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April 29th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Last Sunday night, the sightless Mr Chen reportedly scaled a wall of his back yard and then walked across country to a prearranged meeting with an accomplice who drove him several hours to Beijing. The well-known human rights activist Hu Jia confirmed that Mr Chen is in the American embassy – which declines to discuss Mr Chen’s whereabouts.
Mr Hu, who has already served three and half years for “subversion” is reportedly now under house arrest.
After his arrival in Beijing, Mr Chen appealed by video to China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, to direct an investigation into “who ordered 70 to 80 county public security and party and administrative officials to my home to loot and beat and harm us without any legal procedure, without even one person wearing a uniform.”
He continued: “Who made the decision of refusal of medical treatment after injury from the beating, and that this be handled without accordance with the law? What happened is extremely cruel and inhumane and harms the image of the Party. More than a dozen men broke into my house… They pushed my wife down on the floor, covered her with a quilt, and beat and kicked her for several hours. They also beat me up violently.”
Although the central authorities have issued no confirmation that Mr Chen has escaped, the entire affair has spread through China’s overheated blogosphere and into the international press. If he is being harboured in the US embassy, Mrs Clinton will be confronted in Beijing with demands that Mr Chen be handed over to the police.
Not since the Fang Lizhi affair in 1989 has there been the potential for such a standoff between Washington and Beijing. Fang, an astrophysicist who has just died, was China’s most internationally celebrated dissident when, just after the June 4, 1989 killings in Tiananmen, he and his scientist wife, Li Shuxian, were named as the country’s numbers one and two “most wanted.”
After sheltering in the American embassy for 13 months they were allowed to leave China after a Japanese and British-brokered deal whereby the couple went first to Cambridge University, and only after six months to the US.
The Clinton visit would have been fraught enough, with Sino-US wranglings over recent American moves to establish a military base in Australia in response to China’s moves to increase influence over the South China Sea and beyond.
Such meetings normally are held “behind the screen” as Beijing says, to avoid unpleasant statements in public. But in the case of Chen Guangcheng, Mrs Clinton, who has openly condemned Beijing’s inaction over Syria, will not hide behind diplomatic niceties like “full and frank exchanges”.
Beijing is already contorted by what it likes least: public scrutiny of the Party’s traditional self-cannibalisation before leadership changes. Later this year, a new Politburo Standing Committee will be named to run the country. It may have seven rather than nine members.
The country’s security apparatus and other administrative matters are said to be under review. Into this vortex has plummeted Politburo member Bo Xilai, son of one of the venerated “Eight Party Elders”; one of the country’s top leaders, Bo was tipped to rise to the Standing Committee.
He and his wife have now been formally accused of vast corruption and possible complicity in the alleged murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood.
Hillary Clinton is used to the pressure cooker but this week’s venture into what some may call the Beijing Spring will test all her powers.
Jonathan Mirsky is a former East Asia editor of The Times. In 1990 he was named British Editors’ International Reporter of the Year for his reporting of China.
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