Pod Save the World - Dissident at the Doorstep Episode 6: The Great Moving Right Show

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

Almost one year after arriving in the US, the New York Post publishes a story suggesting NYU is trying to sever ties with Guangcheng. Guangcheng alleges the university is bowing to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. Guangcheng’s hosts at NYU accuse right wing political forces of misleading him. Things get very messy. Where Guangcheng lands next sets him on a path that eventually leads to throwing his support behind Trump for reelection in 2020.

If you like Dissident at the Doorstep and want ad-free episodes and exclusive content from the show, join Friends of the Pod, Crooked's new subscription community at crooked.com slash friends. Goods your Shenzaiwa Tiagawesi. I'm going to ask him the first question, which is he's already been here almost five months. And what does he think about all this? This is Jerry Cohen, introducing Guangcheng in early, October 2012, just weeks after the drama in Washington, D.C. The talk proceeded without a hitch. Guangcheng thanked NYU for the opportunity to study there,

and then he talked about his plans for studying the law. If you were in the audience, you wouldn't have a clue how bad things had gotten over the past few months, that Guangcheng had been growing deep. tired of Jerry's guidance. Or that at D.C.'s Union Station, he tried to escape from the translator NYU assigned to him. None of this was evident that day. Zichu using law to file in fact,

to do the fair unlawful to keep the same power. In fact, through the rest of the fall and into the spring, things quieted down. Guangcheng continued to study law. He worked more on his memoir. But then, in June, 2013, all those early tensions bubbled up again, this time spilling over in a very public manner. Right around the first anniversary of Guangcheng's arrival in New York,

the New York Post published a story suggesting the university was pushing him out. The anonymous sources it cited said that NYU had been pressured by the Chinese government. After the post article was published, Guangcheng released his own statement. He reiterated what the post had claimed, writing that, as early as August and September, the Chinese communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University. So much so that after we had been in the United States, just three or four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us. The post article, together with this statement from Guangcheng,

kicked up what was basically a shitstorm in the press. So you may have read in the tabloids over the weekend that NYU is in the process of kicking out Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangchun. Chen says NYU is pushing him out because of the, quote, unrelenting pressure of the Chinese Communist Party. But NYU has hit back, saying they are puzzled and saddened by Chen's fictional allegations. Jerry was traveling in China when the story broke. Despite the 12-hour time's own difference, he called in to the Brian Lerer's show to refute the allegations. So the way this is being reported makes it sound like the university is throwing Chen and his family out on the street.

what's your version of what's going on here. That's just nonsense. If I give you a fellowship for a year and I spend several hundred thousand dollars on you and you're told it's only for a year and you're given seven or eight months notice, for sure that it's only a year. Am I throwing you out on the street? Come on, it's just silly. Well, this is what he says.

So how would he have misunderstood it so much? Well, I don't know. He's in the hands of people who have. helped him twist things in a way that's sad and unfortunate. When Jerry says Guangcheng had fallen into the hands of people who helped twist things, he was talking about one person in particular, Pastor Bob Fu. And so was Bob's side of the story that we wanted to hear. I'm Colin Jones.

I'm Alison Clayman, and this is episode six of dissident at the doorstep. When Guangchung arrived in the U.S., he was brought into a whole ecosystem of American liberals. While he was hosted at NYU, he was funded by George Soros, looked out for it by Jerry, and celebrated by Hollywood celebrities and major human rights organizations. Nowadays, 10 years later, Guangcheng is no longer on speaking terms with almost any of these people, and his livelihood and his social world

are almost entirely provided by conservatives. A lot of how Guangcheng got from one place to the other has to do with this place, Midland, Texas, home-based to Bob, for the past 20 years, and the site of his non-profit, China Aid. Thank you so much. Thank you. Humble office.

The building China Aid is housed in isn't much to look at. It's a one-story brick house painted a pale yellow color, sitting just off a fairly major road. But once you're through the door, you can see immediately that this office and Bob himself are incredibly well-connected. The walls of the foyer are covered in clippings of Bob and the local paper. Next to these are the front page of the Wall Street Journal with Bob and Congressman Chris Smith.

There's another picture of Bob with the Dalai Lama and a recent snapshot from China AIDS 20th anniversary gala where both Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick showed up. And then there are these two paintings in the corner, both portraits of Bob. Jonathan has introduced you, the ably version of Bob food, the beautified version of Bobbub.

