Chen Guangcheng is in the US embassy in Beijing!!

I don't think the reason this guy was imprisoned was that he shed light on isuues the authorities didn't want to talk about. I'd say it was rather that he began to go against local authorities. They seldom like that. He was a nuisance, and so they had him put in jail. That is not to say he was a great threat to the party, but at the local level he was a nuisance, and considering how many people in China are subject to discretionary incarceration and detention (this number is dropping, though) I don't think it was much of a hassle to pull it through. He is smart to appeal to the central authorities, as they might want to investigate this (behind the scenes of course). If anything, it's a huge loss of face of the local law enforcement that he managed to escape. Let alone on what grounds they threw him in prison.

It will be very interesting to see how the US reacts and how Chinese authorities reacts. By going to the Americans, this guy has made it into an international incident. As such, I think the central authorities will stand alongside the local authorities that imprisoned him, so that they manifest a coherent body vis-a-vis the US. As such it has become a case of Chinese law vs foreign infringement on that law (as my own country did when they gave the Nobel prize to another felon), rather than a case between the central authorities and local authorities, and how Chinese law is manifested.

Interesting case anyway.

SampanViking said:

No it was definitely incitement he was jailed for in 2006.

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Yes, inciting people to challenge the belief that the CCP is all-knowing, all-loving and generally perfect. And he thought he was just drawing attention to forced abortions and sterilisation in the name of the one-child policy!

As for the home detention being illegal, that is a very strong statement and one which I hope you can prove. It is not unusual in many developed countries; even in the UK, to release certain persons from Prison early to a regime of home detention.

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First, I know of no home detention in the UK where your family members are also restricted in what they can do - such as your children being stopped from going to school or your wife being beaten. If you're right, then CNN should be able to go to Chen's house tomorrow and speak to his family. For some reason I have a feeling that's not going to happen...

Second, Chen was sentenced to four years and three months in jail. He was released in 2010 after serving his full sentence. You're clasping at straws.

And Chen isn't being used for someone elses agenda? Like I said before, every dissident who has left China to live in the West are forgotten and hardly heard from then on. If their cause is so important, then why are they hardly heard from again? Because they've become useless. So their value was only in being a dissident having their rights abused and not the cause they're fighting for. Ironic!

One story I read I think it was about a month ago that hasn't gotten much play in the West is some dissidents that escaped from a certain infamous event that cannot be named by the rules of this forum want to come home to China but the Chinese government won't allow them back. They too got a lot of media attention when they were doing what they did in China. But afterwards when they escaped to the West, they were hardly heard from again. Now they want to go home. Sort of weird when all you heard was these people would be executed if the Chinese authorities ever got a hold of them. Why you don't hear about them wanting to go home? Because it doesn't serve the propaganda from the other end. The last I heard about one of them was during the Occupy Wall Street protests. One was about to be interviewed to liken Occupy Wall Street to what happened in China with her cause and then at the last minute she was pulled out. Someone didn't like Occupy Wall Street being compared to what she went through. The mechanisms are just different not the freedoms.

Mr T said:

Again, the facts don't back you up. The Chinese authorities have spent millions keeping Chen and his family locked up. Why would you do that if you didn't care about someone?

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LOL, on the internet, people can make up statistics on the spot. If you think it takes millions of dollars to hire a few guards in China, then you've got a whole lot to learn about China.

AssassinsMace said:

And Chen isn't being used for someone elses agenda?

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I guess you're right, Chen's brutal treatment could have been orchestrated by CCP hardliners who were hoping to engineer a situation like this that could embarrass the current leaders. Maybe if the Politburo hadn't tried to pretend Chen and his family weren't being persecuted, they wouldn't have been backed into the corner they now find themselves in.

solarz said:

LOL, on the internet, people can make up statistics on the spot. If you think it takes millions of dollars to hire a few guards in China, then you've got a whole lot to learn about China.

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I think the "lol" is on you. If you knew about this case, you would know that there's been far more than "a few" guards patrolling the house and the approaches to the village. It took several just to deal with Christian Bale when he wanted to visit - and he didn't get anywhere near the house.

