Pod Save the World - Dissident at the Doorstep Episode 8: The Shit In The Frame

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Guangcheng has put his life on the line to stand up for noble causes and principles. He has also thrown his support behind Trump and, more recently, a range of intolerant ideas. There are so many things to admire about him, but there are others that are hard to excuse. We thought with this series that we could show how all these things could be true at once. But as we got closer to the end of the story, we learned just how hard that really is. 

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. Dissidents are often associated with positive characteristics. They're brave, self-sacrificing. They're people who stand up for their ideals. Less positive attributes might come with the territory, but they tend to fly under the radar. In telling any story, it's helpful to make the hero consistent. I think Guangcheng understands this too.

We called him up last summer for a final conversation, and he said something that stuck out. It came up when he was talking about a disagreement he had with his son's position on environmentalism and eating animals. They say, oh, you should protect the environment, protect nature. And I say, yes, certain things need our protection, like, animals and plants. But this is not absolute. Guangcheng then gave an example. Imagine, he said, that you're drawing a picture of a farm.

You say the painting should reflect reality. That's correct. You paint a beautiful lawn with flowers on the edge and green grass in the middle, right? But if a cow pooped on the lawn, do you need to paint that too? I don't think so. This is a problem with stories, too. You want to tell things like they are, as completely an action. as accurately as possible. But stories need structure. The events you're telling have to go in some kind of order. And for things to make sense, you're constantly making choices about what goes

in next and what doesn't fit. With this show, we thought we could do it all. Draw a beautiful picture and keep the shit in the frame. But as we got closer to the end of the story, we learned just how hard that really is. I'm Alison Clayman. I'm Yen. I'm Yon. And I'm Colin Jones, and this is episode 8 of dissident at the doorstep. Whenever I told people about this series, I'd say something like, Guangcheng was a legal activist who escaped house arrest, came to New York, was celebrated by the human rights community, and then went Maga. And generally, people would be shocked, like, what? How did that happen? The truth is, his trajectory isn't that surprising at all.

Dissidents and emigaries from socialist countries tend to go pretty far right when they get to American soil. There are many examples among ex-soviets, Cuban Americans, and increasingly among Chinese democracy activists. Also, Guangcheng's choice to back Trump makes some sense, given that Trump dragged the Republican Party and our whole country toward Guangcheng on the issue that matters to him most, China. China has been taken advantage of the United States for many, many years. I'm not just talking about during the Obama administration. You can go back long before that. And we can't let that happen. Going back to the mid-1990s, the consensus among both Democrats and Republicans

was that free trade and engagement with China was a good thing. Trump tore that consensus apart. With the trade war, he started in 2018, and then with the belligerent things he was willing to say when it came to the pandemic. Every day Americans are still losing their lives, and we're still seeing more cases every day. Well, they're losing their lives everywhere in the world, and maybe that's a question you should ask China. Don't ask me. Ask China that question, okay?

Guangcheng understood this, rightfully, as a sea change in the U.S. government's position on China, and he threw in behind the politician who's willing to make China an enemy in rhetoric, if not always in practice. But if hatred for the CCP is Guangcheng's lodestar, he's also followed it into the more conspiratorial and spiteful precincts of the American right. And there's a little bit of shit here that we haven't talked about yet.

In our interviews, Guangcheng to downplay his more extreme beliefs. Maybe because he knows how they might play to a wider audience. When we asked about his thoughts on LGBT rights, for instance, he said he didn't want to talk about it, because his other profession was as a doctor. This was a reference to his studies in Chinese medicine. But I wondered if this was Guangcheng's way of saying

that he thought there was a biological reason. Homosexuality was improper. When Yang Yang asked him to clarify, he ducked out to take a call. It's not just about queer people. After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, I asked him whether outlawing abortion violates the woman's right to her own body. Not unlike the forced abortions in China, he had fought against. To only emphasize that a woman has the right to abortion, that I can do whatever I want, I think this argument is a trap by itself.

because then what about the husband? Where does he stand? If the husband has no say in whether or not to have a child, then he has no say in anything. Do you think this reflects the reality from a society's point of view? Is it okay? Is it fair, in other words? Guang chung is not a Christian.

