These five disability rights activists in China tried to visit Chen last year on the International Day for the Blind and were pushed back by government loyalists. They show 100 more times courage and solidarity under enormous pressures than some American commentators on the subject. Photo by Ted Lipien, 2011.
I don't follow China that closely, as I'm more focused on Russia and Central Asia and the US and Europe, but I have to say, I was very much disturbed by the discourse from our public intellectuals, such as they are, on the case of Chen Guangchen, the blind lawyer, caught up in a superpower drama now during an American-Chinese summit.
I found it appalling to see people appearing in The New York Review of Books or The Atlantic or Foreign Policy without some sort of basic sympathy or solidarity for this brave man, and with even a kind of sneer (that quintessential bad actor from Registan, "Don Bacon," shows up repeatedly at the Atlantic to harangue on "realism".)
What's wrong with them? Has the American dependence on China so corroded the notion of human solidarity that intellectuals can only greet this story with snark or brutal RealPolitik? Why? What does it cost them? They aren't waiting for business deals or visas to China, are they?
The case seemed pretty straightforward, despite all the second-guessing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking around it. This activist who had fought for the rights of women against coerced abortions or sterilization, who was held for months under house arrest and tormented along with his wife, decided to make a break for it when he thought the US-Chinese meeting might give him some political cover to press his cause, and he got to the Embassy.
Once there, he seems to have been hustled somewhat to get closure on his plans and leave before Hillary Clinton arrived for talks -- and I remain with a lot of questions about what happened there. Somehow, US officials got him to leave and go to the hospital for treatment of his broken foot, injured during his escape. The US State Department spokesperson said it wasn't true the ambassador and other officials conveyed any Chinese threat to him, but in fact they did, by simply pointing out what was likely to happen if he didn't rejoin his wife -- she'd be sent back to their home province and likely put in danger. Then, officials somehow lost control of the situation, they didn't keep contact with him, he became worried about his family's safety, and he began to demand to leave on Hillary's plane.
In fact, that was quite a normal demand because nothing short of leaving on Hillary's plane would work to get him and his family out of China and out of harm's way quickly. Someone like him, a dissident and not someone approved and connected, can't simply order a ticket, take his passport, and leave of his own free will. THAT is the problem -- and it isn't a problem we should accept as normal even given the "realities" of China, and we should keep calling it out.
These all seemed obvious issues, yet there was so much second-guessing around it. In the end, a very unsatisfactory deal was reached with the Chinese, whereby they will let Chen apply through the normal channels "like anyone else" and go and study in a US law school.
But if you believe in this, you believe in the tooth fairy. The Chinese don't keep their word; why would anyone trust them to follow through on this after the spotlight of the summit is over? They'll have no motivation. It will be like pulling teeth, not leaving teeth under your pillow for the tooth fairy, to get him out of there. The notion that the Chinese will "look bad" if they don't let him out is ridiculous -- there is nowhere for them to be appearing as there will be little attention on them in fact now that the show is over.
Why don't people nowadays understand the nature of authoritarian communists regimes better?!
What we're getting instead is a series of awful articles and bad-faith discussions that I find really troubling -- I can't imagine such pieces appearing during the Soviet era, for example, even from leftists, about the Soviet dissidents.
So we get Max Fisher, associate editor of The Atlantic, and editor of the international channel, writing The Geopolitics of Helping a Confused, Frightened Blind Man in Beijing
Already the headline shows you massive condescention and belittling of this brave man.
Then there's this narrow-minded literalism about Chen's supposed flip-flop on the US Embassy's behaviour. Chen indeed told several reporters and supporters that he felt he was hustled by the US Embassy -- and clearly they did feel a deadline of resolving his case before the talks with Hillary Clinton began. He then felt bad for the fuss and attention called, which is obviously why he made the face-saving (for all concerned) gesture of saying he had "misunderstood". That seems an obvious and clear reading from this unfortunate situation, yet Max merely takes it for character failure on Chen's part.
For some awful reason, taking Beijing's side in this drama (and not merely reporting both sides), Max Fisher writes that Chen's stay is a "slap in Beijing's face" -- when in fact it's a necessity because, um, China isn't a free country you can come and go from -- although so many students and engineers do come and go from our country to China that you might be forgiven for thinking it is!