Whether this guy's imprisonment and subsequent house arrest was legal or not is sort of beside the point... we all know the laws inside the PRC are malleable via bribery and can be bypassed altogether when the authorities see fit (i.e.: for major dissidents etc), that's not news to anyone.

What's more interesting is;
under whose commands was this guy put away in the first place and why? let's face it, there are probably hundreds and thousands of people like him, why was he given so much "security," or are all cases of house arrest similar to this? (i.e.: are most cases like this done through local or central governments? was this just a case of the local authorities overplaying their hand etc?)
What will happen to him now? I see no reason why china will want to keep him (he won't be the first dissident to leave for america), apart from the possibility of him getting the nobel peace prize, but I'm sure the PRC has learnt from the last incident with liu what's his name so that won't be a big deal. I see more incentive for the US to take him from championing human rights and that jazz, compared with motivation for the PRC to keep him (they won't exactly be giving up important intelligence). But one is clearly more difficult than the other.

But personally I don't think there was ever a "grand plan" by people pulling the strings in the US, at least not to hurt obama's government in any way. Although the timing is obviously meant to coincide with clinton's later visit, so his case can get the best coverage etc, and will force clinton to mention it to her chinese counterpart whoever that may be.

also, does anyone actually know how much support this guy is getting locally, and for what actions? I saw a bbc report (I know, I know, keep with me), by damian grammaticas (LOL I know, just keep reading) that there was "much support" or something along those lines for his escape and stuff. How much support is he actually getting from the chinese internets? I mean there is a difference between an individual highlighting some injustices and that of a major dissident, and an even bigger difference between a daring escape and what is effectively defection. Somehow I don't think the half a billion or so users are all egging this guy on which good ole damian and bbc seems to be suggesting...

What did this guy do in order to be called a dissident? We do have some guys under observation by our internal security because they want to tear down our gouvernment structure, if all of them went to some embassy and made a fuzz there would be little space left for other news.

Two major factors imho; the degree to which they resist or subvert state power, but perhaps more importantly, the luck of the draw wrt which "dissident" western media chooses to focus on.

Mr T said:

If that's the case, I don't see why the authorities take such extraordinary steps to persecute them. Putting a blind man under house arrest for two years and beating his family up doesn't seem logical if they're no threat.

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The problem is that you only hear what you want to hear!

Mr T said:

I guess you're right, Chen's brutal treatment could have been orchestrated by CCP hardliners who were hoping to engineer a situation like this that could embarrass the current leaders. Maybe if the Politburo hadn't tried to pretend Chen and his family weren't being persecuted, they wouldn't have been backed into the corner they now find themselves in.

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Chen's "escape" just shows he wasn't as imprisoned in his own home as the propaganda says. What? All of the sudden the secret state police dropped the ball. I thought every move of every person in China is under surveillance like Westerners think. So if they have that information wrong, you'd better believe a lot of the other propaganda is wrong too. No one can deny every dissident coming out of China that gets to the West become nothing. That means the cause they stood for wasn't important. They were being used for other countries' agendas.

And I don't think in black and white so don't assume I think human rights violations don't occur in China. I know that's the anti-China tactic to suppress any other alternate view so that only one is perpetuated. And who thinks like a communist now? It's just I know those that complain don't really care. You have the anti-China side complain about Chinese girls wearing Hello Kitty t-shirts on the streets of their countries. Hello Kitty is Japanese and it's still a threat somehow? And people complain China suppresses freedom of expression? It's absolutely bizarre how Hello Kitty is seen as a threat somehow but I actually know what it means. It's a threat to culture because it's as simple as it being foreign and not one's own. If it's true complaints about Chinese girls wearing Hello Kitty t-shirts was expressed on the radio, there has to be of like minds out there to understand complaints about something so superficial. And the simplist explanation is it's foreign and they see a Chinese girl liking something foreign as disloyalty. You know where you see that type of thinking also? Cults. Cults want control over their members so they force them to wipe the slate clean in order to instill their values. How do you do that? You have the members demonize and denounce their own families cutting them off from their own heritage so that the only world they know is what the cult defines it as. Like I said before the mechanism for suppression of freedoms is what's different not that some violate and others don't.