Chen Guangcheng is in the US embassy in Beijing!!

gjy2105 said:

Frankly, he was a naive fool for putting all his hopes on the U.S. as a savior. He should've gone to the Norwegian embassy instead.

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The Norwegians wouldn't have been able to get his family to the embassy. And China might not have been willing to make any deal with Norway. But, even though the US and China clash sometimes, they have to get on.

z117 said:

Now he is trying to shame the Americans into helping?

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More like not forget him now he's left the embassy, I think. If the Chinese authorities' guarantees mean anything, surely they have helped already.

Of course this could be a time-bomb for the US administration. Even if you assume that they just wanted to get rid of Chen to smooth things over with China, if anything happens to Chen Congress and Romney are going to make life for the administration and Obama miserable.

With so many changes and contradictions in this story, I can see only one consistent factor, namely that Mr Chen seems unable to relate or work with authority from any country. Indeed he starts to come across as some sort of prima donna, which is a failing which seems all too common with those within the HR industry.

If I read anything at all, the basis of the threats seem to be a spin on his being re-united with his wife if he left the Embassy, otherwise she would be returned home. The beating to death part appears an invented addition of his own and only added after the event.

As Mr Chen is still in Beijing, it appears that the agreement reached is enforce without problem.

SampanViking said:

As Mr Chen is still in Beijing, it appears that the agreement reached is enforce without problem.

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Except that the police seem to be blocking visitors from seeing him. Did Chen agree to being kept isolated in a hospital? So far no member of the press has apparently been able to see him. I know visitors can be refused if patients are very ill, but as far as I understand it Chen has an injured foot - not a reason to refuse visitors. If the Chinese (national) authorities want people to believe they have made serious guarantees about his freedom, it would help if some members of the press could see him.

gjy2105 said:

If it is true about the threats and intimidation, I am really dissappointed by the way Beijing handled this.

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Yeah, you would have hoped someone would have knocked some heads together and let Chen's friends and family get on with their lives.

This is a really strange story. Some blind man climbs around, is a dissident because he did what and is in negotiations and in the news headlines for what reason? It must be hard to be US ambassador to China if there are more such situations.
Btw. it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable could start explaining why Chen should have been a persecuted dissident before he went to the US embassy. What did he do? And how blind is he and when did that happen to him?

(This was an accidental double post, so I put some new info in here.)

This was a from a Chinese government spokesman.

"After Chen Guangcheng's release from prison he was a free person, as far as I know. He has been living in his home town."

So I guess this means that he was being held illegally. But it's not clear as to whether he's saying the Chinese government was not aware he was under house arrest at all (which seems unlikely), or if they're neither confirming or denying that was the case.

Kurt said:

Btw. it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable could start explaining why Chen should have been a persecuted dissident before he went to the US embassy. What did he do? And how blind is he and when did that happen to him?

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As I understand it, he was blind since he was young (I'm not aware of him having any sight). Since the 1990s he had petitioned the authorities in Beijing over issues like wrongful taxation and on environmental issues. Then he publicised how local authorities had been forcing pregnant women to undergo abortions or sterilisation, in the name of the one-child policy. That led to a big scandal and there was a national-level investigation. Some local officials were arrested. It seems like they (the local officials) never forgave Chen for that, so they trumped up some charges that he had somehow organised a riot, which led to his conviction.

Except that the police seem to be blocking visitors from seeing him. Did Chen agree to being kept isolated in a hospital? So far no member of the press has apparently been able to see him. I know visitors can be refused if patients are very ill, but as far as I understand it Chen has an injured foot - not a reason to refuse visitors. If the Chinese (national) authorities want people to believe they have made serious guarantees about his freedom, it would help if some members of the press could see him.

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Not true as he has given interviews with at least UK Channel 4 News and CNN since moving to the hospital. Plus plenty of information about him is being distributed via his friends abroad. Certainly he seems to have a mobile phone and no one has tried to take it from him.

Hardly a surprise though if access is being controlled. It is after all a hospital, something; that the footage of the media scrum shown on the BBC yesterday shows, that many of these reporters are only to happy to ignore, while they chase the story.

The facts such as they are is that he and his family are reunited at the hospital where he is receiving treatment for the injuries he gained while breaking out of house arrest and the stories he is telling or which are being put about by his friends such as China Aid (A Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian Organisation based in Texas) are increasingly at odds with the version of events being put out by the US Embassy and State Dept.

They can't both be right, so the question has to be, Which account is incorrect?

I'm watching CNN and they're saying China is preventing US government officials from interviewing Chen but apparently the same reporter got to talk to him again in the hospital. So the governemnt keeping watch on him let reporters talk to him to say the exact same thing. They don't explain nor catch their own contradictions.

To be fair, Chen(and thousands of others who actually made some difference), deserve the Nobel Prize far more than Liu Xiao Bo, I do think the US should have done more for him.
He's clearly not going to be comfortable in China, and the Chinese government doesn't want him, why not just pack him off to the US, it makes everyone in China happier.

AssassinsMace said:

I'm watching CNN and they're saying China is preventing US government officials from interviewing Chen but apparently the same reporter got to talk to him again in the hospital. So the governemnt keeping watch on him let reporters talk to him to say the exact same thing. They don't explain nor catch their own contradictions.

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Doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. CNN Reporters aren't US Government officials.

kyanges said:

Doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. CNN Reporters aren't US Government officials.

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The same reporter said he couldn't get an interview yesterday while he was in the hospital but before got one. So what has changed? If the government shut him up all this time, why would they let reporters speak to him?