He is not particularly religious. But hearing him, it seems to me that his opposition to women's reproductive rights shares the same patriarchal underpinning as the Christian right. Guangcheng does not see a need for women's rights. The so-called women's rights are very popular these days. What is women's rights? Is it opposed to men's rights?

Is it part of human rights? Do we need men's rights to legitimize women's rights? There are children's rights. Do we also need elders' rights? If you do this, there really is no way to make a word. He takes a similar position on the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter. Do yellow lives matter?

Why do we emphasize Black Lives Matter? Why must we emphasize white lives matter? In fact, I personally think this went too far. In other words, all lives matter. Guangcheng has emphasized he literally, cannot see skin color. Besides, he once told us, one of his kissed huders was black. But the more he spoke about his encounters with black people, in a supermarket on the subway,

or even in the news, there is little ambiguity about this prejudice. His story usually begins with perceived rudeness or even violent behavior from a stranger. And then he deduces the person's race and rails about how ridiculous it is that he isn't supposed to mention it. I remember once in New York, the media said, I remember once in New York, the media reported that an Asian woman had been attacked by a man from Africa. I immediately pushed back.

I said, what is a man from Africa? Just tell me what kind of person he is. It's that simple. So, how do I put it? The root of the problem is that people dare not confront the issue, which is who are the people committing these attacks? Right? Just face it, who cares if they're white or black or yellow?

You just say it, right? I do not know when Guangchang formed his views on black people, whether it was before or after he came to the U.S. I do know that anti-black racism is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. As a college senior in China, I told my family, I was going to pursue my PhD at the University of Chicago, and every single one of them asked, I heard there were a lot of black people in Chicago.

Will you be safe there? In the summer of 2020, my mother in China saw reports of racial uprisings in the U.S. and asked me why black people are so quick to anger. My mother and Guangchang hold opposite views regarding their birth country. She is a firm defender of her government. But when Guangchang talks about social issues, he often sounds just like her.

I'm reminded of these words from James Baldwin, who wrote that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. All this suggests that Guangcheng's right-wing turn was not because he was misled by nefarious forces, or simply out of opportunism. While conservative groups in the U.S. have appropriated his work in China for their own agendas,

Guangcheng himself does view society through a conservative lens. He seems to have internalized a hierarchical order that maps out the world and his place in it. His grievance against the Chinese state is real. But the free society he imagines does not seem to accord equal freedom to every individual. We wanted to know how Guangcheng situates himself in the world nowadays. That's why during our interviews, we pressed him to make his ideas clear. But there's another place to go to hear what Guangcheng has been thinking, his own podcast. He's been making it since 2021 with the help of a student from Catholic University. Welcome to the Barefoot Lawyer Reports. Chen Guangcheng, the blind

a barefoot lawyer, tells us about his fight for democracy in China and his subsequent escape therefrom. This podcast seems to be his main project at Catholic at the moment, and it's the clearest distillation we have of what he wants the world to think of him right now. Lately, a lot of the show has been about Guangcheng's belief in a conspiracy theory that COVID is a bio-weapon engineered in a CCP lab. But the single most important subject in his podcast is Guangcheng himself. He talks about his early life and work in China, how he became the barefoot lawyer, and how he escaped to the U.S. Sometimes, Guangcheng appears alongside other dissidents, including Bob Fu and Wang Dan, a student protest leader at Tiananman in 1989.

In an episode in the summer of 2022, Guangcheng talks about a plan to construct a reservoir near his home village that would flood the region and displace thousands of residents. According to Guangcheng, the motivation is to erase evidence of his presence there. He's explaining it to Will Bethridge, his producer. They tried to make, how to see that? They will keep the water there. So they'll keep the water there, but are they trying to destroy the other parts? Yeah, they will keep water there and make my village in the water.

So are they planning on? Submerging the village in water? Yeah, yeah. Wow. So they want to flood the village. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah.

All the village will in the water. And of course, not just my village, more than 27 villages, we are getting trouble. So the Communist Party used this way to clean the memory. Guangcheng is saying the Communist Party is flooding the area to clean the memory of his work there. In another episode, he credits his work against forced abortion in 2003 as the reason the Chinese government ended the one-child policy in 2016, over a decade later. That Guangcheng takes personal credit for ending the one-child policy sounds incredible. For me, it is also incredibly sad.

