The Chen Guangcheng Imbroglio

Chen Guangcheng, the erstwhile Chinese dissident is back in the news. Now he's accusing NYU of reneging on the fellowship he received after he defected to the US. According to Chen, NYU caved to Chinese pressure and rescinded his all expenses paid sojourn at the University. Of course NYU denies the allegation stating that the appointment was for one year only and that there had never been any expectation of its renewal.

Chen is what we would consider a gadfly here in the US. Now, I have nothing against gadflies, some of my heroes are or have been gadflies. But gadflies, by their very nature are annoying. They are obsessive compulsives and will not give up no matter what the consequences of their actions. A local gadfly in Santa Cruz who I greatly admire, Robert Norse, is an advocate for the vagrant population of Santa Cruz, and has been harassed, persecuted and prosecuted by the local power structure for decades. Most recently he was falsely charged, along with 10 “co-conspirators,” with felony conspiracy to trespass and vandalize an abandoned bank building that was occupied by protesters during the height of the Occupy movement in Santa Cruz a year and a half ago. The charges against Norse and seven others were dropped for lack of evidence, a clear indication that he and the others were targeted for political retaliation as they were all visible leaders and members of Occupy Santa Cruz.

The point being that persistently visible and vociferous critics of government social policy and advocates for the down-trodden and abused meet with repression both here and abroad, in the US as in China. If I was Chinese I probably would be sympathetic towards Chen just as I am a supporter of Robert Norse. But many people, actually the overwhelming majority of Santa Cruzans, even some on the left, consider Norse to be a trouble-maker, seeking self-aggrandizement. I know that many Chinese think of Chen in the same way.

So why am I not on the band-wagon supporting Chen as a Human Rights champion and lambasting China for how they treated him? The reason is that the whole imbroglio is being used to stigmatize China as a serial human rights abuser and to stir up anti-China hysteria. While it would be nice to live in a perfect world where everybody acts in an angelic fashion, that is not the way things actually work. Gadflies such as Chen and Norse are unfortunately persecuted here, there and everywhere. And some of it of course is of their own doing, they choose to be gadflies and place themselves in harm's way by challenging the powers that be. But we do not make these instances of persecution of gadflies into major breaches of human rights domestically. The ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and human rights crusaders such as Richard Gere and Desmond Tutu have not taken up the cause of Robert Norse or other persecuted gadflies here in the US. Why not? Why haven't they inflated these local instances of persecution into major human rights issues here in the US? The only conclusion to be reached is that the whole human rights issue is a cynical attempt to stigmatize China. To make China out to be a sinister menace that must to chastised and opposed for its barbaric political repression. In actual fact, compared to many of our once and future allies throughout the world, China does not have death squads to eliminate its opposition, does not engage in political assassination of its critics and does not send aerial drones across international borders to remotely bomb its adversaries. So, no matter how one may view Chen on a personal level, his plight has been hypocritically and cynically used to further an anti-China agenda.