The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China
by chen guangcheng
henry holt, 352 pages, $30
A
nnihilating a civilization that has withstood more famines, invasions, peasant revolts, civil wars, and tyrants than historians can keep straight takes work. It can’t be done in a day. Monuments and temples come down quickly enough with fire and axe, dynamite and sledgehammer (just ask our friends in the Middle East), but the essence of a people—the hope in their eyes, the tales of ancient heroes, the trust of their neighbors—that takes time to root out. Time, and concerted effort. Unfortunately, as the autobiography of Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng meticulously documents, it is the sort of effort that the Chinese Communist party is quite willing to make.
Chen was blind from early childhood, illiterate until early adulthood, and raised in crushing rural poverty. Lacking any formal legal training, he was nevertheless able, through an excellent memory and sheer doggedness, to become the regional legal expert. He was a “barefoot lawyer,” like the “barefoot doctors” of the Cultural Revolution who had minimal training and were sent out to villages. Unlike them, he was willing to champion the rural poor against the state’s brutal violations of their persons and property.
What brought Chen to national prominence, and the attention of the authorities, was his opposition to the Yinan County Family Planning Commission, which in 2005 attacked Chen’s village along with several others. Officials brought truckloads of thugs to brutalize the populace with little concern for whether their targets had truly “overbirthed” or were merely the victims of rumor and local grudge. Chen relays this story in much the same way he did to the Chinese public: first with statistics that are numbing in their immensity, then with story after individual story. He tells us of men and women beaten and tortured for days until they revealed the locations of their pregnant neighbors, of pregnant women abducted in the middle of the night and injected with toxins to cause miscarriage or premature labor, of relatives kidnapped and beaten until a woman turned herself in, of terrified doctors compelled to sterilize countless men and women, of newborn babies strangled or drowned at birth in the hospital, of homes demolished and livestock killed when victims were unable to pay “fines,” and on and on.