Both paintings were done by George W. Bush. In the first painting, the one Bob calls the ugly version, our former president has captured Bob's likeness. But it also sort of looks like Bob's face is melting off. So Bush tried again. So I think he painted this first and maybe regretted it and said, okay, Bob, maybe this is not the most satisfactory version. Taking all this in, you can see why Jerry might have thought

that Bob's overtures to Guangcheng were pulled. politically motivated. The way Bob sees it, though, NYU was the source of the real conspiracy. In early summer 2013, he got a distressed call from Guangcheng. He said, well, I'm facing a homeless situation. NYU issued an ultimatum. By this day, you have to get out. According to Bob, Guangcheng's entire fellowship at NYU had been made possible by a corrupt bargain,

worked out between the CCP, the Obama administration, and the university. You know, Hillary Clinton directly communicated to take this hot potato to make sure there should be some agreement behind the scenes that, okay, we handed with this guy to you. You have to do something. The hot potato here is Guangcheng. What Bob's saying is that there was a tacit agreement not to let Guangcheng be too much of a thorn in China's side. after coming to the U.S. According to Bob, when Guangcheng didn't play ball,

NYU started looking for a way out. To do that, the university cut a three-year fellowship down to one. Bob says Guangcheng had seen the paperwork to prove it. On record, he said he saw the document, it's three years agreement in NYU. And yet NYU said, oh no, it's from the very beginning is one year. And the agreement, in written forms, was in his pocket, in his jacket, but it was mysteriously taken away, lost.

We asked Guangcheng about this. He confirmed what Bob said, but added some important details. According to Guangcheng, back when he was inside the U.S. embassy in Beijing, the first proposal the Americans approached China with was a three-year fellowship at NYU. China rejected this, and the length of his offer was shortened to a single year. But Guangcheng always understood that as a provisional agreement. When he first arrived in New York, it seemed as if he might be able to stay longer. And then that one year became a very firm deadline. Everyone we spoke with from NYU was adamant that Guangcheng's fellowship was only supposed to last one year. Here's Guangzhou's translator, Maddie Bikink.

I knew that the fellowship was going to be for one year because I had literally told him that within about two weeks of his rival of the United States and that it was constantly part of the process. Maddie says she even helped Guangcheng and his family arranged for long-term visas once they arrived in New York. She did this, she says, because the original visas, NYU sponsored, were only good for a year. There's evidence to back up what Maddie's saying. In early May, 2012, while Guangcheng was being treated at Chow Yang Hospital, and the deal that would bring him to New York was still being hashed out. Jerry spoke with PBS news hours, Ray Suarez. You expect your friend to return to China when he's done.

We would be delighted to have him come. The idea would be they could come for up to a year. And at that point, he'll be more comfortable with himself. He'll be more adjusted to freedom. And he'll have to decide what next. So even before Guangcheng had left China, Jerry was saying publicly that Guangcheng would be at NYU for one year at most. But for Bob and for Guangcheng, the details of the length of the fellowship

are just part of what they see as the bigger picture, which is that Jerry and NYU had deeply conflicted interests. For starters, there was NYU's new Shanghai campus. Opening in 2012, the same year Guangcheng arrived in the U.S., NYU Shanghai was the first time in American Research University had partnered with the Chinese government to build a degree-granting school in China. NYU's then-president John Sexton saw NYU Shanghai as a key step in globalizing the university.

But for Guangcheng and Bob, the Shanghai campus gave the Chinese government leverage to make things hard for Guangcheng in New York. The CCP was applying pressure. That's, of course, obvious. Guangcheng believes that China's ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Zhang Yesway, had personally put pressure on NYU's leadership to cancel his fellowship. He also mentioned a member of NYU's Board of Trustees, a construction mogul named Wang Wenliang. In 2009, Wang's company donated money to launch NYU's U.S.-China Center. Then, in the spring of 2012, right as the deal to host Guangchung was being finalized, Wang pledged another $25 million to the university.

Guangcheng claims this money was an indirect payment from the CCP to NYU, essentially a bribe to convince the university to cut ties with Guangcheng. How could it have been a personal donation? Look at how Wang Wenliang exploits his workers, how he exploits those who work for him. Is he a generous man? Could he donate so much money all at once? The basic premise that Guangcheng and Bob are arguing is correct.

