Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (46 page)

The precise sequence of events that resulted in the crackdown in Linyi is unknown, but birth planning officials told me that local officials were no doubt trying to meet unreasonable targets. Shandong Province already boasted one of the lowest fertility rates in the nation, and apparently that was not enough for provincial leaders. Any slip, after all, could derail their careers. Linyi was one of several cities in the western part of the province with slightly higher fertility rates than the rest of the province, and it came under pressure to do better. The burden fell on the Linyi party chief, Li Qun, an up-and-coming politician in his early forties who was being considered for a promotion to a provincial leadership post. The party had selected Li for a special training program in 2000, and he had spent six months in the United States taking public administration classes and serving in an internship as a special assistant to the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. When he returned to China, he was named Linyi’s mayor, and then two years later its party chief. An internal report he submitted about his U.S. experience was said to have received good reviews in the leadership, and he later published a popular book titled
I Was an Assistant to an American Mayor
, in which he wrote that Chinese officials could learn a lot from their American counterparts about how to improve governance. The national media presented him as a face of the future, an open-minded and savvy reformer.

But if Li were to continue his rise through party ranks, he would have to meet population targets like everyone else. In the summer of 2004, he issued a directive calling on his subordinates to “strengthen population and birth planning work in a new age.” Given the government’s softer and more voluntary approach to birth planning, he said, the task of population control faced “new situations and problems” and “severe challenges.”

Li’s directive went on to set a goal of limiting population growth to under 6 percent and guaranteeing more than 97 percent of births satisfied the one-child policy. It reminded officials to obey the law and respect the “informed choice” of residents, but the emphasis was on getting the job done, and it outlined rewards and penalties for officials in the three urban districts and nine rural counties under Linyi’s jurisdiction. Seven months later, Li followed up with another directive on the subject. This one was not publicized, but I was told it adopted a much tougher tone. The peasants weren’t educated enough to respect the law, it said, so legal procedures would not be enough to enforce compliance with birth planning targets. Instead, “the old methods” had to be used. It was this document that resulted in the violent crackdown in Linyi during the spring of 2005. Within the first few months, one county alone reported completing seven thousand sterilization operations. Teng Biao, the legal scholar who traveled to Linyi to investigate, estimated that 130,000 people had been detained, beaten, and held hostage by officials trying to compel relatives or neighbors to abort pregnancies or submit to sterilization.

It wasn’t until a blind man forced the nation, and the world, to look at what was happening in Linyi that the crackdown was suspended. When I traveled to Linyi, Chen Guangcheng took me from village to village, introducing me to women who had been dragged away like animals to be spayed and men who still bore bruises from being beaten and whipped. Villagers described midnight raids on their homes involving as many as thirty officials and hired thugs. Others recalled being packed into small rooms with as many as seventy others and released only after paying exorbitant fees. One woman could barely walk because of a botched tubal ligation. When the doctor told her what had happened, he didn’t apologize; he just told her she needed to come back in a month so he could try again. Another woman told me she was seven months pregnant and in hiding when officials detained all her aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws, as well as her pregnant sister. Every day her family called her, begging her to turn herself in so the beatings would end. Finally, she did and gave in to the government’s demand she have an abortion. At each village we visited, the peasants crowded around and greeted Chen like a returning hero. He recorded their stories, and told them not to give up.

Local officials confined Chen to his farmhouse not long after my article and others like it were published. But within weeks, the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the government ministry that administers the birth planning program in Beijing, announced it was opening an investigation and sending officials to Linyi. By then, though, Chen had escaped and was making his way to the capital.

E
VEN BEFORE
C
HEN’S
train arrived in Beijing, the goons from Linyi were waiting for him at the station. One of his lawyer friends had gone to pick him up and noticed several men outside speaking with Shandong accents about how to spot him. The lawyer called Chen’s cell phone, then arranged to meet him on the train. Together they disembarked and doubled back through a tunnel onto another platform. Then they slipped out a cargo exit on the other side of the station. But the next day, the men from Linyi managed to track him down again. Chen and the lawyer were about to enter a subway station when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Let’s go home, brother. You’ve made me come so far. You’re killing me!”

Chen recognized the weary voice immediately. It was Zhu Hongguo, a portly rural official he often dealt with back home. “I’m not going home,” he told the official.

But then there was another voice: “We’re from the Linyi Public Security Bureau.”

“So what?” Chen said. “Have we broken the law?”

“No.”

“Then why are you following me? The police must conduct their business according to the law!”

“We want to have a word with you.”

At this point the men began trying to separate Chen from his companion. There were about six of them, and they kept telling the lawyer that they were old friends of Chen’s. “Who says we’re friends?” Chen shot back. Addressing Zhu, he said, “If you had come by yourself, we could talk, but you’ve brought so many police and thugs with you.” The lawyer began shouting that hoodlums from Shandong had come to Beijing to bully a blind man, and a crowd of passersby started gathering around them. Chen called a friend on his cell phone, telling him to come to the subway station with a camera and take pictures. The men from Linyi backed off a distance, apparently worried about causing a scene.