He then calls this crappy deal -- without any guarantees whatsoever -- made by the weak and dissembling Foreign Ministry a "humble but important breakthrough" (!), then chastises Chen for yet another "slap in the face" by demanding to leave China. Well, why can't he?
Why is Max so irritated at Chen?! Is it because he takes up the politically-incorrect Christian-right sort of issue of protesting forced abortions?
That may be part of it, but his next paragraph lets us know what's really getting his goat -- the fear -- the sweating fear -- that this might harm Obama's re-election chances. So that's why he has to take a swipe at Chen again, chastising him for not being more worldly on this most public of world stages:
Chen, who grew up in rural Shandong province when rural China was still one of the poorest places on Earth, is a courageous activist and a self-made man; he is not particularly worldly. Yet he's on the world stage now, whether he wants to be or not, and as more than just an activist. Having elevated his mistreatment to the U.S. embassy, he is, for this brief moment, a major player in the great power politics of the Pacific. His declarations, demands, and denouncements are now a subject of the U.S. presidential race and a major issue (if largely unspoken, in public anyway) of the high-level U.S.-China talks for which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both in Beijing.
Ugh. I hadn't realized the Atlantic's moral compass had gotten this broken.
Fisher then bangs on Chen some more in a really exasperating refusal to understand the jiu-jitsu of dissenters trying to play summit politics to shed light on their causes:
Throughout this episode, Chen has shown two consistent traits that don't seem to be helping him: an odd optimism about his situation, no matter how dire it gets; and a politically insensitive willingness to say whatever he thinks. His requests to fly to America on Hillary Clinton's plane, or to travel freely to a from the U.S. embassy building, show that he may not fully grasp the gravity of his situation.
Good God on a crutch, Max, why can't the guy say what he thinks?! And in fact Hillary's plane is the only way he really would get out safely and quickly at this point, and we all realize that, and the point is not to take it so literally that you don't grasp the larger effort here: exposing the Chinese government for what it is, a nasty, oppressive state that lets some people travel -- and lots of them come to the US for education and work -- but places fake obstacles in the way of critics.
Apparently we all need to be reminded of this so dramatically -- precisely because editors of international channels can't concede the basics here.
Max then claims that the deal of studying in China being offered is "better than house arrest" -- as if the Chinese government will keep to this deal! -- and then bangs on Chen again because he is "disappointed that the U.S. did not live up to his lofty sense of American power and ideals."
Well, why can't he be disappointed? And why can't he believe in what in fact should be a lofty sense of American power and ideals that Max Fisher clearly doesn't share?
He concludes that Chen is "stuck between the two most powerful states in the world" and "stuck in the middle of a much larger U.S.-China conversation about human rights that has been running since President Clinton reopened the relationship in the mid-1990s" -- as if this "conversation" is authentic or useful, when it has really accomplished little. The only reason it's there is as a sop; Chinese is big, we're in hock, we can't do much. But at least we could have some basic solidarity to Chen's plight and the ideals he called upon, and not imagine the problem is his poor navigation of superpower politics -- bleah.
It can and does get worse at The Atlantic:
Then there's Jacob Heilbrunn with the aptly titled, Obama's Realpolitik Response to the Cheng Guangcheng Case -- and mind you, this isn't going to be a condemnation of what Obama did on Chen -- which is not to say a word and let his chief legal advisor Harold Koh attempt to negotiate the problem away with the Chinese. Well, lawyers serve their clients, that's their professional obligation. Koh's client is not Chen; Koh's client is the United States of America. I don't know where Michael Posner was in this story -- if anywhere. The fact that he wasn't on the delegation in the first place speaks volumes of how the Chinese-US negotiations are arranged -- without the human rights secretary.
Heilbrunn, too, seems to be mainly preoccupied with how bad this all makes Obama look, so he spins what appears to be a wimp-out into a stern RealPolitik:
Obama gives off every sign of taking coldly antiseptic positions in foreign affairs. Again and again, Obama has dismissed the notion that he should get involved in the internal affairs of other countries. The Arab Spring? He viewed it with caution. Libya? He tried to lead from behind. Syria? He wants nothing to do with it.
This approach might be called Obama's neo-Kissingerianism. Neocons and much of the Right view Obama's stances as abhorrent. It's immoral realpolitik. Obama is jettisoning the values that Americans should uphold. It can, for example, be safely assumed that a chorus of indignation will be directed at Obama for having abandoned Chen in his greatest moment of peril. Here is Jennifer Rubin lambasting what she views as Obama's abandonment of Chen in the Washington Post:
This is par for the course--it is the same jumble of incompetence, naivete and timidity that characerizes the Obama foreign policy.
