Even in Slave China, there is hope.

From Washington's other newspaper (via Yahoo!News and The Birmingham News) comes the story of a better man than me risking his life to defy the slave holders and stop their murderous reign of terror.


A crowd of disheveled villagers was waiting when Chen Guangcheng stepped out of the car. More women than men among them, a mix of desperation and hope on their faces, they ushered him into a nearby house. One after another, they told him about the city's campaign against "unplanned births."

Since March, the farmers said, local authorities had been raiding the homes of families with two children and demanding at least one parent be sterilized. Women pregnant with a third child were forced to have abortions. And if people tried to hide, the officials jailed their relatives and neighbors, beating them and holding them hostage until the fugitives turned themselves in.

Chen, 34, a slender man wearing dark sunglasses, held out a digital voice recorder and listened intently. Blind since birth, he couldn't see the tears of the women forced to terminate pregnancies seven or eight months along, or the blank stares of the men who said they submitted to vasectomies to save family members from torture. But he could hear the pain and anger in their voices.

For weeks, Chen has been collecting testimony about the population-control abuses in this city of 10 million, located about 400 miles southeast of Beijing, beginning in his own village in the rural suburbs, then traveling from one community to the next. Now he is preparing an unlikely challenge to the crackdown: a class-action lawsuit.

"What these officials are doing is completely illegal," Chen said. "They've committed widespread violations of citizens' basic rights, and they should be held responsible."

It might appear a quixotic crusade - a blind peasant with limited legal training taking on the Communist Party's one-child policy, which has long been considered a pillar of the nation's economic development strategy and off-limits to public debate. But the Linyi case marks a legal milestone in challenging the coercive measures used for decades to limit population growth in China.

While there have been scattered cases of individuals suing family planning officials, legal scholars say the Linyi farmers appear to be the first to band together and challenge the state's power to compel people to undergo sterilization or abort a pregnancy since the enactment of a 2002 law guaranteeing citizens an "informed choice" in such matters.

Over the years, Chen earned a reputation as someone who understood the law - and would stand up to the government.

In 1996, he had traveled to Beijing with a complaint about his family's taxes. He won a refund and admission to a university to study acupuncture and massage, the only higher education courses available to the blind in China. He took law classes on the side, and then began campaigning for the rights of the disabled and farmers.

When neighbors told him about the family planning abuses, he proposed a lawsuit. Word spread quickly, and Chen emerged as the leader of the battle against the forced abortion and sterilization campaign.

Liu Chuanyu, a Linyi family planning official reached by phone, denied knowledge of the abuses. "All of our work is done according to national policy and the demands of upper-level officials," he said.

But Yu Xuejin, a senior official with the national family planning commission in Beijing, said his office had received complaints about abuses in Linyi and asked provincial authorities to investigate. He said the practices described by the farmers were "definitely illegal."

But back in Linyi, Chen said local officials have visited him three times and urged him to persuade the farmers to drop the lawsuit. He said one warned him that if any officials were fired because of his lawsuit, "they might try to take revenge."

But Chen said he wasn't backing down. "If you've violated the law, you must take responsibility," he said. "If we withdraw the lawsuit, then they'll just violate the law again next time."

Amen to that, Brother.

Bless and protect him, Lord.He'sgonna need it.