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“Blind Lawyer” jailed in China

Jill

Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese activist who has been fighting the good fight over there for a good long time, has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.

Chen’s supporters say he has become a target of retaliation by officials in the eastern Chinese city of Linyi for publicizing information about forced late-term abortions and sterilization campaigns involving tens of thousands of people.

China’s one-child policy has become less coercive in recent years, and such draconian family planning measures are no longer common practice. But that hasn’t stopped some local officials from continuing with the abuse in order to meet certain quotas.

The harsh treatment of the self-taught lawyer and a recent slew of incidents involving the arrest or intimidation of attorneys fighting against official abuse suggest that the Communist Party is worried about losing control over an increasingly vocal legal community.

China’s one-child policy is just as much an assault on reproductive freedom as restrictive abortion laws are. Chen has been an invaluable voice in numerous legal battles in his country, and his imprisonment is a sad example of what happens when governments with too much power are simultaneously able to limit basic human rights like reproductive freedom (remember, folks, if the government has the power to outlaw abortion, it also has the power to force/coerce abortion) and also seek to stifle free speech and criticism of the administration (as we see people like Ann Coulter accusing liberals of “treason,” let’s remember what it actually looks like when governments will jail you for dissent).

Best of luck to Chen, and here’s to hoping that the people of China eventually secure the rights they deserve.

In related news, my friend Will informs me that readers in China are unable to access Feministe. Way to go, subversive feminist force!

13 thoughts on “Blind Lawyer” jailed in China

  1. In related news, my friend Will informs me that readers in China are unable to access Feministe. Way to go, subversive feminist force!

    It’s true! I spent two months studying in Beijing this summer, and no Feministe the entire time! I was a wreck. Horrid. 😉

  2. Is “reproductive freedom” the power to do whatever you want with your body–including having as many kids as you want? That seems nice, but are you sure that the government shoudn’t have a say? Or is reproductive freedom the power to make your own choices within limits?

    Seems to me there’d be a difference, say, between saying “You may have only one child” in a world where contraception was free, and saying the same thing in a world where it was not free.

    Does China provide BC?

  3. Would you be sanguine about a policy that mandated having at least one child, in a society where the government paid all costs associated with child-bearing and shouldered a great deal of the burden of care? Personally, it’d frighten me.

  4. See: Romania under Ceaucescu. Childbirth was compulsory, women were required to produce evidence that they were ovulating, and the resulting children were dumped in orphanages by their overburdened parents.

  5. Right. Or the forensic gynecologists. Even setting aside what inevitably happens in real life, the situation is terrifying enough in the abstract.

  6. Is “reproductive freedom” the power to do whatever you want with your body–including having as many kids as you want? That seems nice, but are you sure that the government shoudn’t have a say?

    The government should absolutely fucking not have a say.

    I hate to sound paranoid and slippery-slope, but the more limits we have on body sovereignty, the more restrictions we have on reproductive freedom, the more likely it becomes that we’ll end up in Gattaca. And I find that terrifying.

  7. Also bear in mind that the one-child policy simply *doesn’t work*. As far as I know, birth control and contraception are widely distributed in China (at least urban China) and abortions are fairly easy to get (correct me if I’m wrong). But the fact is that people happen to want kids. More importantly, people happen to want *boys*. And they will have as many illegitimate girls as they need to in order to get a boy, and then you have an extra couple million or more girls in China with no citizenship and no identification because they don’t legally exist, and/or are dumped in orphanages. Or just outside to die.

    China obviously knows it needs to curb it’s birth rate, but you can’t just change hundreds of years worth of cultural values in a broad policy. Just as you hear many people freaking out that many Western countries have a declining population and we’re headed for disaster, but you can’t just end contraception or abortion and expect the problem to go away. A lot of people just don’t want kids. End of.

  8. Actually, I hate hearing the “Chinese-hates-women” spread out like butter on white bread, without really knowing more about China. In China, the wanting boys has been predominantly a rural issue- and the government has done a lot of give incentives for families to keep their girls, including free schooling.

    I’m not for the Chinese government, but I just hate the almost racist fervor that seem to arise when people speak about China, while we have our own troops raping female soliders on the … same side. In my opinion, china’s fucked, but US isn’t that far behind.

  9. Hi Sailorman. The others have covered pretty much what I was going to say, so I’ll just smile, wave, and thank you for bringing the straw-feminist. You’re so thoughtful.

  10. I don’t like or agree with abortion…..but that must be a free choice ….. Not coerced.
    Abortion is like guns or drugs. Impossible to make go away. People must freely choose to do the right thing or it doesn’t matter.

    Prostitution, Drugs, Guns & Abortions are impossible to remove from a society that desires them.

  11. Karen, was that directed at me? I was just stating what I understood to be the case, and you can’t discount rural issues seeing as rural China is very, very hugely big. I don’t have any racist feelings towards China- my mother is Chinese and I have strong roots to it. We all know how screwed up their government is, and that doesn’t mean we *don’t* know how screwed up our own respective ones are.

  12. In related news, my friend Will informs me that readers in China are unable to access Feministe. Way to go, subversive feminist force!

    Great Firewall of China at work again?

    My father either doesn’t remember that part of communist Romania or just never mentioned it. He told me abortion was outlawed because Nene Nicu was afraid of population decline, but never talked about all the ridiculous pro-birth shit going on. Then again, he ran away in the late 70s, was male, did not have a partner he was planning to have children with, and his parents already had their kids by the time the communists came.

    I think it’s very strange. I definitely believe that all the pregnancy border checks and fertility checks were happening, but it’s strange that he never bothered to mention it. I guess because he was able to so easily ignore it.

  13. I hate to sound paranoid and slippery-slope, but the more limits we have on body sovereignty, the more restrictions we have on reproductive freedom, the more likely it becomes that we’ll end up in Gattaca

    Or We by Zamyatin, the book that movie stole most of its ideas from :/

    (sorry, I’m a lit/film nerd)

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