BEIJING - The improbable escape of a well-known dissident from government detention - aided by a network of activists who helped him evade security forces for days - is emboldening China’s often beleaguered human rights community, even as the authorities have begun rounding up those they suspect helped him flee.
As more details of his escape from virtual imprisonment in his home emerged Saturday, it became even more clear how difficult, and dangerous, the last week has been for both the dissident, Chen Guangcheng, who is blind, and supporters who aided his flight to safety to Beijing.
Chen was not only operating without sight when he scrambled over the wall built around his farmhouse to keep him in and supporters out, he was also weakened by chronic diarrhea and hobbled by an injured leg.
Chen, one of China’s best-known rights lawyers, managed to evade dozens of guards at his house and on his way from rural Shandong Province in northeast China to the capital 300 miles away.
Friends say his escape last Sunday was so well-planned that local officials did not realize he was gone until Thursday.
Those friends, along with sources in the Chinese government, say he is now inside the US Embassy in Beijing, where officials are trying to negotiate a diplomatic solution that would ensure safety for him and his family.
“His escape is nothing less than a miracle,’’ said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights campaigner who spent time with Chen in Beijing last week.
US officials kept their silence Saturday, refusing to say whether Chen is at the embassy. News of his improbable odyssey has electrified China’s rights activists, scores of whom had sought to draw attention to his plight and to challenge his extralegal detention by flocking to Dongshigu village in a futile attempt to see him. The journeys, many of them publicized through social media outlets, always ended the same way: The phalanx of guards who were paid to keep Chen and his family incommunicado would use violence to drive visitors away.
Chen, 40, has long been a cause celebre among rights advocates in China. A self-taught lawyer who was illiterate well into his 20s, Chen made a name for himself defending peasants and the disabled. But he infuriated local family planning officials in Shandong Province after filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of women forced to have abortions and sterilizations under China’s one-child policy.
In 2006, he was jailed on charges that many legal experts say were trumped up. After serving his 51-month sentence, he was escorted back to his home in Dongshigu. Even if Chen did not face additional charges, local officials were determined to keep him silent. They turned his home into a makeshift prison, encircling it with guards, surveillance cameras, and a wall to separate him from his neighbors. His wife and young daughter were also confined to the house, although his daughter was later allowed to attend school accompanied by security guards.
Details of their confinement emerged last year after the couple secretly recorded a home video. Infuriated after it made its way to the Internet, the captors unleashed a series of beatings that left Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing, with lingering injuries, according to rights advocates. Surveillance grew tighter after guards discovered evidence that he was trying to dig a tunnel from his house, one friend said.
Many details of Chen’s escape remain murky, but supporters say he was aided by at least one of the guards sympathetic to his plight
The friends said Chen’s subterfuge was months in the making. In recent weeks, they said he stayed in bed continuously, to convince his minders that he was too weak to walk.
After he scaled the wall outside his home, it reportedly took Chen 20 hours to reach a predetermined pickup spot. It was then that He Peirong, a rights activist from Nanjing, arrived in her car and drove Chen to Beijing, according to an account she posted on her microblog.