Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Chen Guangcheng

  11

  BLIND JUSTICE

  In a small farmhouse in Dongshigu Village, on the rural plains south of where the Yellow River empties into the Bohai Sea in Shandong Province, a blind man prepared for a long and dangerous journey. Chen Guangcheng was in his mid-thirties, a slim, handsome fellow with a thick mop of hair and a smile that could dazzle. He wore dark sunglasses, and in a different setting he might have been mistaken for a hip young musician or a Hong Kong film star. On this night in the summer of 2005, though, he was a prisoner planning an escape.

  Chen shuffled across a dimly lit room and gathered some papers, which he folded and stuffed in his pockets along with a digital voice recorder and a few other items. He would have to move quickly to elude the thugs who had been posted around his house, and he couldn’t afford to be slowed down by carrying a bag. A few days earlier, he had consulted the Book of Changes, an ancient oracle text, and determined the most auspicious time to run: August 25, between 9 and 11 P.M. If everything went according to plan, his nephew would be waiting on the outskirts of the village, ready to take him to a car and put him on a train to Beijing. He just had to get past the thugs.

  It was a warm, breezeless night, and as he waited Chen could feel a bead of sweat forming on the back of his neck. He stood by the door and listened intently, but heard only a dog barking in the distance and his own nervous breathing. For a moment he wondered if the government’s men were still out there. But of course they were. They had been a constant presence for weeks, preventing him from leaving his house and blocking anyone from visiting him.

  As the hour approached, Chen’s wife helped him take off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. Yuan Weijing was a tough, sturdy woman, and a co-conspirator in Chen’s plot to escape. They had met four years earlier, just after she graduated from college. Chen had heard her on a call-in radio show, a sad, soft voice from a village in the next county talking about how hard it was to find a good job, and he had called her to cheer her up. He reminded her how fortunate she was compared with most peasants in the area, and teased her about how much more difficult it was for a disabled person to find work. His words touched her and, with his encouragement, she found a job as a teacher. A romance quickly blossomed, on the phone at first, then in person. Her parents objected strenuously. She wasn’t pretty, they told her, but she was tall and healthy and had a good job, so there was “no need” for her to marry a blind man. At one point they locked her in the house to prevent her from seeing him. But she escaped and eloped with Chen, and soon afterward they had a boy and then a second child, a girl.

  From the start, Yuan had tried to persuade her husband to take a quiet job at a local hospital practicing traditional medicine and massage, one of the few careers available to the blind in China. But Chen had never been one to let his disability constrain him. The youngest of five peasant brothers, he had lost his sight as an infant, the result of a high fever and the awful state of rural medical care during the Cultural Revolution. He couldn’t go to school until he was seventeen, and he was twenty before he finished elementary school. But then instead of attending a vocational school, where he would only learn massage, Chen convinced his parents to send him to an academy for the blind in the port city of Qingdao so he could continue his education. It was there that he learned about a new law protecting the rights of people with disabilities. When he returned to his village, he told local officials the law required them to reduce or waive taxes on the disabled, and when they ignored him, he made the four-hundred-mile trip to Beijing to complain and won a refund for his family. The money helped his parents send him to a university in Nanjing, where he studied traditional medicine, the only department open to the blind besides music. On the side, though, Chen took a few classes in the subject that really interested him: the law. Discrimination against the blind and others with disabilities was common in China, and he believed he could use his legal knowledge to fight it.

  Even before graduating, Chen began to develop a reputation back home as someone who understood the law and wasn’t afraid to stand up to the government. The fact that he was blind only enhanced people’s respect for him. They understood the difficulties faced by the disabled, especially in backward and impoverished villages like Dongshigu, and they admired Chen for making something of himself despite these challenges. At first he was known as a legal advocate for people with disabilities. If officials could not provide better services for the disabled, he argued in court again and again, they should at least stop collecting taxes from them. Judges sympathized with his cause, handing him victories in three cases. But then the party bosses instructed the courts to stop accepting any more of his lawsuits; apparently, they were worried about the loss of tax revenues.

  Word of Chen’s success spread, though, and residents began seeking his legal advice on other matters. In 2002, he helped organize dozens of villages in a petition campaign to shut down a paper mill that was dumping black noxious wastewater into a local river, destroying crops, killing fish and turtles, and making residents sick. When the government refused to act, because a party official owned the mill, Chen found another solution, persuading a British aid agency to fund the construction of a new well, complete with pipelines for irrigation and drinking water. A year later, Chen and his wife traveled to the United States on an exchange program run by the State Department. After he returned, he won another big lawsuit, forcing the Beijing subway system to waive fares for the handicapped.