In our show, I listen to every episode of his podcast. I heard him repeat well-trod views on Instagram. international headlines and spin conspiracy theories. Time and again, he returns to decade-old stories of the most traumatic period of his life. His mistreatment by the Chinese state seems to be the only unique thing he has to say. Regardless of the topic at hand, each episode lands with Guangcheng denouncing the evils of the CCP to an audience that does not need convincing. This is a man with an outsized view of himself,

severed from his native land and trying desperately to grasp onto relevancy in his adopted home. Here's the thing about being a dissident. As soon as that title gets bestowed on you, you're marked as someone who can no longer safely stay at home. Many dissidents are forced to leave,

and when they do, they lose their battleground. Guangcheng's work was about trying to force the CCP to follow its own laws as a citizen listening to the grievances of his neighbors. It's almost impossible to do this from outside China. So it makes sense that Guangcheng has clung tightly to his story and decided to align himself with the person and the party most willing to attack the CCP, and in doing so, has married his worldviews with a hateful and authoritarian movement here in the States. All this time, we've wondered if it had to be

this way. And for a little while, we thought we could understand. Guangcheng's story better if we ended the show by looking at another dissident in exile. After the break, you'll hear how that turned out. Writing this last episode has been a journey. Originally, we planned to focus on Teng Biao, the legal activist and close friend of Guangcheng. He was Guangcheng's partner in the legal case against China's enforcement of the one-child policy and passed along that sycamore leaf bouquet made by Guangcheng's daughter that Guangcheng preserved all those years in prison.

We interviewed Teng Biao twice at his home in New Jersey. After our first session, he took us outside on a little garden tour. Behind a slightly neglected pool in the backyard was a ramshackle structure made of wood and wire. My younger daughter, Nancy, really loves all kinds of pets. So these takens are her pets. Well, there's a lot of them. Teng Biao then took us around front and was pointing

out some flowers he'd planted by his walkway. So I planted roses and they were blooming last month. There were some flowers Tang Biao could only name in Chinese. At one point, we all took out our phones to try to find the English name of a flower he was

pointing to. Lilac. Lailak. Oh, okay, lilac. I should memorize all this. flower's name. I remember being quite touched by this moment. Tong Biao had this whole vocabulary in Chinese,

with which he could pick out each flower, name it, and put it into a kind of order. And what he was working on, as he led us around that garden, was transferring that ordered world into this new home here in New Jersey, where he felt like he should be able to name his flowers in English too. I remember thinking, so this is what it's like when you're forced into exile.

We wanted to interview Tang Biao because he was an important friend to Guangcheng and could help us tell Guangcheng's story. But as I learn more about Teng Biao, I couldn't help but compare the two. They had so many things in common, rural upbringing, childhood illness, a commitment to activism that led to run-ins with the authorities and detention. Teng Biao fled to the U.S. when he saw his close friends and fellow activists all being arrested after Xi Jinping came to power in 2013. His wife and oldest daughter, Grace, had to go through a risky three-week journey to get out of China,

over the Yunnan border and going through Burma and Thailand and Laos to get to the U.S. In America, both Teng Biao and Guangcheng had to figure out their place in society, and they both decided to continue being vocal critics of the CCP. But then these two men, whose politics were so linked in China, had a falling out over their politics in the U.S. specifically over Guangcheng's support of Trump at the RNC. For me, it's really embarrassing and confusing because Donald Trump is not a supporter of American constitutional democracy.

And he sees the media as an enemy. And he promotes conspiracy theories. He doesn't respect rule of law. This view put Tang Biao in the minority, of his community of Chinese dissidents on Twitter. Most were happy to support Trump. But Tang Biao wasn't just anti-Trump. Everything about how he spoke

revealed someone who was comfortable with the discourse of the American left. Like when he talked about how his PhD and job as a professor in China helped him when he got here, and he said unprompted that he checks his privilege. I do check my privilege. Many Chinese people who have to escape China

feel it's really difficult to have a new life in a totally different country. It's not easy to do human rights in the United States and earn money. It was so refreshing to see in Tang Biao an alternate path for an exiled Chinese rights activist, one that felt politically more aligned with what I thought was right. It made for a lovely feel-good ending. Guangcheng's path wasn't inevitable. And then, just as we were finishing this series, Tang Biao was accused of sexual assault from 2016.

