan increased from ten men 
     to 40. She wrote a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao, 
     calling herself ``nothing but a rights defender's wife.'' She 
     told of the humiliations she and her family endured.
       The West protested too, in various ways. At the U.N., there 
     were ``working groups'' and ``special rapporteurs.'' The 
     State Department and the EU uttered their peeps. 
     Organizations were good enough to give Chen awards, in 
     absentia. Nothing moved the Chinese government.
       He was released from prison in September 2010 and confined 
     to his home in the village of Dongshigu. This sort of 
     confinement is known as ruanjin, or soft detention, but it 
     has been very hard. Chen and his family have been watched 
     constantly and subjected to escalating abuses. In February, 
     he managed to have a video smuggled out to the West. It was 
     publicized by a group in Texas called the China Aid 
     Association, which said that the video had come courtesy of a 
     ``sympathetic government source.''
       In the video, Chen described the circumstances in which he 
     and his family were being kept, and he said, ``The thing we 
     need to do now is conquer terror'' and expose practices that 
     are ``lacking in human conscience.'' He said he was ``fully 
     prepared'' to be tortured after the video's release, but was 
     ``not afraid.'' Yuan Weijing spoke too, saying that her 
     family was in danger. With a breaking voice, she expressed 
     the hope that friends would take care of their children, 
     Kerui and Kesi, if something happened to them, the parents. 
     What happened immediately is that Chen and Yuan were beaten 
     to a pulp. A letter from Yuan, made available in June, told 
     us the following:

       More than ten men covered me totally with a blanket and 
     kicked my ribs and all over my body. After half an hour's 
     nonstop torture, I finally squeezed my head out of the 
     blanket. I saw more than ten men surrounding Chen Guangcheng, 
     torturing him. Some of them twisted his arms forcefully while 
     the others pushed his head down and lifted his collar up 
     tightly. . . . Guangcheng was not able to resist and passed 
     out after more than two hours.

       The letter details a great deal more.
       Infuriated by the video, the authorities did their best to 
     ensure that nothing could get in or out of the Chen home. 
     They removed the family's electronics and sealed the windows 
     with metal sheets. They installed surveillance cameras. They 
     plundered the house of almost everything, down to family 
     photos, toys, and Chen's white cane. The goal was to isolate 
     the family completely.
       Over the months, a stream of visitors have trekked to 
     Dongshigu, hoping to see Chen. These include writers, 
     lawyers, advocates for the disabled, and ordinary citizens. 
     They also include foreign diplomats and journalists. All have 
     been repulsed by teams of thugs at the four entrances to the 
     village. These thugs--a mixture of policemen and their 
     hirees--have detained, beaten, robbed, and shot at the would-
     be visitors. Many of these incidents are meticulously 
     documented.
       Impossible to document, of course, is Chen's condition at 
     the moment. But we know for sure that beatings, malnutrition, 
     and illness have taken their toll. The question is, To what 
     degree? Chen's supporters in China and around the world are 
     redoubling their efforts in his behalf. Some people are 
     risking a journey to Dongshigu on November 12, Chen's 40th 
     birthday. There is also a ``sunglasses campaign.'' Chen, like 
     many blind people, wears sunglasses, and supporters are 
     donning their own sunglasses and having their picture taken, 
     to be posted on the Internet. It is a gesture of solidarity, 
     a way of getting Beijing's attention.
       There is also pressure on an American movie company. 
     Relativity Media has just started filming 21 and Over in, of 
     all places, Linyi. They must be within shouting distance of 
     Dongshigu. The company is working in cooperation with the 
     same Party officials who are brutalizing Chen. The movie, 
     according to publicity, is a ``hilarious comedy'' about ``two 
     childhood friends who drag their straight-arrow buddy out to 
     celebrate his twenty-first birthday the night before an all-
     important medical school interview.'' And ``when one beer 
     leads to another, the evening spirals into a wild epic 
     misadventure of debauchery and mayhem that none of them will 
     ever forget.''
       The same press release quotes Zhang Shajun, a key Party 
     official. He welcomes his ``good friend Ryan Kavanaugh and 
     his great company Relativity'' and promises to ``provide the 
     best service possible in order to help make the movie 
     successful worldwide.'' Naturally, human-rights groups have 
     asked Relativity Media to use whatever leverage it has to 
     help Chen Guangcheng, or at least inquire into him. The 
     company has so far seemed disinclined.
       On another front, Jianli Yang has written the State 
     Department, asking it to bar from entering the United States 
     a Party official named Li Qun. Li studied at the University 
     of New Haven in Connecticut, and even served as an assistant 
     to New Haven's mayor. Now, according to Yang, he is the Party 
     official chiefly responsible for Chen's ordeal.
       Have international protests done any good at all? Reggie 
     Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, 
     says yes: ``I believe Chen would be dead by now but for 
     people in the West speaking out for him.''
       Across China, Chen is a symbol of human rights, like Gao 
     Zhisheng, another lawyer, who has been ``disappeared,'' and 
     Liu Xiaobo, the political prisoner who is also the 2010 Nobel 
     peace laureate. But Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China makes 
     a point that is depressing and inspiring at the same time: 
     There are many, many like Chen, Gao, and Liu, but whose names 
     are unknown to us. They languish in prisons, ``black jails,'' 
     psychiatric wards, and other dark places. They have stuck 
     their necks out for their rights and all people's.
       Why do they do it? Why do they risk, or guarantee, the full 
     wrath and murderous power of a dictatorship? Of Chen 
     Guangcheng, Harry Wu says, ``He had to tell the truth. 
     Simple. He had no choice but to tell the truth. That is why 
     people appreciate him, and why the government hates him.'' 
     Perhaps Chen's blindness gave him an extra dose of compassion 
     and courage. Perhaps not. In any case, there is someone much 
     like him in Cuba, the blind lawyer and activist Juan Carlos 
     Gonzalez Leiva. The bravery of such people is hard to account 
     for. But it can be admired.
       In that video, released earlier this year, Chen said, ``A 
     society that is not built on a foundation of fairness and 
     equality, but instead relies on bullying and violence, cannot 
     possibly maintain lasting stability.'' He is probably right 
     about that. Yet think how many suffer and die in the 
     meantime.

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