NYU, like many American universities, is heavily reliant on private donors. Unlike most other universities, it has a direct relationship with the Chinese government. government. These interests shaped the university's policies. But Bob and Guangcheng claimed something more specific happened, that NYU had kicked out Guangchung due to Chinese pressure. So I asked Bob how such a pressure campaign would actually work, just on a practical level. Do you think it was, so was it, you think pressure on like John Sexton, the then president of NYU over NYU Shanghai,

or do you think it was at a government level? I have no direct evidence. But, you know, we can only tell from the precedence, from the patterns of the Communist Party's behavior, there's no surprise trying to hold some cars, right? In other words, Bob doesn't need proof that the CCP used its power to pressure NYU. It's enough to know that the CCP had tried to influence American universities before. In an NYU's case, it had the ability to do so. The university is fundamentally conflicted, and, For Bob and Guangcheng, I think that means it's fundamentally corrupt.

But this is all just the start of making a case for what Bob and Guangcheng claimed happen. It doesn't demonstrate anything more than plausibility. We know of no evidence that NYU decided to end Guangcheng's fellowship prematurely. We've also seen no evidence that the university's interests in China affected any decisions it made concerning Guangzhou. We made several attempts to schedule an interview with someone from NYU, but they failed to follow up on a request. What was certain was that Guangcheng's public statement and the press that followed it

transformed the relationship between NYU and Bob. While it had never been great exactly, after that spring, the knives came out. Jerry was quoted and accusing my wife as a dirty spy or, you know, tried to spy Chen Guangcheng. When Bob's wife Heidi first met with Guangcheng just after he'd arrived in the U.S., she'd gifted him an iPad. NYU staff later scanned the device to make sure it was safe. And when they did that, they discovered software on it that would allow someone to track Guangcheng's movements and communications. NYU kept the iPad and then sat on these findings for almost a year.

Then, shortly after Guangcheng accused NYU of kicking him out, Jerry told a Reuters reporter that people who were supposedly out there to help Guangcheng had given him a, quote, Trojan horse. This would be a serious charge under any circumstances. But within the community of Chinese exiles, where double agents and informants are a constant concern, it had an especially sharp edge. And it turned out to be false.

I was glad that NYU vice president later on apologized, and we kind of reach what do you call the legal term, basically. Settlement? Yeah, settlement. The supposed spyware that NYU discovered, It turned out to be run-of-the-mill stuff, geo-tracking and remote backups, which are part of Apple's operating system. NYU and Jerry jointly issued a public retraction saying they had misunderstood the technology.

Things were a mess. And Guangcheng still needed a place to go next. That's after the break. While the dispute between Guangcheng and NYU played out in public through the summer of 2013, behind the scenes, Jerry continued to use his connections. to try to help Guangchung find a new academic home. It was around that time that Martin Flaherty says he got a call from someone at the State Department.

Martin is a professor of international human rights at Fordham Law School. I think my initial approach was by Mike Posner, who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department. And so Mike approached me and said that Chen's time at NYU was coming to a close and that he needed, you know, another institutional home.

Martin is also the co-director of Fordham's Lightner Center, which focuses on human rights law. It was there, Martin says, that Mike Posner thought Guangchung could land. We reached out to Mike for comment. He did not respond. And I said immediately, absolutely, we would love to host him. We thought it would be, to speak selfishly, really good for our program, you know,

to have one of the most prominent human rights advocates with us. The one caveat I told Mike was we didn't have any money. When Guangcheng said the Obama administration was trying to sabotage his NYU fellowship, I was skeptical that anyone over there was still thinking about him. So I was surprised to learn that not only was Mike Posner, a high-ranking state department official, thinking about Guangcheng. He was trying to help Guangcheng line up a new gig. To fund the position, Jerry tapped a man named Andrew Duncan,

a private equity exec turned human rights advocate, film producer, and major China critic. Andrew Duncan was willing to sponsor this, and he had put up, or was willing to be committed $900,000 for three-year total, $300 a year, $250. Can you imagine that for Chun? An income of $250 and $50 a year for his assistant. And so Martin and his co-director at the Leitner Center started getting the paperwork together. And then one day, out of the blue, I recall getting an email, essentially saying that the law school cannot host Chen Guangcheng because of concerns expressed by the dean of the business school that this would adversely impact applications from China. And so we had to tell him.

that the deal was off. The email was from Fordham's president, Father Joseph McShane. It was almost exactly the kind of scenario that Guangchung and Bob believed happened at NYU, a major university refusing Guangchung a position there because of its financial ties to China. Except for what happened next. After being told that Guangcheng couldn't come to Fordham, Martin says his colleague fired back with a blistering email. That started with, dear Father McShane, you should be ashamed of yourself.

and basically said you are throwing under the bus, one of the most prominent human rights activists in the world. And oh, by the way, one of the issues that this person who you are rejecting was involved with was fighting forced abortions in China. That mattered to Fordham because it's a Jesuit school. Martin's colleague closed by saying that if Father McShane did not reconsider, she would go to the press and to Congress.

