BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind rights lawyer who has been under extralegal house arrest in his rural village for the past 19 months, has escaped from his heavily guarded home and is in hiding in the capital, rights advocates and Chinese officials said Friday.
The activist Hu Jia told the BBC that Chen, 40, had scaled a wall, was driven to Beijing, and was in the U.S. Embassy. An official in the Chinese Ministry of State Security confirmed that Chen had managed to reach the embassy, though U.S. officials would not confirm that report.
Those who have spoken to Chen say he slipped away from his captors Sunday evening in Shandong province, where he has been held incommunicado since his release from prison in September 2010. They said Chen was not seeking to leave China, but would try to negotiate his freedom with Chinese authorities.
“He is reluctant to go overseas and wants only to live like a normal Chinese citizen,” said Bob Fu, president of China Aid, a Christian rights organization based in Texas that had been in touch with him as recently as Friday morning.
The escape would represent a significant public relations challenge to the Chinese government, which has long sought to deny reports that local officials in Dongshigu village were keeping Chen and his wife locked in their home even though there are no legal charges against him.
The case could also present a major new challenge to the United States, which was thrust into another delicate internal political dispute in China in February. At that time, Wang Lijun, a senior police official from the region of Chongqing, sought refuge in the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, revealing details about the killing of a British businessman and setting off a cascade of events that led to the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was a member of China’s Politburo.
U.S. diplomats said they determined Wang’s case did not involve national security, and they turned him over to Chinese security officials, prompting criticism in Washington about their handling of the case.
But if Chen is now on the grounds of the embassy in Beijing, Obama administration officials are likely to be far more cautious in handling his case, given that he is one of China’s most internationally recognized dissidents and has been the subject of extralegal abuses in China for many years.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has addressed Chen’s case on several occasions, most recently in a speech on Asian policy in November that prompted a sharp rebuke from the Chinese government.
“When we see reports of lawyers, artists, and others who are detained or disappeared, the United States speaks up both publicly and privately,” she said then. “We are alarmed by recent incidents in Tibet of young people lighting themselves on fire in desperate acts of protest, as well as the continued house arrest of the Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng. We continue to call on China to embrace a different path.”
On Friday, however, the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said she would make no comment about Chen’s escape or his whereabouts. The White House also declined to comment, and a scheduled briefing on Clinton’s visit to China next week — which Chen’s escape will almost certainly overshadow — was postponed.
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Minister on Friday said he had no information about the episode, but one Chinese intelligence officer expressed frustration and bewilderment that Chen had evaded his captors and that he might have entered the embassy.
“It’s still not clear how this happened,” the intelligence officer said. “Was this happenstance, or was it planned this way? Are there others planning to do the same?”
On Friday, shortly after news of Chen’s daring escape began circulating, a video appeared on YouTube, filmed in the days since he gained his freedom, in which he described life under house arrest. The video, in the form of an appeal to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, detailed the abuse he and his family suffered during their confinement and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.
He told how his daughter was followed to school by three guards each day and how guards had kicked his wife for hours on end.
“Prime Minister Wen, you owe the people an explanation,” he said. “Are these atrocities the result of local officials violating the law or a result of orders from the top leadership?” Fu of China Aid said Chen slipped out of the house and was spirited to a safe house in Beijing by Chinese activists. Among those who helped out was He Peirong, a family friend who said Chen had planned his escape far in advance, staying in bed for long period of time to trick guards into thinking he was too sick to walk. In an account she wrote on her microblog account early Friday, He said Chen called her after fleeing the village. She said she then picked him up in her car and they drove to Beijing.
By late morning He had been picked up by public security agents from her home in Nanjing, according to Fu. Her microblog account was later deleted.
Ai Weiwei, the artist and government critic who has also been subjected to residential detention, albeit far less draconian, said he had spoken to a friend who met with Chen in Beijing on Wednesday. The friend said Chen had climbed over a wall at night and evaded multiple lines of guards.
“You know he’s blind, so the night to him is nothing,” Ai said the friend told him. “I think that’s a perfect metaphor.”
Officials in Linyi County could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon but activists described a violent confrontation between local officials and relatives of Chen as they frantically tried to track him down. When officials, including the township chief, came to take away Chen’s older brother, Chen Guangfu, the man’s son reportedly drew a knife and swung at the men, injuring one or more of them, including the township director.
On Thursday night, Cao Yaxue, a blogger at the website Seeing Red in China, recorded a conversation with the nephew, Chen Kegui, as he was waiting to surrender to police. The nephew said he attacked the men after they broke into the house and failed to identify themselves.
“I was defending myself,” he said through sobs. “I was not attacking. I’m not a murderer. These are my last words.”
Chen Kegui, however, did not surrender to police and he was also being sought by the authorities, the state media reported.
Rights advocates Friday expressed concern for the safety of Chen Guangcheng and for his wife, Yuan Weijing, who was reportedly left behind. In 2009, the family of another prominent rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, escaped from residential detention in Beijing with the help of Christian activists. Gao’s wife and two children traveled overland to Thailand and eventually reached the United States, where they were given asylum. Rights advocates say Gao — who has been repeatedly tortured over the years — had planned to go with them but was stopped by his minders. He was later given a three-year prison term for violating the terms of his probation.
Fu of China Aid said he was optimistic that Chen Guangcheng might be able to negotiate his freedom.
“The fact that he’s escaped will really shake up Chinese security forces,” he said. “It tells them that they are not almighty God.”
In the video posted Friday, Chen Guangcheng described how local officials had profited from his detention, pocketing money from the county that was meant to pay those responsible for guarding his family. At its peak, the effort employed hundreds of people, he said, some of whom were spread along roads about three miles from the village.
But he said his primary concern was the safety of those he left behind and he called on China’s top leaders to guarantee that his escape would not cause them further harm.
“I ask that my family be kept safe,” he said.
