Activist: U.S. will help me leave China

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

05/03/2012

Activist: U.S. will help me leave China

Chen Guangcheng regrets leaving U.S. Embassy

BEIJING (CNN) -

Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese activist at the center of a diplomatic firestorm, reiterated his intention to leave China and said he expects U.S. assistance.

"I believe they will help me," he told CNN in an interview early Friday, but declined to elaborate.

The activist, who left the refuge of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing after he escaped house arrest in his eastern China hometown, said Thursday that he regretted the move and now wants U.S. officials to help get him and his family to the United States.

Now in a hospital, Chen told CNN in an interview early Friday that he spoke with U.S. representatives by phone Thursday. They also met with his wife, Yuan Weijing.

When Chen left the embassy Wednesday, it was announced that the United States and China had worked out a deal for his future.

Read more at (ONE OF FIVE PAGES) KOAT

May 3, 2012 2:11:25 PM | Activist/Dissident, Current Affairs

The comments to this entry are closed.

Blind activist goes free after promises of safety BEIJING — A blind Chinese activist who fled persecution by local officials in his rural town and sparked a diplomatic standoff by holing up in the U.S. Embassy for six days emerged Wednesday after U.S. officials said China had assured his safety. Chen Guangcheng's escape from illegal house arrest in eastern China and his flight into the protection of U.S. diplomats in Beijing last week had threatened to derail annual U.S.-China strategic talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton starting Thursday. U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke escorted Chen to Chaoyang Hospital, where he was reunited with his family as...

U.S., China grapple with trust gap amid Chen fallout Ananth Krishnan Chinese police officers watch over journalists outside the hospital where Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng is recuperating in Beijing on Thursday. Photo:AP United States and Chinese officials on Thursday called for measures to deepen trust at the start of an annual strategic dialogue, a day after the two countries grappled with a major diplomatic crisis over the case of Chinese lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng. The fate of the visually challenged rights campaigner remained unclear on Thursday after it emerged that he had expressed strong reservations about a deal reached by U.S. and Chinese officials to arrange his leaving...