So, within 24 hours, we got a response. And the response was to renege on the reneging. And so it was, okay, he can come. With the deal back on, Martin started meeting regularly with Jerry and Guangcheng to work out the transition. They were having these meetings through June 2013 when Guangchung publicly accused NYU of bowing to Chinese pressure.

It was around that time that Martin remembers hearing some rumors. I think it was during some of those June meetings that we were getting wind of. there was, you know, what became a competing offer. And what did you know about that? What we started to hear was that the offer was a kind of consortium of politically conservative Catholic groups in the United States. Turns out Bob had been busy, too. While Jerry was trying to work out a deal for Guangcheng to stay in New York,

Bob had been working his own connections. So Guangchong faced a homeless situation, and he needs an academic kind of setting and institution. So Bob reached out to an old friend. Congressman Smith, who is a Catholic, of course, so he talked to Cardinal Dolan. That's Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York. Then Bob says they brought in another person, a professor at Princeton University named Robert George. Like many Americans, I couldn't help but admire the courage and the fortitude of this blind, largely self-educated lawyer, exposing the abuses, especially in the area of forced abortion of the Communist Party in China.

Robert is a legal scholar and philosopher. Far and away, his main focus is the United States. Even so, he says he had followed Guangcheng's story in the news, and when he got the call from Bob, he was shocked to hear that Guangcheng would be leaving NYU. What is there not the like about having him on your campus, having him on your staff? If you're poor and you can't afford the extra shekels,

because I can understand that. I don't think NYU's poor. Bob suggested to Robert that Guangchung could be placed at the Witherspoon Institute, the conservative think tank that Robert helped found. So when Bob called me and filled me in a bit more on the details and made it clear that NYU wasn't going to budge, well, when I heard all that, I thought, well, I'm going to leave this hero, this great champion of human rights.

We can't leave this guy out in the cold. Meanwhile, Martin was still working on a Fordham deal. He said that he understood Witherspoon as a competitor. During their meetings with Guangchung, Martin and Jerry brought this up. we started to raise, you know, for him, what would have been the pros and cons of going one place rather than the other. Can you kind of explain that conversation? Yeah, well, you know, for us, we thought that as deft and as insightful and as successful he was at navigating human rights work in China, he was really knew nothing about the political setting in the United States. Here's where we should say a couple words about the institute that Robert founded, Witherspoon.

Witherspoon has deep ties to the conservative wing of American Catholicism, with a president who has served as a national official for Opus Day, an international Catholic organization with a conservative interpretation of the church's mission. Witherspoon fellows have spoken out against pornography, divorce, and capital punishment, all in line with Catholic social teaching. The Institute has been particularly fervent in its advocacy for what it calls a, quote, historical understanding of marriage and human sexuality, unquote. In 2012, it funded a kind of nasty study with questionable methodology,

which concluded that children whose parents had had same-sex relationships were more likely to end up less educated, unemployed, and poor. And, of course, Witherspoon is adamantly pro-life. Martin worried that if Guangcheng partnered with conservative Catholics, it might limit his influence in what Martin calls the mainstream, human rights community. That's going to be human rights watch, human rights first, it's going to be the U.S. State Department, it's going to be most of the law school-based human rights programs.

In that mainstream community, human rights people promoted a fairly broad basket of rights, including reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. And then there was a right-wing side of human rights, which Martin says is primarily concerned with religious freedom and pro-life issues. With regard to China, there is, I'm happy to say, bipartisan support, but part of the bipartisan support on the sort of GOP side really focuses on two issues. Religious freedom, in particular religious freedom for Christians in China, and the opposition of forced abortion. We were trying to convey to him that if you throw in your lot with a group that is just concerned about those two issues, you are going to lose your voice in the mainstream human rights community in the United States.

