THE STORY of how Chen Guangcheng, a 40-year-old blind villager, escaped through the prison-like security cordon surrounding his home and ended up hundreds of miles away in Beijing under American diplomatic protection will long be recounted as one of the most dramatic episodes in America's dealings with China over human rights. After six days at the American Embassy, Mr Chen left “of his own accord”, the two governments said, to receive medical treatment in a Beijing hospital. Mr Chen, it was reported, would stay in China and be allowed to attend university. A subsequent report from Associated Press stated that Mr Chen left the embassy after threats were made against his wife. [UPDATE: And then, not many hours later, citing the menace posed to his life and his family's, Mr Chen said he wants to go to the United States after all. The situation is in flux.]
Despite ubiquitous complaints by Chinese about human-rights abuses, there has only been one other known example of a dissident being granted protective custody by a foreign diplomatic mission in Communist-ruled China. That was in 1989, when Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist accused by China of stirring up the Tiananmen Square unrest that year, was admitted with his wife to the American ambassador's residence. Arrangements for their safe passage to America, where Mr Fang died last month, took more than a year. China is now a much stronger country and America far more anxious not to displease it. The announcement on May 2nd that Mr Chen had left the embassy (he checked into a hospital, accompanied by America's ambassador, Gary Locke) appeared to signal at least a temporary compromise. But China also demanded an apology from America for taking Mr Chen into the embassy and gave no public guarantee of his safety.
Both countries were anxious that Mr Chen's flight should not spoil their annual high-level “strategic and economic dialogue”, a two-day event which began in Beijing on May 3rd. They are being led on the American side by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, neither of whom want a human-rights case to overshadow discussions about issues ranging from a possibly imminent nuclear test by North Korea to global economic rebalancing. The timing was especially bad for China, which was already under enormous political stress following the flight of a senior provincial official to an American consulate in Chengdu in February and the dismissal it led to of a Politburo member, Bo Xilai.
Mr Chen's journey began in the village of Dongshigu in Shandong Province, more than 500 km (300 miles) south-east of Beijing, where he had been kept under house arrest since his release at the end of a four-year jail term in 2010. Local officials have long been determined to silence Mr Chen, a self-taught legal worker who became widely known for championing victims of local injustice. Mr Chen particularly angered the authorities by exposing forced sterilisations and abortions involving thousands of women in connection with China's one-child policy. No legal basis was ever produced for keeping Mr Chen confined to his home, nor for deploying dozens of thugs to keep visitors away, sometimes with violence. The goons appeared to enjoy backing from at least some leaders in Beijing.
