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Blind dissident accuses Hillary Clinton of giving in to Beijing

WASHINGTON — Mrs Hillary Clinton’s account of one of her crowning moments as United States Secretary of State has been flatly contradicted by a leading Chinese activist.

Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng (right) is helped from a van as he arrives in New York May 19, 2012. Photo: Reuters

Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng (right) is helped from a van as he arrives in New York May 19, 2012. Photo: Reuters

WASHINGTON — Mrs Hillary Clinton’s account of one of her crowning moments as United States Secretary of State has been flatly contradicted by a leading Chinese activist.

Mr Chen Guangcheng (picture), a blind lawyer who escaped house arrest and caused a diplomatic crisis between China and the US by taking refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing in 2012, accused the Obama administration and Mrs Clinton of “giving in” to Chinese negotiators.

The blind lawyer, who was eventually allowed to go to the US to study, made the claims in a damning new memoir that is likely to stir controversy over Mrs Clinton’s record at the State Department as she prepares for a potential presidential run next year.

The rescue of the 43-year-old “barefoot lawyer” featured prominently in her manifesto-memoir, Hard Choices, as a triumph of white-knuckle diplomacy that also respected Mr Chen’s individual rights and wishes.

Mrs Clinton wrote that “we had done what Chen said he wanted every step of the way”, echoing her public remarks in Beijing at the time that “all of our efforts with Mr Chen have been guided by his choices and our values”.

But Mr Chen, while grateful for being given refuge first at the embassy and later in the US, directly contradicted her in his 322-page memoir The Barefoot Lawyer, a copy of which has been seen by The Daily Telegraph.

Far from having his wishes respected, he described how he was relentlessly pressured to leave the embassy for a Beijing hospital and forced to accept an “absurdly inadequate” deal on pain of the Chinese government accusing him of treason.

“What troubled me most at the time was this: When negotiating with a government run by hooligans, the country that most consistently advocated for democracy, freedom, and universal human rights had simply given in,” he wrote.

Mr Chen, a self-taught lawyer from Shandong province who has been blind since infancy, described how the elation of reaching the embassy on April 26, 2012, was soon overtaken by the “colder, clearer realities” of two great powers reaching a face-saving deal.

After his escape from house arrest in his village of Dongshigu under the noses of scores of locally hired guards — described in detail at the start of the book — Mr Chen said he hoped the US would be able to negotiate for him to work and write freely in China.

But as pressure mounted on him to leave the embassy, Mr Chen described the “disappointment and despair” of having to accept a deal that he felt offered no security to himself or his family and would not stop the Chinese from again restricting his freedoms.

“I hadn’t expected so many people on both sides would be working so hard to get me to leave, without guaranteeing my rights or my family’s safety,” he wrote. “No one seemed to be putting pressure on the Chinese Communist Party; instead, they were dumping shipping containers of weight on to my shoulders to get me to do their bidding.”

In the end, Mr Chen, who made his name helping women abused under China’s one-child policy and spent more than six years in various forms of detention as a result of his work, said he felt he had no choice but to leave the safety of the embassy compound.

He went to the hospital but the deal to allow him to study at a Chinese university rapidly unravelled. He said he felt the “noose” of security tightening back around him and felt suddenly abandoned by the US Embassy, which initially did not answer the phones.

It was then that Mr Chen publicly appealed to be allowed to go to the US, memorably speaking live via mobile phone to a specially convened congressional hearing in Washington, saying he no longer felt safe.

In his book, he singled out committee chairman Chris Smith and several other congressional leaders for proving to be “principled and fearless friends of the Chinese people” — in implicit contrast to Mrs Clinton and the White House. Three years after leaving China, Mr Chen lives in Washington with his wife and two children and works as a fellow in human rights at the Witherspoon Institute, a Princeton-based think-tank. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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