Martin was very direct with Guangcheng. I mean, we actually put it to him. How can you pursue human rights with groups that oppose the human rights of groups like LGBTQ plus people? And that, I think, was my low point in dealing with him. He said, frankly, I don't care. Those aren't really human rights. I don't care about those people. Guangcheng says he does not remember having this conversation with,

Martin. But when we asked him about his views on gay rights, he told us he didn't want to talk about it. On his Twitter feed, he frequently retweets anti-trans stories and messages. Martin told us he thought the reason Witherspoon had any interest in Guangchang was because of his work against forced abortion in China. Someone we spoke with at NYU made a similar point. When I spoke with Robert George, I laid out their statement for him. You know, this is a pro-life anti-abortion instead, like think tank, and that Guangcheng was anti-abortion enough to be brought here. And that was the reason. And I just wouldn't want to know what you have to say to that.

Shame on whoever at NYU said that to you. They had every opportunity to keep Guangcheng. For reasons that are simply unfathomable to me, they cut him loose. When we learned about it, we immediately provide. He provided him with an institutional home. No conditions. Didn't say what he could or couldn't say about abortion or anything else. Just told him to continue to do the good work you were doing in informing the American people

in the broader world public about what is happening in China. And when we did that, people at NYU have the audacity to accuse us of cynicism. That is outrageous. shame on them. Robert and Witherspoon wanted to help Guangchung and his family, providing for him when NYU's support was coming to an end. But I don't necessarily think it's outrageous to notice that Guangcheng's work on forced abortion

made him a hero to a certain kind of American conservative. This had been happening since he arrived in the U.S. And I have a hard time identifying what other overlap there might be between Guangcheng's work and what the Witherspoon Institute does, which at the time had nothing to do with China at all. In the end, Witherspoon was the only option. The man who was supposed to fund Guangcheng's position at Fordham,

Andrew Duncan, backed out suddenly, and the whole deal collapsed. I spoke with Andrew on the phone and asked him for an interview. He declined. Here, though, is how Jerry remembers it. I think Andrew may have offended the Fordham people there was some failure to get along. In the meantime, then Chun starts denouncing NYU,

and at that point, Andrew, gave up. Whether Guangchung would have decided to go to Fordham or Witherspoon, there was ultimately no real choice. And in the fall of 2013, Witherspoon announced that a new fellow was coming to the institute, the first Chinese national that they had ever hosted. Guangchung never lived in Princeton. After New York, he and his family moved to the D.C. area,

and he set up an affiliation with the Catholic University of America. Witherspoon helped make the connection and continued to support him financially for a number of years. Even though Guangchung was now taking conservative money, he continued to heed Jerry Cohen's advice to avoid being branded as a partisan. For example, at the same time, he became a Witherspoon fellow. Guangcheng also accepted a position at the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice,

which is named after the former Democratic congressman, Tom Lantos. In this way, Guangcheng maintained an air of neutrality, staying out of the daily battles of U.S. politics for several years after his departure from NYU. Eventually, though, he would join the fray. Do you remember meeting him the day? Well, I remember meeting him. He had an office in the basement, and that sounds worse than it is. It's like the bottom floor of the main administrative building.

there's a lot of kind of centers have offices there. This is Bill Saunders, who you might remember helped us arrange an interview with Guangchung. He's Guangchung's closest colleague at Catholic. As Bill remembers it, he began working at Catholic in the summer of 2017, a little over three years after Guangcheng had struck up an affiliation with the university. I think Witherspoon was still supporting him, but he wasn't with Witherspoon. They would get grants to support him, but he was here. but he was a little bit, just to use an expression, like dying on the vine, he was kind of not present.

Bill had been hired on to set up a new center for human rights, as well as a master's program. He has a long track record in the field. In the 1990s, he joined with other Catholics to fly into Central Sudan, literally in the middle of a civil war, to bring humanitarian aid to an ethnic minority group hold up in the Nuba Mountains. Since the early 2000s, Bill has turned his focus to the United States. and especially to abortion. Before coming to Catholic, he served on an executive committee

at the Federalist Society, as senior counsel for Americans United for Life, and as senior vice president at the Family Research Council. In 2009, that group settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed that Bill had sexually harassed her. Bill says he doesn't know what the allegations there might have been, but if there were any allegations of sexual harassment

or otherwise against him, he denies them. At Catholic, Bill wanted to build a human rights program anchored in conservative Catholic social teaching. Central to that is the rights of the unborn. Because I think the central thing about human rights is the rights of humans. Whether it's a zygote or a five-year-old African boy, each one's a human being. Where Guangcheng fits in this world has been a little tough to figure out. He's not a Catholic, and he's not a Christian, but he's not an anti-Christian or an anti-anything.

