Blind man’s bluff

ON A local-government website, Chen Guangcheng is still listed as one of Linyi prefecture's top news personalities of 2003: “a young blind person who upholds the rights of the handicapped”. As well as helping the disabled win benefits, Mr Chen helped farmers in his coastal Shandong province resist illegal land-seizures. Local officials, however, have long since tired of Mr Chen's activism. In 2006 he was sentenced to four years in jail for exposing the brutality of officials enforcing family-planning regulations. Since his release, Mr Chen has been a prisoner in his own home, watched around the clock by hired thugs. They prevent well-wishers even from entering his home village of Dongshigu, sometimes with violence. Yet recently an online campaign has encouraged a growing number of Mr Chen's supporters to attempt to visit.

The use of the internet to mobilise people to visit Mr Chen has rattled officials far beyond Shandong province. It is the first time in China that activists have made such a persistent effort to show up in solidarity with someone under house arrest. It also coincides with attempts to use weibo, or microblogs, to gain support for independent candidates in elections to low-level “people's congresses” that have been taking place around the country. Though the congresses have little power, and it is very difficult for truly independent candidates to stand, the polls still make the Communist Party nervous.