Word: chen
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Then came the text message: "Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to four years and three months' imprisonment." I first met Chen a year ago. A native of China's eastern Shandong province, the self-schooled legal activist came to Shanghai to publicize the plight of women who had been forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations as part of the nation's family-planning campaign. China has tried for more than two decades to lower its population through its "one-child" policy, but the coercive measures used in Shandong's Linyi region are now illegal. By publicizing abuses committed by local...
...days after our first meeting, we got together again in Beijing. As we were leaving, Chen had a last request: Would it be possible to see what I looked like? He lifted his hands and felt my face. My nose, he commented, wasn't especially big for a foreigner's. Chen was blinded by a fever as a small child. His hands--as well as an unusually supportive family that reads out loud to him everything from law books to letters from peasants requesting his legal aid--are what allow him to see the world...
...Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, who has been under house arrest herself for months, was equally stunned by the harsh sentence. Each day, she says, her three-year-old son tells her he doesn't want to start supper until his father comes home. "Today," she told TIME by cell phone, "I had to tell my child that his father won't be joining him for dinner for a long time...
...must admit, I was worried how Yuan would react to a phone call from TIME. I wondered if she would blame the international media for publicizing the forcible family-planning campaign, which is perhaps what prompted Linyi officials to take out their anger on her husband. That Chen had been detained just hours after talking to me made me even more queasy. But Yuan brightened when she heard it was TIME on the line. She knew about the TIME 100, of course. And she had told another one of Chen's lawyers that she never imagined that she would...
...pack up my final boxes for my move from Shanghai, I will certainly remember the disgust I felt as I read the text message informing me of Chen's sentencing. He will probably be released around the time I finish my next assignment for TIME in Southeast Asia. But I will also remember Yuan's conviction that the outside world must know what is going on in Linyi so it can help change things for the better. Hers is a faith based on a system that has not yet taken root in her homeland - one in which justice would consistently...