Guangcheng is also not anti-abortion, though his views on abortion are not exactly pro-choice either. In any case, at Catholic, the idea has always been to find Guangcheng a role in the classroom. But almost 10 years since he arrived there, it's still very much a work in progress. Well, his academic roles are still being developed. We're actually talking about him teaching a series of classes in the spring to this internship program we have teaching people about how to do human rights. When asked what kind of things Guangcheng could teach, Bill gave us an example. Just the fundamental thing is, you know, you're under house arrest in your home, you know,

which means you're surrounded all the time. You have a cell phone, but the battery runs down. What are you going to do about it? Guangxen got a flashlight from the guards for some reason. He used the battery in the flashlight to charge the battery in the phone. and he contacted Bob Fu. I mean, that's the kind of thing that people need to understand because if you looked at that situation Guangcheng was in,

you would say it's hopeless. It ain't hopeless. It's never hopeless. That's a lovely sentiment. But having Guangcheng tell students about the ordeals of his incarceration once a semester isn't really a job, and it's not enough to keep him occupied.

It raised a question for us. What exactly has Guangcheng been up to at Catholic these past years? Finding an answer to that isn't straightforward. After all the attention and scrutiny, Guangcheng received during his first year in the U.S. For the next several years, public information about his life is a lot harder to come by. If you wanted to see what Guangcheng was up to, the best place to look was online. Hi, this is Chen Guangcheng. This is my official YouTube page.

Guangcheng posted this clip in 2015, announcing the birth of his YouTube channel. In the video, which runs only a couple more. seconds, Guangcheng stands in front of an official-looking background for the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. A bunch of other videos followed. They cover a range of topics and experiences. Trips to the Berlin Wall. A primer on how to use And Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. I'm now in Japan's and in the Rihpian,

to help you to do this video. A primer on how to use Twitter if you're blind. Or a plea on behalf of Liu Xia, widow to the dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu Xiaobo by the government has then we need to continue to watch his wife,

Liu Xia, the chou-giat's chow. But in virtually every single, video on his channel. At least everyone I watched, Guangcheng winds up in the same place, exhorting his viewers to recognize the evils of the CCP. It's as if it's hard for him to sustain a train of thought about anything else. One video from February 14, 2016, is called Valentine's Day. Communism kills the human spirit. This video belongs to a whole genre of Guangcheng videos where he's filmed himself in public space

on Catholic University's campus. This makes for some pretty funny contrasts, like you'll see a pair of monks and Franciscan robes stroll by behind him while he's making a point about how China doesn't have elections. In his Valentine's Day video, Guangcheng is sitting by himself in the middle of what looks like the Student Center at Catholic.

College kids are eating and talking to each other in the near background. On one wall, a flat-screen TV is playing news about Michael Flynn leaving the Trump administration. while on the wall directly behind Guangcheng is the Latin phrase Deis looks maya est, God is my light. What Guangcheng wants to say has little to do with any of this. Guangzhou says that on Valentine's Day, it can seem like you need to have a lover,

but as he sees it, it's far more important to be a righteous and humane person yourself. then he pivots. He says that actually, in China, ever since the communist dictator seized power, the Communist Party has been destroying the bonds that hold people together. Guangcheng continues in this vein for the remaining 17 minutes of the video,

making the case that CCP rule essentially destroys people's ability to care about each other. At one point, as evidence, he recalls the torture he endured while incarcerated. Even though a strong-semin human

human is no even though Guangcheng was blind, he says these people still treated him

without an ounce of humanity. The party's dictatorship had saturated their brains and drained them of

normal human sympathies. And let me remind you this was Guangcheng's Valentine's Day video.

By the numbers, the audience for this kind of thing has been pretty small. When I watched

the Valentine's video, it only had about a hundred views. The views for almost all other videos on Guangcheng's YouTube channel fall in the same range, somewhere in the low hundreds, with many in the tens. Looking over all of them, I was struck by how far he'd come since his first months at NYU.

