The Drama of Chen

Chen Guancheng is a Chinese activist for human rights who has focused his protests against the abortions and forced sterilizations performed to comply with China’s one-child policy.

This protest earned him a four-year prison sentence in 2006, under accusations of property damage and transportation disturbance, but not without a substitution of his lawyers, who were detained until final judgment, for state defenders the day before the verdict. The most recent chapter of this drama includes Chen’s flight from his home confinement, where they had him isolated from his family and the press, to seek protection in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and above all a telephone from which he could report his persecution to the Washington Post. Recently, in the prelude to a bilateral summit between Beijing and Washington about strategic issues, Chen left his temporary diplomatic refuge under promises from the Chinese authorities that there would be no legal repercussions against him, and the White House’s promise of remaining vigilant about his case, which is not exceptional but representative of a systemic problem with human rights in China.

Frank Wolf recalled, in an article published April 30 in Foreign Policy, that the Republican Ronald Reagan made religious liberty and basic human rights inseparable from every aspect of bilateral relations with the Soviet Union during the iciest moments of the Cold War, a precedent that puts the current position of the Democrat-commanded White House to the test as it faces the dilemma posed by the Chen case. In fact, in view of China’s combative protest in describing Washington’s gesture toward the activist as an unacceptable interference in internal issues, the imminent dialogue over bilateral security and strategy could have been compromised if Washington’s protection was prolonged or had it escalated to asylum. So Chen, who had reported threats against his family, was obliged to leave diplomatic protection, which also appeared to have been ceded before the usual state reasons.

The drama of Chen, like that of Lu Xiaobo — who received the Nobel Prize in 2010 while in prison for his peaceful struggle for human rights and for asking for the end of the one-party communist regime — and of so many other political prisoners and persecuted people, brings to mind once more the situation of freedoms in China, inversely proportional to their performance in terms of economic growth. The East, where five of the 10 countries with the most economic growth in these last few years are located, is generally characterized by authoritarianism and intolerance.

In contrast, from Cuba to China, from the Europe of World War II to the Venezuela of the 20th century, North America has been, with all the stigmas that political literature attributes to it, the preferred destiny of emigrants in search of liberty. If the Democrats of the White House cannot put their priorities in order, they could tarnish this hallmark.