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Chinese human rights lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng was released from a Beijing hospital yesterday after receiving treatment for injuries he sustained while escaping house arrest more than a week ago. Chen had escaped to seek medical and diplomatic assistance from the United States embassy, after his family and he had endured abuse from Chinese authorities at their home during his house arrest sentence since 2010. Chen’s case has received international attention as his stay at the US embassy sparked diplomatic tensions between China and the United States, leading to talks between officials of both nations last week. The talks yielded an agreement from the Chinese government to abstain from reprisals against Chen. Now, however, Chen has claimed that China has gone back on its end of the deal – the activist has claimed that all he wants to do is leave China with his family, going as far as to say “[m]y fervent hope is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S. on Hillary Clinton’s plane.” US Secretary of State Clinton has been in China this week and finds herself at the center of the conflicting aims of appeasing relations with China while maintaining a commitment to human rights in China.

Chen has been fighting for many years to expose the coercive population control practices of the Chinese government on its citizens under the One-child Program. The program was founded in 1978 to alleviate social, economic, and environmental problems affecting China. A 2001 report found that quotas of 20,000 abortions and sterilizations were set by the government for a county in Guangdong Province in one year due to reported disregard of the one-child policy. Such coercive family planning methods go against the government’s stated principles, and yet, the Chinese government has shown reluctance in investigating reports of abuses. In 2005, Chen decide to do his own investigations into the matter, leading him to file a class-action lawsuit one year later against a city in another province – Shandong – for forced abortions and sterilizations. Shortly thereafter, Chen was imprisoned but later released to serve out his sentence under house arrest.*

GUEST: Jianying Zha, author of Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China, her earlier books include China Pop (in English), and the award-winning book The Eighties (in Chinese) a cultural retrospective of the 1980s in China. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and various Chinese publications, and spends her time between New York and Beijing.