  Yuan objected to her husband’s crusades at first. She told him there were too many problems in the countryside, and he couldn’t solve them all. But Chen insisted he should try his best. He argued that victories even in small cases could be life-changing for the families involved. Eventually, Yuan came to support him in his battles with the authorities, but she never stopped worrying he was too much of a dreamer. He wanted to set up a legal aid group for people with disabilities in the countryside; she doubted the government would ever let him. The party required nongovernmental organizations to register with a state sponsor, and the state only sponsored groups it could control. The closest Chen came was an offer to let him start his center under a party-run organization—as long as he agreed to pay a huge annual kickback. Yuan feared for her husband’s safety, too. She knew he had angered and embarrassed local officials. Helping him get around, she was painfully aware how vulnerable he was and how easy it would be for someone to hire a few of the local bullies to rough him up. But she also knew her husband wouldn’t change. When villagers came to him asking for help, he just couldn’t ignore them.

  The latest trouble began about five months earlier, while Chen was in Beijing trying to find support for the legal aid group he wanted to start. A man from Dongshigu had called and told him that officials were visiting every couple in the village with more than one child and taking either the mother or father away to be sterilized. The caller wanted to know if what they were doing was legal. Chen told him that it wasn’t, and he rushed back to find out what was going on. One of his neighbors, a woman named Du Dehong, was waiting in tears at his home when he returned. She said a group of officials had stormed into her house and demanded she accompany them to the local clinic to be sterilized. When she refused, they dragged her outside and stuffed her into a van as her two children watched. At the clinic, one of the officials grabbed her hand, pressed her thumb on an inkpad, and then forced her to leave a print on a consent form. She tried arguing with them, but it was no use. A doctor finished the procedure in less than five minutes.

  The story infuriated Chen, but it was just the beginning. Over the next several days, other neighbors came to him with similar stories, and worse. Mothers pregnant with a third child, some more than eight months along, described being forced to have abortions, weeping as they explained how doctors injected poisons into their wombs. Relatives of couples who went into hiding told of being tortured and held by local officials until they persuaded missing family members to turn themselves
in and submit to the operations. Many residents said they were held for days in makeshift jails packed with dozens of people, including small children.

  One after another, the villagers came to Chen and asked for his help. He had never taken on anything as sensitive as the one-child policy, which was a pillar of the state’s development strategy and considered off-limits for public debate. He knew the government had outlawed forced sterilization and abortions years ago but that officials in many parts of the country continued to use such methods. To Chen, it was another maddening example of the party ignoring its own laws, and when his neighbors asked him what they should do, he suggested a class-action lawsuit against local officials. In the quarter century since the party adopted the one-child policy, no one had ever attempted a mass legal challenge against the state’s power to compel sterilization and abortion, and Chen knew the odds were against him. But he held on to the hope that party leaders, once confronted with the abuses committed in their name in his village, would step in and punish those responsible.

  As word of Chen’s plan spread, residents of other villages across the county began visiting him to share their own horror stories. Then peasants from neighboring counties started calling him. Before long, Chen realized that party officials in the nearby city of Linyi had ordered a crackdown on “unplanned births” in the entire region, home to about ten million people. He started collecting evidence, traveling from one village to another and taking depositions from residents using his digital voice recorder. In his farmhouse, Yuan and other volunteers transcribed the testimony on an old computer. Then Chen traveled to Beijing and tried to find journalists who would expose the abuses. All of the reporters he contacted said there was nothing they could do. The one-child policy remained a forbidden zone for the state media, too risky for even the most daring newspapers like the Southern Metropolis Daily to broach. But Chen did persuade a blogger and a few foreign journalists, including me, to visit Linyi and write about the crackdown. He also found several lawyers who were willing to come back with him and help, including one of the legal scholars who had called for a constitutional review of the shourong detention system. The lawyers traveled to Linyi and filed several lawsuits to pave the way for a class-action case, and the scholar authored a lengthy, powerful report that he posted on the Web. The abuses committed in Linyi were now international news, and on the Internet at least, a subject of national discussion and condemnation.

  For officials in Linyi, the scrutiny was decidedly unwelcome, and they tried to silence Chen. Three times they visited the blind man and urged him to persuade the villagers to withdraw the lawsuits. Three times he refused. When they told him their birth planning crackdown was over, Chen said people still needed to be held accountable. When they warned him that people might seek revenge against him if they lost their jobs because of his lawsuits, Chen ignored them and concluded he had rattled them. Not long after the lawyers and reporters left, the officials confined Chen to his home and stationed thirty men in his village with orders to prevent anyone else from visiting him. Chen had no idea how long they were going to hold him, but he didn’t intend to find out. He had heard that government officials in Beijing sympathetic to his cause were already planning an investigation. If he could just get to the capital, he thought, he would be able to go to the lawyers and the media for help again.

  Chen and his wife made their move just before 11 P.M., stepping quietly out their front door. “Seven guards,” Yuan whispered in Chen’s ear. “About twenty feet away.” Chen knelt down and grabbed a fistful of sand and pebbles. Then he took a deep breath and started walking briskly, his wife holding his arm and guiding him. After a few minutes, he heard the men following them, and getting closer. When he sensed they had almost caught up, he tossed the sand and pebbles over his shoulder. The men cursed, and fell back.

