Chen Guangcheng

Chen Guangchen (born onNovember 12, 1971) is the blind, self-taught, civil rights lawyer/activist who works on human rights issues in rural areas of the People’s Republic ofChina. He advocates for women’s rights and the poor. He is best known for exposing alleged abuses in official family-planning policy, often involving claims of violence and forced abortions.

In 2005, he was placed under house arrest for organizing a class action suit against the city he lives in for excessive enforcement of the one-child policy which was affected throughout China in 1979. He recently escaped from his home incarceration and sought refuge in the US Embassy in Beijing. On May 2, he left the Embassy for medical reasons, apparently much to the relief of US diplomatic assemblage inChina.

Gaungcheng’s numbers offer that he is a pragmatic and determined freedom-fighter on a higher-consciousness mission. Reading his history, however, makes one wonder where someone who is blind and living in conditions that would seem to test the will of even the most devoted of protagonists would get such resolve to pay such a high price for his principles. Beyond being incarcerated, his totalitarian government monitors his home, cut off the power, installed metal sheets over his house windows, banned his young daughter from attending school and had her toys confiscated, beat his wife, and even harassed his mother while she was working in the fields. (more…)