WSJ’s Review on Chen Guangcheng’s Book

choi

David Feith, Hillary Can't Delete This. As Secretary of State, Clinton says she stopped at nothing to get a blind dissident out of China. That's not what he remembers. Wall Street Journal, Mar 16, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... angcheng-1426455899
(boojkreview on Chen Guangcheng, The Barefoot Doctor. A blind man's fight for justice and freedom in China. Henry Holt, 2015)

Quote:

(a) “'Their [Chen's clients'] stories confirmed my belief that the Cultural Revolution has never ended—it has simply metastasized,' Mr Chen writes.

(b) "after [Chen's] agreeing under US pressure to leave the embassy for a state-run hospital, he changed his mind and decided that he wanted to leave China with his family. He hoped for asylum in the US—a request he publicized from his hospital bed upon receiving a phone call from a US-based Chinese activist participating in an emergency congressional hearing on the case. * * *

"By then Mrs Clinton was in Beijing for the bilateral summit, and within a day US diplomats secured China’s agreement to let Mr Chen emigrate—an outcome he attributes not to the secretary of state but to 'enormous pressure from Congress and the American public.' Republican Chris Smith, Democrat Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers 'proved to be principled and fearless friends of the Chinese people,' he writes, and 'the voice of the American people made itself strongly felt at the bargaining table.' Two weeks later, with his wife and two children, Mr Chen was on a flight to the US.

"Kurt Campbell, the State Department’s top Asia hand and lead negotiator during the affair, doesn’t dispute the dissident’s version of events, diplomatically telling Foreign Policy magazine last month, 'I respect Chen’s perspective and his many sacrifices.'

Note:
(a) "in 1989, at age 17, when his [Chen's] family learned of a new school for the blind some 40 miles away. Over the next 12 years he advanced from primary school through the Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine 南京中医药大学 [1954- ]"
(b) "How a blind man escaped such a lockdown alone and on foot, navigating toward a neighboring village via smells and 'a kind of batlike echolocation,' is an amazing tale."

I am unsure whether "lockdown" is correct here. Usually it is used in prison (when prison guards search for contrabands or an assailant when a prisoner was assaulted*) or in school after gunfire erupted (as in Virginia Tech).
(i) lockdown
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockdown
(ii) lockdown (n): "from 1940s in various mechanical senses, from lock (v) + down (adv). Prison sense is by 1975, American English"
Online Etymology Dictionary
www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lockdown

* In Massachusetts, there are county jails and state prisons--county runs a jail (official name: house of correction) and the state runs prisons (official name of a prison is Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI)). A prison is for more serious crime and harder-to-rehabilitate inmates. When I was in jail, three inmates beat up a new arrival, by ambushing the latter in bathroom, covered him with a bed sheet (so that the victim could not identify assailants) and beat him up. They claimed that the victim was former boyfriend of one inmate's sister who had been abused domestically. The guards--a guard's official title is a corrections officer--imposed lockdown, examined the knuckles 手指關節 of every inmate on that floor but failed to find assailants. Of course guard did not explain and inmates did not know what was going on. Only later did word of mouth spread: knuckles of an assailant was supposed to be swollen (recall Newton's third law of motion: action and reaction).

(c) Isaac Stone Fish, Chinese Dissident Accuses Top US Diplomat of Lying. Foreign Policy, Feb 25, 2015
foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/25/chen_guangcheng_crisis_kurt_campbell_lies/
("Campbell didn’t keep his promise to go to rural China and bring Chen’s family to Beijing. Instead, it was Chinese officials who did so, causing Chen to fear for their safety. The Americans, Chen writes, “relinquished control of the situation.” Furious, Chen instead made a different statement, and complained that US officials abandoned him * * * Chen, however, barely mentions Clinton in his book. * * * it’s Campbell who comes off especially poorly. * * * Chen writes that Campbell, exhausted by the pressure, 'shed tears before storming out of the [likely embassy, or hospital] room”)