Jerry's expectation was that Guangcheng would continue his legal studies and become a public intellectual, with solid footing as an academic. To that end, he was put through a crash course in American law, and he was assigned a PR team to manage his image. At Catholic, there seems to have been much less pressure for, Guangcheng to conform to anyone else's vision for him. It also seems, though, like there was not much plan for him at all. In these YouTube videos, he appears to be a man at loose ends,

consumed by an intensely personal hatred for the CCP, casting about online for an audience and for relevancy. In most ways, Guangcheng's Twitter feed mirrored what he's doing on YouTube. The vast majority of its content was focused on the CCP. But on Twitter, something else was happening too. Guangcheng was starting to voice his opinions about American politics, and his opinions were starting to shift. Well through 2016, he maintained an air of non-partisanship, at least publicly. In 2015, for example, Guangcheng signed a copy of his book

for former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. But he also marked the three-year anniversary of his arrival in the U.S. by tweeting his thanks to Hillary Clinton for her work getting him out of China. Later, he got together with Jerry Cohen again to give a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. And as late as November 2016, Guangcheng tweeted an article by Gary Locke, the Obama appointed ambassador who helped negotiate his exit from China. Clearly, at this point, Guangcheng was still interested in associating himself with both parties. At the same time, it was also clear that Guangcheng was cultivating an interest in one man,

Donald Trump. After Trump's election, Guangcheng tweeted an enthusiastic congratulations to the new president. Three exclamation points. Guangcheng was also inspired to make a YouTube video. about why America's so-called free press got the election so wrong. Considering the heated emotions of those early weeks after Trump's win,

Guangcheng's response was diplomatic. In the same video, he also says the people who were protesting Trump's victory were simply expressing their civil rights. But over the next couple of years, Guangcheng began to express more public support for Trump. He tweeted a long post written by a Chinese expat in the U.S. that was basically an apology for all of Trump's most obscene faults. It concluded, Trump is not perfect. Dwelling on his flaws

and mistakes is an escape from the big questions of national destiny, war and peace, life and death. That was followed by more tweets like one praising Trump for taking a hardline approach to Kim Jong-un. If you remember, it was when Trump called Kim a sick puppy and Kim called Trump mentally, deranged, and then they both threatened to use nuclear weapons. With these tweets, Guangchung found himself among a community of like-minded compatriots. One of the many weird and surprising things about Trump's presidency was just how many Chinese liberals and democracy activists got excited about him. It was surprising because I had thought this was a group who would be turned off by Trump's racism

and xenophobia. Not only that, Trump also didn't seem to care much about their professed values. A free press, democracy, rule of law, that kind of thing. But Trump had one big thing going for him. He spent a lot of time talking about... China, China, China. I have to have my China. China, because China...

Initially, Trump's main point was that China had been taking advantage of the U.S. on trade. People say, oh, you don't like China. No, I love them. But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders. But as his presidency progressed, and as the tariffs he placed on Chinese goods, gave way to an open trade war, Trump began to portray China as America's number one adversary.

And this is when you really began to see Chinese dissidents and former student leaders from Tiananmen Square publicly praising our 45th president. Guangcheng was right there with them. He welcomed Trump's trade war with China. And as Trump's rhetoric grew increasingly hostile, Guangcheng tweeted out videos of Trump's speeches, telling his followers that they were worth a listen. No dictator, no regime, and no nation should underestimate ever American resolve. Two years later, Guangcheng took the stage at the 2020 Republican National Convention. The U.S. must use its values of freedom, democracy, and the role of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop CCP's aggression. President Trump had led on this.

and we need the other countries to join him in this fight. A fight for our future. We need to support, vote, and fight for President Trump for the sake of the world. Thank you. With this full-throated endorsement of Trump's re-election, Guangchung had finally and very publicly chosen aside. In the year's sense, he's done. doubled down on this choice.

That's next on Dissant at the Doorstep. Dissident at the Doorstep is an original podcast from Crooked Media. Our hosts are Alison Clayman, Yang Yang Chung, and me, Colin Jones. From Crooked Media, our executive producers are Tommy Vitor, Sarah Geismer, and Katie Long, with special thanks to Mary Knopf and Allison Falzetta. Our senior producers are Maria Byrne and Meg Kramer. Mara Walls is our story editor. our producer is Wudan Yan.

Our associate producers are Bowen Wong and Sydney Rap. Translation by Valerie C. With additional translation by Yang Chang and Richard Yeh. Voiceovers by Richard Yeh. Our fact checker is Tamika Adams. Sound design and mixing by Hannes Brown. Original score by Alon Isakov. And our podcast art is by John Lee.