Chen Guangcheng was born into a poor family on November 12, 1971 in China’s Shandong Province. As an infant, Chen suffered a fever that left him permanently blind. Chen developed a keen interest in legal practice. Teaching himself the law by studying legal texts and auditing various courses, Chen assisted people in his village with legal matters. In 2003, he married an English teacher and the couple had two children. Chen’s activism began in 1996 when he petitioned the central government in Beijing over taxes that were improperly levied against his family. According to Chinese law, families with disabled persons receive tax exemptions that were not being granted to Chen. The campaign was successful and Chen began advocating for people with disabilities who had similar grievances with the government. Soon, he gained notoriety as a prominent activist for the disabled in China. In 2005, Chen spent months investigating reports of forced abortions and sterilization being carried out by Chinese authorities to enforce the country’s one child policy, officially known as the Family Planning Policy. This law was enacted in 1978 and restricts most urban couples to a single child. When his investigation was complete, Chen filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the women he interviewed against the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China’s office in the city of Linyi. This was the first suit of its kind challenging the implementation of the one child policy. The case was rejected and the local government retaliated by placing Chen in de facto house arrest. In 2006, Chen was formally tried and charged with instigating destruction of public property and disturbing the peace , which Chen decried as baseless given his house arrest and constant surveillance by the police. He was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. After the proceedings, Amnesty International declared Chen a prisoner of conscience. Chen was released from prison in 2010 only to once again be placed under house arrest by local authorities. His house was routinely monitored by security agents who prevented anyone from entering or exiting. Chen and his family were subject to constant harassment and abuse during this period. Chen escaped from house arrest in April 2012 and fled to Beijing, where he sought refuge at the United States Embassy. In May 2012, Chen left the embassy after several weeks of negotiations, during which the Chinese government provided assurances that it would release the dissident from house arrest and investigate the actions taken against Chen by Shandong provincial authorities. Soon after leaving the embassy, Chen learned that his family had received numerous threats and feared the government would break its promises. He decided to leave China with his family and was offered a visiting scholar position by New York University. Chen accepted and arrived in New York with his family on May 19, 2012. He continues his work from the United States, advocating for human rights and democratic reform in China.

As I left Shandong [in 2012], the local Chinese communist leader gathered a big group of gangsters [Shandong is Chen’s home province in Eastern China] with weapons, and at around midnight, jumped the walls of my nephew Chen Kegui’s house. They searched all the rooms to rob them and then beat up anybody they saw. A person with a club tried to hit Chen Kegui’s head and when Chen got out of the way it hit the television instead and broke it. Another group of these gangsters would enter his mother’s room and beat up his mother. When Kegui heard his mother screaming he wanted to go out and see her, but the goons would stop him and forbid him from leaving the room. They repeatedly beat up Chen Kegui with clubs, causing many severe injuries to his head, neck and entire body. I was told he was left bleeding for over three hours. So Chen Kegui realized he was going to be beaten to death and he took a knife from the kitchen to protect himself. At this time the second person in charge, also a Communist Party leader, Zhang Jian, he told the gangsters to “control him” and they rushed up on him and Chen was forced to defend himself and cut a few gangsters. However, they were all minor injuries. But the Chinese Communist Party charged Chen Kegui with “attempted murder” and arrested him. Based on criminal laws in China, home invasion and robbery carry a minimum sentence of 10 years in jail but if the Chinese communists are doing this [as they did in Chen Kegui’s house] then the law doesn’t apply to them. Chen Kegui even reported the incident to the police, but the police refused to accept his case. Later, the Chinese communist leaders instructed the police and other government workers to return to Chen’s [Kegui’s] home twice more to rob and beat him. This happened all the while Chen Kegui’s child has a high fever, forty degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Chen Kegui’s mother is feeding Chinese medicine to the child from a bowl, the gangsters rushed in and knocked the bowl of medicine to the ground. They start grabbing her hair -- Chen Kegui’s mother -- and drop her to the ground and start beating her during the ordeal Chen’s mother can’t take it and started to scream: “Help!” but these communist goons beat and taunted her “Keep Screaming!”, “Keep Screaming!” and this beating lasted well over twenty minutes. These goons would then not leave, but stayed in the home, slept on the couch or in their beds and this lasted for many days. At the same time they forbade Chen Kegui’s parents from leaving the house. When they first beat Chen Kegui, they also took his father back to the police station and conducted more than fifty hours of physical beatings on him there. So at this moment the Chinese Communist Party had turned into a bunch of criminals. After that day they used government funds to buy a bunch of video cameras and planted these cameras all over his [Chen Kegui’s] home. At night, when Chen’s [Kegui] mother was beaten, many neighbors heard her cry for help. Some of them got up and wanted to go to Chen’s [Kegui] house to see what was happening, but they found that all the roads leading up to Chen’s [Kegui] home were patrolled by people holding clubs. And they forbade these people [Chen Kegui’s neighbors] from getting close. The clubs were recognized as the ones purchased in volume by the Chinese Communist Party. So under these circumstances, the Chinese communists’ people rushed in to beat and steal. None of them have been prosecuted, but Chen Kegui was arrested because he wanted to protect his mother.