Chen Guangcheng He began his activism defending people with disabilities, to the peasants against the corrupt authorities and to the women who were forced to have abortions and forced sterilizations to comply with the policy of a family, a son. His commitment to mediate conflicts and advise those who did not have the means to initiate a legal process, earned him the nickname 'the lawyer'´.
GEA PHOTOWORDS Illustration
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT– Interview with Chen Guangcheng
ByMercedes Iniguez Quintela forGEA PHOTOWORDS
“I was imprisoned for seven years.: 10 months without any excuse, four years of official prison and 20 “months under home surveillance”, explains the Chinese dissident Chen Guancheng who did not have serious problems until June 2005 denounced that the local authorities of Shandong carried out forced abortions on women in an advanced state of pregnancy and sterilizations to meet the population figures demanded by the central government.. Your report, addressed to Beijing so that the Government would act against those officials, It earned him the wrath of these and the support of international organizations defending human rights.. Two months later he was subjected, with his family, to house arrest and just a year later, In June of 2006, He was charged with disrupting traffic and damaging private property.. In a two-hour pantomime trial, with a court-appointed lawyer because his three lawyers had just been arrested, He was sentenced to four years in prison. “The Chinese government in order to maintain the monopoly of the single party, enslaves and persecutes civilians, the government prevents the establishment of a civilized system, democratic and with freedom and with a constitutional system”, denounces Guangcheng and continues “the communist party is above the law and the state”.
Although he was released in 2010, Shandong authorities confined him and his family in a house in Dongshigu village., without leaving or receiving anyone and closely watched by almost a hundred agents. “I tried to escape several times, but it was complicated. Finally one day pretending to water the plants, "I moved away little by little and managed to escape," says Chen., that despite being blind and going alone, he knew the surroundings well-. I followed a path, most of the time on all fours, since I fell more than two hundred times and fractured my foot in several places, but I managed to get to a friend's house, that of course he didn't know that I had escaped”
From there to Beijing, where several dissidents convinced him to take refuge in the US Embassy, where he entered 27 April and stayed six days. He left to enter the hospital and treat his injuries.. This is a daring episode, which coincided with the visit to China of the then American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, caused the worst diplomatic crisis between both countries in the last two decades. But after tense high-level negotiations, He was granted a one-way ticket to New York and political asylum..
“Members and families of the elites of the Chinese Communist Party enjoy a privileged situation and believe they have the right to monopolize political education.”, social and cultural of China. The disparity is growing, “Communist cadres create internal and social conflicts.”. To build the stability of your own system, according to Guangcheng, “The Chinese government spends a very large budget of about 15% of the GDP (even higher than military spending) to control his own people. Under violence there is no justice, there are no human rights under an authoritarian regime. “The Chinese Communist Party considers its own citizens as its first enemy.”.
Guangcheng who is still not comfortable speaking in English, is accompanied by an interpreter, He also spoke about the human rights situation in Tibet “the Chinese authorities, They accused the Dalai Lama of being a separatist, false propaganda intended to incite ethnic hatred between the Chinese and Tibetan people. Protesting Tibetans quickly disappear. Nothing is known about them, nor of his whereabouts. But I want to encourage my Tibetan friends to be patient., Keep your spirits up so you can continue fighting. The Tibetan conflict between peoples does not exist, "The conflict is with the authorities and the Chinese communist government.".
For the dissident, social justice is everywhere, people demand it “and I believe that the communist party has been powerless when it comes to stopping it.”. Only citizens, through our own efforts, can denounce and fight for human rights.. The citizens of the whole world and of China are the ones who have to demand their rights and then the situation will be reversed. This will not be achieved in a single day, with which you have to be patient and trust and not stop fighting. If it is not planted, there will be no harvest. The thought of democracy must also be planted and one day it will flourish.. It must be planted in the heart of each one, although there are many who still do not dare to think. Taiwan's recent elections have shown that the students' eight-month-old sunflower movement has brought about changes. The seed of hope can be spread throughout the earth, if planted on one side, “Then what we defend in one place will create a butterfly effect that will spread and impact Chinese society when the time is right.”.
.A round trip effect
.However, for the international law lawyer and editor and investigator of the complaint presented before the National Court for genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Tibetan people by former Chinese leaders, José Elias Esteve Moltó, The butterfly effect has another, much more worrying aspect., “This propagation effect has a way back and we have seen it in Spain, in the National Court that has filed the complaint. What will have to be decided soon, not only in Spain but throughout the EU, is whether dictatorships like China's should resemble democracies like Western ones, or on the contrary, just as it seems, authoritarian and dictatorial governments, through that butterfly effect, are imposing their criteria and our democracies are increasingly, "They look like dictatorial governments.".
.Mercedes Iñiguez Quintela, Graduate in Journalism from the Complutense University and Master in Journalism from the University of Barcelona and Columbia University of New York. He has lived and worked for 15 years abroad and has collaborated for media such as Il Sole 24 Ore, The Guardian, La Vanguardia or the Catalunya Newspaper, inter alia. In recent times she has specialized in gender equality and human rights issues..