Wrong. There is nothing naive or timid about the administration's approach. If anything, it appears to be coldly calculating.
And that's...progress? "Progressive?" Again -- ugh.
The worst thing about this piece is James Fallows (Atlantic editor) appearing in the comments and saying that he doesn't even believe Chen was hustled out of the Embassy because he says Jerome Cohen, a long-time specialist and activist on China, says so.
But that's only a partial reading of Cohen, who just six hours ago was tweeting that it's a terrible dilemma for Chen to have to chose between trying to stay in China and do what he loves on the flimsy promise of the Chinese government, or leave the country and at least have safety for himself and his family.
And in an interview cited in The Cable, Cohen makes it very clear that the Chinese government cannot be trusted, which Fallows -- if he is to be intellectually honest -- really should be citing:
There is no firm Chinese government agreement to allow blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng leave China to study in the United States, only two statements by the two governments and hopes that everything will work out fine, according to Chen's legal mentor and confidant Jerome Cohen.
Fallows claims that Cohen didn't believe the US "hustled" Chen -- but where is he getting that? The Daily Beast reports that the Embassy worked frantically to meet the deadline before Hillary's talks were to begin. NPR reports that Chen said in an interview that the US "isn't pressing hard enough". A very different version of the story emerges from The Cable's interview of Cohen -- in fact, Cohen told Chen to stay in the Embassy because otherwise he would not be safe, but when the Chinese played hardball by threatening his wife, he felt he had to leave the Embassy to go to the hospital and rejoin her.
In a circling of the bad-faith wagons, Fallows then turns around and cites another awful piece, by Ian Johnson, of The New York Review of Books, Debacle in Beijing.
The story of a blind Chinese lawyer’s flight to the US Embassy in Beijing is likely to ignite accusations and recriminations until the US presidential election in November. But what few will acknowledge is a harsher truth: that for all our desire to effect change, outsiders have little leverage to shape China’s future
Ah, worried about Obama getting re-elected again, I see.
Actually, Ian Johnson has PLENTY of company and there aren't a "few" but many shrinking from open solidarity with Chen, shrinking from frank criticism of the US handling and becoming philosophical about how China can't change. Well, why can't it? Many of its citizens want it to, and it has bent to their will on some occasions, anyway.
"Chen lived in the countryside, never took a “capacity-building” seminar of the sort Western NGOs like to offer, and instead taught himself law," says Johnson in a swipe at NED-type programs. (I wrote a comment acknowledging he was right about the inanity of this type of programming at times, but criticizing his awful notion that the Chinese reformers are all on their own and we can't help and we can't show solidarity. That's just not right. My comment wasn't let through.)
With high-minded moral equivalency, Johnson lumps together everything everywhere, "But like people on the cutting edge of social change anywhere, he suffered." Well, Chen has sure suffered way, way, WAY more than say, demonstrators in Greece or on Wall Street, you know?
You start to see how out of touch the intelligentsia is...how skewed the values...or completely missing... with a tone-deaf sentence like this:
His decision to go to the US Embassy was interesting and one hopes that in time we will learn more about his motives.
Um, his motives were that he thought he could count on the US to help him because of its reputation as a helper of freedom fighters, you know?
Johnson then garbles the Fang LiZhi story, leaving out a very crucial element from the story by Perry Link that he links to: that Fang left the embassy and that Bush ordered Embassy personnel to call him back, and bring his wife.
Obama could have done the same thing. He didn't.
I don't see most of the major human rights groups asking further questions about how the US government has handled this case or urgently calling for follow-up -- Human Rights Watch has gone off on other tangents related to the Chinese human rights situation as a whole or in the case of Human Rights First, turned in robust praise from director Elisa Massimino or how the Administration, which includes their former director, Michael Posner, handled this dramatic case:
“I commend the American diplomats who helped Mr. Chen get to the American embassy, sheltered him there, and negotiated on his behalf with Chinese authorities. It is a credit to the United States that Mr. Chen looked to American diplomats for help and protection. We now owe him our best efforts to ensure his safety."
-- alhough in a second statement May 5, she called for the Administration to follow up.
I hope they do.
