Beijing cannot portray blind lawyer as threat to authority

The idea of a blind seer is not new. In ancient Greece, Tiresias of Thebes, warned Oedipus he would end up killing his father and sleeping with his mother. His very blindness made the truth of his prophecy more telling. So it is with Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught lawyer who on Wednesday left the safety of the US embassy to resume his life as, one can only hope, a relatively free man in China.

Chen's blindness resonated on several levels. That was evident from the online campaign in China, in which supporters posted photographs of themselves wearing his trademark dark glasses.

The campaigning lawyer's lack of sight made his struggle seem all the more extraordinary and the state that imprisoned and beat him all the more thuggish.

It made his improbable escape from house arrest, over a wall and past ranks of guards, more heroic.

And it hinted at the vulnerability of a state whose security apparatus can sometimes appear unbreachable by society as a whole, let alone a single blind man.

Like Tiresias, who divined the truth in darkness, Chen's central stance — that women should not be forced to have abortions — exposed in a flash the moral bankruptcy of China's public policy.

Forced abortions, as well as being morally repugnant, are hopelessly out of date even from the coldest policy perspective. More than 30 years of the one-child policy have left China on the brink of rapid ageing, raising the prospect — prophesied by economists — that China could grow old before it gets rich.

It is ironic that Christian Bale, the Hollywood actor who played Batman, should have been beaten up when he attempted to visit Chen last December. In China, as in America, a blind man who overcomes poverty and illiteracy comes across as braver than any superhero in a leotard.

That is what makes Chen such a difficult force for the Chinese authorities to deal with. Unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose calls for democracy directly challenged state power, Chen is harder to portray as a threat to authority.

Like the protesters of Wukan, who demanded the ejection of corrupt village officials, Chen directed his anger not explicitly at Beijing, but at officials in Shandong province. In the video uploaded on YouTube after his night-time escape recently, he appealed directly to Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, to punish local cadres.

Breaking party ranks

Blaming them for sullying the party's image, he challenged Wen to answer whether local officials were acting alone or in accordance with Beijing's instructions. Wen was the right man to ask. He has presented himself as defending ordinary people. His speech against Bo Xilai, the disgraced former party secretary of Chongqing, was couched in precisely the terms of wayward officials breaking party ranks.

The distinction has provided Beijing with a get-out. It has agreed, say US officials, to move Chen to a ‘safe environment' and to allow him to study at university. It has also, again according to the US, pledged to investigate allegedly trumped-up charges against Chen.

Of course, no one knows whether Beijing will honour its promises. There were some indications that Chen may have decided to stay in China because of fears about his family's safety.

Downfall of Bo

He will be living in China's sovereign territory beyond the reach of anything but Washington's moral suasion. Still, for now, Beijing must be content with berating the US for interfering in its internal affairs and with extracting a promise that there will be no repeat performance. (On Friday, China hinted at a possible, face-saving way out saying that he could apply for permission to study abroad).

It is a fragile compromise befitting these extraordinary times in China. The Communist party is still reeling from the abrupt downfall of Bo, the repercussions of which are unclear for this year's leadership succession.

Revelations about Bo, even though the party can claim to have dealt with him, can have done little to bolster the government's reputation among the Chinese people for legality or propriety. The strange case of Chen only adds to the sense of instability.

Few would bet the party will get to its succession without more bumps along the way.

The prophecy given to Oedipus led to tragedy. At the end of Sophocles' play, the young Greek king, realising what he has done, gouges out his eyes so that he no longer has to look upon a world he has so befouled.

No one expects the Communist party to do anything like that. But Chen remains a potent symbol. It will not escape some people's notice in China that, for thousands of years, the personification of justice in the West has been blind.

— Financial Times