标题: China Real Time Interviews Chen Guangchen [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 3-18-2015 08:31 标题: China Real Time Interviews Chen Guangchen 本帖最后由 choi 于 3-18-2015 08:41 编辑
Josh Chin, ‘The Barefoot Lawyer’: Q&A With Blind Chinese Activist Chen Guangcheng. China Real Time, Mar 18, 2015.
wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/03/18/the-barefoot-lawyer-qa-with-blind-chinese-activist-chen-guangcheng/
three consecutive paragraphs:
(a) Q: "You made it to Beijing, and after some negotiation and a car chase, you got it into the US embassy. You write that once you arrived, the US government kept changing its position. What kind of impact did that experience have on your view of the U.S.?
A: "When I first got to the embassy, they were very, very good to me. You could tell the staff members were all excited. They thought they were doing something important and right. But not too long after I arrived, there was meeting, I think in the White House, and that’s when things started to change. After another meeting three days later, the situation completely switched and the new order was to get me out of the embassy as quickly as possible to avoid have a bad influence on relations with the Communist Party. Prior to that I believed deeply and without question in the US as a defender of democracy and human rights. Of course, afterwards I realized politicians don’t always think from the standpoint of the people. But if you look around the world, even though the US is sometimes weak in the face of dictators, it’s still the best defender of freedom there is.
(b) Q: "In your book, you write that U.S. officials cared too much about giving China face. Do you think the US is too quick to believe in the concept of face?
A: "I think they’ve been fooled. I told officials inside the embassy, “If the Communist Party didn’t want to lose face, it wouldn’t do so many awful things.” All this talk about face is a trick to manipulate foreign governments — or put it another way, it gives Western government officials an excuse when they need to go back home and explain things to their own people. Maybe the US realized that face was meaningless at the time, but they didn’t want to anger the party. What can you do? Just pretend that the fake is what’s real.
(c) Q: "You left the embassy and went to the hospital, where you reunited with your wife and children. After some tense moments and a lot of negotiation, you all were able to go to the US together. The end result was – if not ideal – about as good as you could have hoped for, no?
A: "That’s right. When I was in the embassy, if I had said then that I wanted to go to the US, the Chinese government probably would have let me go alone but taken my family hostage. That was something I couldn’t accept. The party was making all kinds of unreasonable demands. I refused them. After a while they started getting nervous, and the embassy people told them I didn’t trust them because they hadn’t taken any concrete steps to make me believe they were genuine. That’s when the Foreign Ministry brought up the idea of bringing my family to Beijing.
My comment: One may want to read the rest of the interview AFTER the quotation, but not before (about childhood etc)