  The couple picked up the pace, making one sharp turn after another on the village’s muddy lanes. Then they stepped into the fields and began running through the rows of high cornstalks. When they reached the intersection where Chen’s nephew was waiting, they were out of breath. The sound of barking dogs seemed to be coming from every direction. The government’s men were closing in. Chen knew it was best to split up and try to confuse them. There was hardly time for a good-bye. Yuan ran west, deliberately making more noise and trying to lead the men away. Chen and his nephew slipped into the cornfields again, heading east.

  The plan seemed to work. Hiking through the fields, a half-moon in the sky, Chen and his nephew reached another village after about an hour. But men were patrolling that village too and spotted them. Chen and his nephew fled into a thick wooded area. The government’s men were forced to abandon their motorcycles and cars and pursue them on foot. Because Chen was accustomed to feeling his way through the pitch dark, he moved faster than they did, leading his nephew swiftly through the trees. After an hour, they finally stopped to rest. The men were gone.

  It was past 3 A.M. Chen’s nephew called a friend with a car. When the driver arrived, Chen hugged his nephew and got in. He would make the rest of the journey on his own.

  THE ONE-CHILD POLICY may be at once the best known and the most overlooked of the Communist Party’s many efforts to transform Chinese society: best known because it ranks among the most ambitious experiments in social engineering ever attempted anywhere in the world; most overlooked because it almost never figures in scholarly studies of China’s reform era, and the suffering it has caused is rarely mentioned alongside the great tragedies of Maoist rule.

  Launched in 1979, the program was breathtaking in its audacity. With few exceptions, all couples were told they could have just one child, while local officials were given the power to decide when women could conceive and what kind of contraception they should use after giving birth. In effect, the state claimed the authority to regulate the most personal and private behavior of its citizens. Given the scale of the project, the confidence with which the party embraced it is remarkable. Party leaders were convinced not only that the one-child policy was justified, but also that it was enforceable in a nation of nearly one billion people, the vast majority of them peasants who could be expected to resist for cultural and economic reasons. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the program is its longevity. The communes of the Great Leap Forward lasted only a few years and the Cultural Revolution a decade, but nearly thirty years after it was first adopted, the one-child policy—or at least its most basic components—remains an enduring fixture in Chinese life.

  It is easy to forget that this program was launched not by Mao but by his successors, at a time when the party was generally withdrawing from people’s lives. Mao himself had been ambivalent about population control. At first, he stood by Marxist and Soviet orthodoxy against limiting population growth, but he later changed his mind and endorsed birth control and “birth planning.” During the Hundred Flowers Movement, the president of Peking University, an economist named Ma Yinchu, won Mao’s praise by arguing that strong measures were needed to prevent the nation’s fast-growing population from slowing economic development. But the economist came under withering attack in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, Mao suggested that a larger population was good for China because it meant more workers. His flip-flops resulted in a pair of baby booms in the 1950s and ’60s that swelled the Chinese population. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Premier Zhou Enlai managed to outmaneuver the leftists who opposed population control and launch a national “birth planning” program rooted in the socialist planned economy. For the first time, the production of children, like the production of grain or steel, was subject to the targets and quotas of the government’s Five-Year Plan. Couples were told to marry later, limited to two or three children, and required to wait three to four years between births.

  After Mao’s death, this relatively moderate approach to slowing population growth was ditched in favor of the far more radical one-child policy. The sudden shift came as Deng Xiaoping was rolling
out his market economic reforms, and it seemed to run counter to his effort to lead the party away from disruptive mass campaigns and toward more pragmatic policy making. But if Deng was abandoning doctrinaire socialism, he was replacing it with a new ruling ideology, a belief in the power of “science” and “scientific decision making” to solve the nation’s problems.

  For more than a century, the Chinese have used the word “science” to refer not just to the study of the natural world but also to a way of thinking that is supposed to be rational, objective, and modern. In a nation disillusioned by Mao’s utopian fantasies, Deng’s emphasis on science as the party’s new touchstone was a political masterstroke. But as the anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh has shown, the leadership’s blind faith in science led it to adopt an extreme solution to a problem that, while serious, could have been managed in other ways. At the center of the process was a group of eminent rocket scientists, men who had been sheltered from Mao’s campaigns, who had access to computers and international journals, and who were supremely confident in their own abilities. Chief among them was the cyberneticist Song Jian, who later served as minister of science and technology. These men viewed the population as a machine to be fine-tuned by engineers like themselves, not a society of humans with rights, values, and preferences. In 1979, they made the mistake of accepting as mainstream science the most alarmist theories of overpopulation and ecological crisis then circulating in the West. They used weak data, plugged them into formulas adapted from their missile optimization work, and created population models and forecasts that gave the illusion of fact. Then, over the objections of other scholars, they used these “scientific” results to persuade the leadership that China faced a grave crisis and that immediate implementation of a one-child program was the “only way” to avoid environmental disaster and meet Deng’s economic goals.