This book won’t help Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Its author, Chen Guangcheng, is the blind Chinese human-rights lawyer who in April 2012 escaped rural house arrest and sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The ensuing diplomatic tussle over his fate was a high drama that Mrs. Clinton touts as an accomplishment of her tenure as secretary of state. It reminded her of the “responsibility to make sure our country remains the beacon for dissidents and dreamers all over the world,” she wrote in “Hard Choices” (2014), and so she and her staff did “what Chen said he wanted every step of the way.”

That’s...