The Barefoot Lawyer

— By T R Ramachandran | Aug 23, 2015 08:33 am 

Both a riveting memoir and a revealing portrait of modern China, this passionate book tells the story of a man who has never accepted limits and always believed in the power of the human spirit to overcome any obstacle.

The Barefoot Lawyer

Chen Guangcheng

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 330; Price: Rs 599

This is a nerve tingling account of the Communist Regime in China using brute force and barbaric means to snuff out dissidence. This goes contrary to the Communist party’s theme of serving the interests of the people. The account of visually impaired Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught barefoot lawyer, who dared to take it upon himself and his band of friends to fight for human rights puts one on the seats edge.

The barbaric and inhuman manner in which the lesser minions being more loyal than the King use their brawn to stifle and eventually silence the dissenters sends jitters up one’s spine. Inevitably, they might be a minuscule number but strong willed who challenge the high and mighty and try to expose the ham handed ways of the administration.

The vast majority of the Chinese population in the country’s out-backs toils and suffers at the hands of the party cadres whose exploitation of the poor in the villages is legion. All this and more is revealed in Chen’s tell all book ‘The Barefoot Lawyer’. The taxes that these people have to cough up annually are marked up to ridiculously high levels. The hated one child norm is only talked about in big centres. It is hardly evident several hundred miles beyond Beijing in the rural areas where people invariably have three, four or even five children. Their family planning techniques are akin to the controversial and forced sterilisation drive undertaken in this country four decades back during the highly feared and draconian internal Emergency.

While people in China get wages in low three digits like 200 or 300 Yuan, they have to shell out in thousands by way of taxes summarily imposed on them. There is rank exploitation of the poor amid sweeping corruption. The Chinese authorities become highly circumspect when human rights abuses are reported in the western media. When Chen was being incarcerated, his interviews to the CNN, BBC and various leading newspapers in England and the United States proved highly embarrassing for the Chinese leadership. It had its repercussions down the leadership chain. What hurts the Chinese establishment is Chen’s recognition internationally as the most famous political activist of China. His guts and perseverance despite being visually impaired brought him freedom. He now lives with his wife Weijing and two children in the United States.

Chen was 18 or 19 when he went to a school for the visually impaired which had opened two to three hours drive from his native village Dongshigu. Son of a poor farmer he was under house arrest for nearly a year-and-a-half when Chen took his wife into confidence and plotted escaping from his heavily guarded home. He remained undeterred despite having lost his vision as an infant. He educated himself to fight for the rights of the country’s poor especially a legion of women who had endured forced sterilisation.

The Dalai Lama in a brief but telling foreword says he looks forward to the time when China is “able to embrace and accommodate inspiring as well as motivated people like Chen Guangcheng and Liu Xiaobo (given the Nobel prize for his long fight for human rights in China). People like them have a positive role to play”. Helping people help themselves as Chen did is no threat to peace and order of society, but can instead contribute to harmony, observed His Holiness.

Chen says he might not be able to see but people have no idea that “my ear provides information that sighted people are blind to. Chinese history is full of examples of the disempowered overcoming odds with wit and daring”. His father’s tales became Chen’s foundational texts in everything from morality to history and literature that provided him with a roadmap for everyday life. He often thought of a wise saying he had read somewhere: “Good doctors cure illnesses and great doctors cure people, but the greatest doctors heal the nation”. He did not know where this new path would take him but “I want to follow it to the horizon and beyond. The evil in society should be unmasked”.

The government was again raising the spectre of a violent family planning campaign. In rural China having multiple children is still seen by many as not only a long standing cultural and economic imperative but also a basic right. When the traditional bias against girls meets the One-Child policy head on the result is a widely skewed gender imbalance. Boys now far outnumber girls though on paper the law does not allow birth selection based on the sex of the baby.

The crackdown was a near replica of the enforcement campaigns in the past. It is unlawful for officials to abuse their power by kidnapping one or both parents, seizing money or property or harassing family members. It is difficult to believe that criminal behaviour can be taking place on such a large scale. The government campaign continued to escalate and the cases of brutality and terror kept mounting.

When it came to family planning the laws did not matter: Officials could act with complete impunity and the whole system seemed rigged. No one – whether doctors, nurses, officials or judges is willing to step forward and stop what everyone knew were atrocities. It was not long before Chen is placed under House arrest and fully in “my captors power now.” He was now alone with his enemies and bound for an unknown fate. Then begins the trials in August 2006. While one attorney was roughed up badly the others were not allowed near Chen. He had no idea what is in store for him. Both the trials against him on trumped up charges was a farce.

In both instances he was sentenced to four years and three months for disturbing traffic and destroying public property. He was sent to Linyi city prison where his body was ailing but his spirit unbroken. He was driven home to Dongshigu by his captors and there can be no pretending: once again “my home would become my prison. And now it seemed I will never escape the prison walls of China.”

This time the large scale effort to imprison him in his own home was real. Now that he was under house arrest, he felt the moment for escape was ripe. “We needed just the tiniest of openings, then a first move perfectly executed. It’s now or never,” he told Weijing. He had no choice at all now. That he hoodwinked a whole battery of crawling security personnel encircling his house and the village of Dongshingu for four days speaks of his resoluteness to break free from the Communist shackles. Despite a broken leg while scaling a wall and landing on sharp stones during his escape, he finally reached the US Embassy in Beijing.

Depending on his friends, Chen carried his heart in his mouth all the time. Deputy chief of the US mission Wang finally told Chen, “Don’t worry you are safe now. You can breathe easy.” It was the end of the storm but Chen continued to have serious doubts about the Chinese being devious even though he had the full backing of Washington DC. Finally Chen had to visit a hospital outside the US Embassy to fix his broken leg and ensure he regains his health. Everyone knew he was once again in Chinese hands and “no one could say for sure when I would have another chance to speak to the outside world”.

After all the high drama the Chinese authorities preferred getting rid of a problem by driving Chen and his immediate family to the airport with the relevant documents so that they could wing their way to the Land of Promise and freedom. The notion that China is gradually liberalising and improving its human rights record is simply untrue. Like the dynasties of the past, in China today the elite enjoys the rights and privileges available to no one else. No matter what the crime, the party and its representatives cannot be tried or held liable in lawsuits of any kind. Chen believes the “fate of my country of origin” will not be an isolated one. His effort is a dream of justice and equality for not just the citizens of China but for all peoples.

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