New York Times on China and Chen Guangcheng

Published 20 July: "Advocate for China’s Weak Runs Afoul of the Powerful". BEIJING, July 19 — Only a few years ago, Chen Guangcheng, a blind man who taught himself the law, was hailed as a champion of peasant rights who symbolized China’s growing embrace of legal norms. Mr. Chen helped other people with disabilities avoid illegal fees and taxes. He forced a paper mill to stop spewing toxic chemicals into his village’s river. The authorities in his home province, Shandong, considered him a propaganda coup and broadcast clips from his wedding ceremony on television. All that changed last year, when he organized a rare class-action lawsuit against the local government for forcing peasants to have late-term abortions and be sterilized. Mr. Chen, 35, is now a symbol of something else: the tendency of Communist Party officials to use legal pretexts to crush dissent. On Thursday a court in Yinan County of Shandong Province is to hear charges that Mr. Chen destroyed public property and gathered a crowd to block traffic. His lawyers argue that he would have had trouble committing those crimes even if he could see. At the time they were said to have occurred, he was being guarded day and night by a team of local officials. His case is typical of efforts to punish lawyers, journalists and participants in environmental, health and religious groups who expose abuses or organize people in a manner officials consider threatening. Like Mr. Chen, they are often accused of fraud, illicit business practices or leaking state secrets, charges that do not reflect the political nature of their offenses....