BEIJING ? For months, Chen Guangcheng, one of China?s best-known dissidents, played a cat-and-mouse game with the phalanx of guards encircling his home. He dug a tunnel to try to escape, a friend says, but was found out. And he sneaked out a video that alerted his supporters to the beatings he said he and his wife suffered at the hands of the men who kept them virtual prisoners in their rural farmhouse.
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An undated photograph of the blind Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng with his family.
Then last Sunday night, in an improbable escape, Mr. Chen, who is blind and reportedly weak from months of mistreatment, scaled the wall that has been built around his house, slipped past his security detail and made a desperate sprint to apparent safety in Beijing. The daring rush for freedom could not have been possible without a small network of activists who risked detention to help him and who, supporters with knowledge of the escape said, used coded messages to communicate and elude a surveillance apparatus that is one of the world?s most pervasive.
By Saturday, three activists had disappeared, including the woman who drove Mr. Chen 300 miles to Beijing and a man who admitted to meeting the dissident as he was shuttled between safe houses in the capital. The man?s wife said he was taken away by the police.
Friends of Mr. Chen, along with people in the Chinese government, say he is now inside the American Embassy in Beijing. If true, that creates diplomatic headaches for the United States just days before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other American officials arrive for annual talks. .
That the underground network of activists was able to help Mr. Chen evade his captors and move around the capital undetected for days has undoubtedly shaken Chinese leaders, who have become increasingly determined to suppress dissent through technology and brute force. Friends say his escape was so well executed that local officials did not realize until Thursday that he was gone.
?His escape is nothing less than a miracle,? said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights campaigner who also spent time with Mr. Chen last week.
Mr. Chen?s flight could not have come at a worse time for China?s leaders, who were already struggling with the humiliation inflicted by the case of Bo Xilai, the center of a cascading scandal that cost him his seat in the Politburo and exposed a level of mistrust among top officials in the one-party state.
News of Mr. Chen?s improbable odyssey has electrified China?s rights activists, scores of whom had sought for months to draw attention to his plight and to challenge his extralegal detention by flocking to Dongshigu village in futile attempts to see him. The journeys, many of them publicized through social media, always ended the same way: the guards paid to keep Mr. Chen and his family incommunicado would use violence to drive visitors away.
Mr. Chen, 40, has long been a cause c�l�bre among human rights advocates both in China and abroad. A self-taught lawyer who was illiterate well into his 20s, Mr. Chen earned renown by defending disenfranchised 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 undergo abortions and sterilizations.
In 2006, he was convicted on charges that many legal experts say were trumped up. After serving his 51-month sentence, he was escorted back to Dongshigu, where local officials were determined to keep him silent. They turned his home into a makeshift prison, encircling it with guards, surveillance cameras and a jamming device to ensure he could not communicate with the outside world. His wife and young daughter were also confined to the house, although she was later allowed to attend school accompanied by guards.
Many details of the escape remain murky, but supporters say Mr. Chen may have been aided by a sympathetic guard. They also say that the night before his escape, he was able to discuss his plans with supporters via cellphone ? a remarkable detail given how hard the guards had worked to keep him isolated.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6b9b6467ec0e493493d44bfb6e9d8f7d
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