But when Chen and the lawyers entered the station, they followed. Chen knew they wouldn’t try to grab him in such a public place, but he didn’t want them following him, either. So he took the lawyer’s hand and began leading him briskly toward the subway line. He knew the station well. After all, he had sued the subway system just a few years earlier. The men from Linyi had fallen behind while paying their fares, but they caught up in time to follow Chen onto the subway. Chen moved through the car, pushing his way past the other passengers, dragging the lawyer along, and then suddenly he got off the car at the other end just as it was about to leave. The Linyi men were caught off guard and scrambled to get off, too, but only one or two of them managed to make it before the doors closed. Chen kept moving, heading through the crowd down the platform toward another line in the station, his lawyer friend trying to keep up. He boarded another train, and the remaining Linyi men followed him on. When he got off again, they got off. But then he and the lawyer jumped back on. The doors closed before the Linyi men could follow. The subway pulled out of the station.

I saw Chen that night at a restaurant on the north side of Beijing, and he was his usual charming self, regaling a roomful of friends with the story of his adventure in the subway system and his earlier escape through the cornfields of his village. More than once, a listener interrupted to express wonderment that a blind man could outmaneuver the state’s agents. “I wasn’t leading Guangcheng around. Guangcheng was leading me around!” exclaimed Jiang Tianyong, the lawyer he had dragged through the subway station, and everybody laughed. Later, I asked Chen what his plans were. “We need to prepare the case and talk about bringing it to court,” he said. “I can’t collect any more material. If I go back now, many, many people will be waiting for me…. We could get more evidence, but I want to get started on the case and collect material later. We need to file the lawsuits, go to the media.”

Over the next several days, Chen said, he planned to meet with more lawyers and try to persuade them to join the case. About a half dozen of those who had already agreed to help were at the table with us, among them an attorney named Li Heping, whom I had met years earlier. Li had handled the defense of Yang Zili, a computer programmer jailed in 2001 on subversion charges for setting up a study group to discuss political reform. At the time, Li had struck me as a particularly nervous and frightened man. (When I showed up at his office to ask about that case, he had started sweating and refused to talk to me.) But he was a different person now. He had converted to Christianity and become one of the more prominent
weiquan,
or “rights defense,” lawyers in Beijing. His firm had already filed several of the lawsuits on behalf of Linyi residents. He told me it would be nearly impossible to persuade the courts to allow a class-action or collective case. That’s why Chen needed to recruit more lawyers—to help file more individual lawsuits. Chen himself hadn’t given up on the idea of a class-action case, but he agreed he needed more legal help. Li and his colleagues were working pro bono, and they could only do so much.

I asked Chen if he had considered seeking help from the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the agency that had announced an investigation into the Linyi crackdown. He replied that he would try but that he was unsure how to get in touch with officials there and worried he might end up getting arrested outside their offices. He still believed the courts were his best option for seeking justice. He had had some success in the legal system, after all, and he was familiar with the process. “Everyone has to be held accountable under the law,” he told me. “These officials broke the law, and they have to take responsibility.”

Four days later, the men from Linyi caught up with Chen again, ambushing him outside the apartment building where he was staying. Chen tried to resist, shouting for help as they dragged him across a parking lot and bundled him headfirst into an unmarked car. A friend who was with Chen at the time called me and I rushed over from the other side of the city. By the time I arrived, a crowd of Beijing residents, upset at seeing such rough treatment of a blind man, had surrounded the car and were preventing it from driving away. Behind dark-tinted windows, I saw two beefy men in the rear of the sedan but no sign of Chen. The people in the crowd told me to look again, and I pressed my nose on the window. Then I realized Chen was indeed in the car. The two men had pinned him facedown to the floor of the vehicle, and I could hear muffled screaming. Some of the angry onlookers said the men had hit him a few times. Residents called the Beijing police, and eventually two uniformed officers arrived. They consulted with the Linyi men, and then cleared a way through the crowd for the car to leave.

As I watched them drive off, I was reminded of something Chen had said while we were in Linyi a few weeks earlier. I had asked one of the villagers we were interviewing whether she was afraid that local officials might punish her for speaking out about the abuses. Chen interrupted and said the authorities wouldn’t do anything to the villagers. “If anything,” he said, “they’ll go after me.”

I
N THE TWO
years since the
Southern Metropolis Daily
published its report about the death of Sun Zhigang, prompting the party to abolish the
shourong
detention system, a loose collection of lawyers, journalists, and activists had coalesced around the
weiquan,
or “rights defense,” concept—the idea that citizens could bring about gradual political change by fighting for legal rights one case at a time, without directly challenging the authoritarian system. But the fledgling movement was divided from the start over what to do about Chen Guangcheng and the abuses he exposed in Linyi. The journalists were on the defensive after the arrests at the
Daily
and unwilling to break the long-standing taboo against coverage of the negative effects of the one-child policy. The lawyers were in a stronger position but also hesitant. Among the most prominent of them were Xu Zhiyong and Teng Biao, the young scholars who had called for a constitutional review of the
shourong
regulations. Former classmates at Beida and now lecturers at different universities in Beijing, the pair had set up a legal institute to take on cases they believed had the potential to highlight wider problems and promote change. They had helped defend the newspaper executives at the
Daily,
tried to stop the closure of a popular Internet bulletin board site, and represented private entrepreneurs who ran afoul of party bosses. When the two men heard about the crackdown in Linyi, though, they had reacted differently. Teng had agreed to help Chen, but Xu was worried the one-child policy was still too sensitive to take on in court.