On Wikipedia, Chen Guangcheng is described as :
Chen Guangcheng (born 12 November 1971) is a Chinese civil rights activist who has worked on human rights issues in rural areas of the People’s Republic of China. Blind from an early age and self-taught in the law, Chen is frequently described as a “barefoot lawyer” who advocates for women’s rights, land rights, and the welfare of the poor.
In August 2020, Chen spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention. During his speech, Chen stated “We need to support, vote, and fight for President Trump.”
These two sentences seem contradictory to each other. To me, one of them must be a profound misunderstanding of Chen.
If you are not familiar with Chen, he became internationally famous in 2005 “for organizing a landmark class-action lawsuit against authorities in Linyi, Shandong province, for the excessive enforcement of the one-child policy.”
As a result of this lawsuit, Chen was placed under house arrest from September 2005 to March 2006, with a formal arrest in June 2006. On 24 August 2006, Chen was sentenced to four years and three months for “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.” He was released from prison in 2010 after serving his full sentence, but remained under house arrest or “soft detention” at his home in Dongshigu Village. Chen and his wife were reportedly beaten shortly after a human rights group released a video of their home under intense police surveillance in February 2011.
Chen’s case received sustained international attention, with the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Secretary, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International issuing appeals for his release; the latter group designated him a prisoner of conscience. Chen is a 2007 laureate of the Ramon Magsaysay Award and in 2006 was named in the Time 100 (in the ‘Heroes & Pioneers’ section).
In April 2012, Chen escaped his house arrest and fled to the Embassy of the United States, Beijing. After negotiations with the Chinese government, he left the embassy for medical treatment in early May 2012, and it was reported that China would consider allowing him to travel to the United States to study. On 19 May 2012, Chen, his wife, and his two children were granted U.S. visas and departed Beijing for New York City. In October 2013, Chen accepted a position with the conservative research group Witherspoon Institute, and a position at the Catholic University of America.
When the Supreme Court ruling became known to the public, Chen commented on Twitter:
#June24th2022 , The U.S. Supreme Court, under a variety of pressures, issued a major ruling - vacating the 1973 ultra vires decision in Roe v Wade and returning power to the states under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In the 49 years since the Supreme Court’s erroneous ruling, more than 63 million fetuses have been strangled in the United States.
He made it clear that Roe v Wade was wrong in his mind.
He then tweeted:
Fighting the Supreme Court with abstinence, calling on wives to go on sex strike.
It would be more convincing if you spontaneously set up an American “Xiejia Laowei”, and lived in it for three years to experience “Yerunian”.
“Xiejia Laowei” refers to a housing compound described in popular novel Women around the house (Chinese Edition) . It was written in 2009, about the lives of a group of women in a small town in China in the 1930s. I have never read it or heard of it before, but that the novel is about 200 widows who spent the rest of their lives in that housing compound away from men to tone the sins of their lives before, and without men, of course, they suffered and every night is as long as a year, which in Chinese is “Yerunian”.
So, Mr. Chen was never advocating for women’s rights. It was the fetus’ right that he cared about all along. That explained why he supports Trump.
We have described the complicated property dispute between Zeng Jinyan and her ex-husband Hu Jia in our newsletters 29, 30, 31. Zeng has experienced abortion before her separation from Hu Jia. She took to twitter to share her abortion experience after the overturning of Roe v Wade.
She also responded to Chen, who she knew well when in China.
@iguangcheng Dear Brother Guangcheng, holding your hands and sister-in-law Weijing’s hands.
When I had my abortion, I asked my sister-in-law for help and after listening to what she said, I understood that she had endured great pain and sorrow and allowed herself to become accustomed to it. You have been a candle in the darkness. In China, anti-abortion is resistance to the government’s denial of a woman’s reproductive autonomy; in the United States, securing the right to abortion is opposition to the denial of a woman’s bodily autonomy by any force.
(Here Zeng called Chen’s wife her sister-in-law to show that Chen is like a brother to her.)
When you escaped from house arrest in Shandong and we met and clasped hands, I felt your heart brighter than anyone else. Please keep that brightness and see every woman around you, women who care about you, the specific people, and see their lives and needs, instead of being the voice of an ideology that controls the autonomy of women’s bodies.
May you remain Brother Light Sincerity, and not the Brother who extinguishes the light of women.
(Chen’s name, Guangcheng, literally mans Light Sincerity).
Unfortunately Chen did not want to understand her, he pretended that the Supreme Court was simply giving the power to the states. Obviously this is not what he thinks.
Chen is not the only one that support the Supreme Court decision, among the famous anti-CCP crowd overseas. So many men think that at the same time they fought against CCP’s tyranny, they themselves should rule over women’s life.
One twitter user asked ordinary male Chinese Twitter users to show their support to women’s right to abortion, saying that she has lost any hope in Chinese men, and she got almost 1000 responses. Later she tweeted to thank the men who spoke up.
According to Chinese social media, on noon of June 26th, one of the rural banks that have frozen the deposits of their customers, suddenly allowed money transferred out on their online platform. This lasted for about an hour.
A few lucky ones did get the money out. But then, the bank claimed that the money belongs to the bank, because the actual customers’ money is gone, taken away by the bad investor. So the bank openly stated that they will investigate the money that has been transferred. At night, they had indeed successfully managed to get some of the money back!
Some lucky ones showed that they have got up to 800,000 yuan out of their accounts. But experts said this method is harming the customers’ interest. Some even speculated that this one hour of “hole” was designed to let some selected people (in the know) to get their money out. Of course, the investigation by the bank is not transparent to the public and no one knows who are let to keep the money.
Welcome to China.