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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Chen Guangcheng

Interviewed November 5, 2024

Even when I hadn’t gotten out of prison yet, the Chinese Communist Party had already sent people to the prison, I remembered it was April [2010], and they asked the jail police, “How was Chen’s ‘transformation process’ in here?”

The prison guard told them, “Chen Guangcheng refused our ‘transformation process’ and insists on standing firm in what he believed,” and they apologized for failing the mission given to them. So these gangster Communist [Party] members then replied: “Ok, this means we will do something more drastic then.”

Therefore, by September [2010], before I was released from jail, about a week earlier or eight days earlier they had organized a huge team of personnel to turn my home into another jail. Of course, in reality since 2005 my home had already been a place of illegal house arrest. [Chen Guangcheng, without trial, was placed under house arrest from August 2005 to March 2006 during which time his home was surrounded by government agents instructed to keep Chen inside at all times.]

But after I was released, the people they sent to surround my home had been increased to seventy or eighty people, so as I returned to my home it had already been turned into a fortress. For this entire ordeal, I should say from the day I returned home, the reality is my home was actually worse than jail.

Throughout this time, the guards around my home repeatedly robbed us or beat us, repeatedly physically abused us, they even tried to cut off power to my home, destroyed the television antenna on the roof and never allowed us to step outside of our house, including my children and my father. Even my mother, all of them were forbidden to leave the house.

I should say my escape was planned for over a year and I did this because I realized these people [the authorities] could not be reasoned with whatsoever. I realized they would never let me go. And I know they kept beating on me, hoping that I would hit back, and then they have a good excuse to put me back into prison.

I know this for a fact. Therefore, I wanted to escape and tell the truth to the public. So I tried many different plans and at the end I escaped successfully. Of course the chain of events during the escape had many hardships because you cannot imagine how tight the surveillance was they placed on our whole family. At its worst, the guards would come inside our home and stare at each of us face- to-face.

And many times, this kind of harassment cost us so much anxiety that we couldn’t eat. I escaped to Beijing. First I escaped my village. I found my friend, we escaped to Beijing and into the United States Embassy in Beijing. Because I believed with the exception of the United States Embassy in China there were no more safe places.

Before this [in previous escape attempts] I had been captured by them [the authorities] many times already. In September 2005, I was caught by them in Beijing and sent back to Shandong, and after I had returned they beat me repeatedly and I hadn’t been a free man since. So I realized if after this escape I was again captured and return to Shandong and then my future would be… only one result…