Interviews with Chen Guangcheng

My name is Chen Guangcheng, I am from Shandong [a coastal province in eastern] China. I am an ordinary citizen and also a human rights activist in China. I am very happy to be here today. This is related to the general environment of rights being abused in China.

I like the law because my own individual citizen’s rights, and my fellow people’s citizens’ rights are being persecuted at this moment. There are no other avenues to resolve this problem and I thought of using the Rule of Law to try and solve this problem. There are many examples of my rights being persecuted in China. For example, in 1991 China announced the Protection of Disabled Person’s Law, this law has clearly outlined that if you are a rural citizen and disabled, you don’t have to pay the same taxes as other ordinary citizens.

But in reality even as this law was in existence, until it was abolished years later, it was never executed in society. In other words, although the law is written one way, the local government is still taxing us illegally. Also, they require us to do “volunteer labor work” and to ask us to pay fees that the law said we don’t have to pay.

This has caused families to look-down upon the disabled among them. This event caused us to spend a long time appealing this process from the local government to the Central government. But the end result was that the government can take, at will, up to 60 percent of people’s land to sell it for their own benefit, and take the land to give them to others, and the result is trampling on the rights of farmer’s ownership of the land. The farmer’s chance to produce has been stolen by the government for its own monetary benefit.

I believe China has laws but there is no rule of law. The basic concept of rule of law has some differences in China. In China, it is taught by educators that the law is a tool for rulers to rule, however, I think it is not the case in reality.

I think the rule of law has a common standard and that is the law is a tool that should be obeyed by all. But in China it is a tool that is used by a small group of people to rule over the greater majority of people in China. In reality the people of China have been searching for rule of law for thousands of years already.

In the earliest days, ancient China had a saying: “If a prince breaks the law he should be tried as an ordinary person.” We can interpret this as the ancient Chinese’s basic understanding of the rule of law, but unfortunately this did not result in a reasonable reflection of a righteous societal order to ensure and enforce the execution of the laws.

So that even now the nation of China is under a system of tyranny and there is no true rule of law and this is a big regret. I would say even commercially there is still no formation of rule of law. Because in reality even in the area of commerce, there is still an “invisible hand” [referring to the government] behind it to control it.

Chen Guangcheng was born into a poor family on November 12, 1971 in China’s Shandong Province. As an infant, Chen suffered a fever that left him permanently blind. Chen developed a keen interest in legal practice. Teaching himself the law by studying legal texts and auditing various courses, Chen assisted people in his village with legal matters. In 2003, he married an English teacher and the couple had two children.

Chen’s activism began in 1996 when he petitioned the central government in Beijing over taxes that were improperly levied against his family. According to Chinese law, families with disabled persons receive tax exemptions that were not being granted to Chen. The campaign was successful and Chen began advocating for people with disabilities who had similar grievances with the government. Soon, he gained notoriety as a prominent activist for the disabled in China.

In 2005, Chen spent months investigating reports of forced abortions and sterilization being carried out by Chinese authorities to enforce the country’s one child policy, officially known as the Family Planning Policy. This law was enacted in 1978 and restricts most urban couples to a single child. When his investigation was complete, Chen filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the women he interviewed against the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China’s office in the city of Linyi. This was the first suit of its kind challenging the implementation of the one child policy. The case was rejected and the local government retaliated by placing Chen in de facto house arrest. In 2006, Chen was formally tried and charged with instigating destruction of public property and disturbing the peace , which Chen decried as baseless given his house arrest and constant surveillance by the police. He was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. After the proceedings, Amnesty International declared Chen a prisoner of conscience.

Chen was released from prison in 2010 only to once again be placed under house arrest by local authorities. His house was routinely monitored by security agents who prevented anyone from entering or exiting. Chen and his family were subject to constant harassment and abuse during this period.

Chen escaped from house arrest in April 2012 and fled to Beijing, where he sought refuge at the United States Embassy. In May 2012, Chen left the embassy after several weeks of negotiations, during which the Chinese government provided assurances that it would release the dissident from house arrest and investigate the actions taken against Chen by Shandong provincial authorities. Soon after leaving the embassy, Chen learned that his family had received numerous threats and feared the government would break its promises. He decided to leave China with his family and was offered a visiting scholar position by New York University. Chen accepted and arrived in New York with his family on May 19, 2012. He continues his work from the United States, advocating for human rights and democratic reform in China.