His accuser came forward in the midst of a Me Too movement that's happening in Taiwan, and includes other high-profile activists. Based on the two accounts from the only two people at the scene, what we do know is that both Tang Biao and his accuser, a Taiwanese journalist, attended the same conference in India in 2016. The journalist needed to extend her stay, and Tang Biao offered her a room at a hotel. When she arrived at the room with her luggage, she found Teng Biao inside. The two accounts diverge on what happened next.

The journalist says Teng Biao lunged at her multiple times, and she had to scream and push him away. She caused it attempted rape. In a public apology posted to his social media accounts, Tang Biao says he does not recall lunging at a journalist or restraining her from leaving. He describes what he did as, quote, an extraordinarily clumsy courtship, adding, quote, regardless, my actions were unacceptable and unforgivable. Tang Biao has since resigned from a number of non-profit organizations dedicated to democracy and human rights in China.

I am still reckoning with the revelation about Tang Biao, whose work I have followed and respected since my early adolescence. But my grief and anger are not just about one individual or one incident. In this me-to-wave that has swept the synophone world, multiple women have come forth with their experiences of sexual assault or harassment by prominent Chinese human rights lawyers and activists. In these cases, because the abuser and the victim share, a common adversary, the authoritarian Chinese state. The victim faces additional pressure

against speaking out. Time and again, I hear this phrase, Goo Da Ju. Think about the big picture. As if the cause of democracy and human rights is too important to be derailed by one misdeed. But whose democracy and whose rights? We recorded all our interviews with Hung Biao before we knew about the accusation against him. Once we heard it, we talked about whether he belongs in the series at all. But we decided that he does,

and that so does the accusation. The questions we've been grappling with this whole series about Guangcheng are, what do you do with someone who you feel betrayed the causes and values you idolize them for in the first place? And how do you think about everything they did up to that point,

in light of what you know now? These questions are applicable here too. Tong Biao was quoting Vashlov Havl to us about living in truth. He not only played such a huge role in Guangcheng's life, but also in pushing for legal reform and democracy in China. He represented a version of activism and protest that seemed to navigate the complexities of the last 10 years, and he's been accused of a sexual assault, which he denies.

This is all his legacy, and there's no other version to be had, It falls on us to reckon with it. We have to look at the picture, shit and all, and reach our own conclusions. Not necessarily about Tang Biao or Guangcheng, but about how to move forward in a world without heroes. I see both Tang Biao and Guangcheng as my Chinese elders. As I process my own reactions to Guangcheng's bigotry

and Tang Biao's sexual assault accusation, I cannot say that I am disappointed. Disappointment implies an expectation. But such expectation would be presumptuous and indeed selfish. To look for a hero is to evade collective responsibility. The burden of liberation can never be carried by one individual. Other forms of political activism are emerging among a new generation. For many young Chinese people, the end of 2022 marked a political coming-out moment.

As protests erupted across China, against the draconian zero COVID policies, and quickly spread to the diaspora. In many places, the call to end COVID lockdowns morphed into demands for free expression and democratic governance. It's the first time I heard my native tons spoken in such a bold fashion in my birth country. Despite swift crackdowns from Chinese authorities, this moment of political awakening has been sustained among a younger generation of overseas Chinese. many were taking part in their first protest. In what has been known as the White Paper Movement,

demonstrators held up a blank sheet of paper. This symbol of critique against state censorship can also be seen as a gesture of inclusivity, where different demands are heard, where the future is open to possibilities. Earlier generations of Chinese activism centered around a handful of charismatic individuals, most of whom were men.

The White Paper movement, however, is largely anonymous and leaderless. Many participants are feminists or queer activists. They bring an admirable transnational consciousness, connecting aspirations for China with liberation struggles in different countries and continents. I do not want to overpraise a nascent movement, but this very existence gives me. me hope. It would be wrong to call the white paper protesters dissidents. I myself have never liked the term. It foregrounds the state as the opposition and limits the imagination.

The label is so often conferred on people by those in the West who take liberal democracy for granted. It's like saying, you are not like them. You are one of us. It assumes and affirms a false binary. Interestingly, Guangcheng himself does not think it's a term that fits him either.

Are those who oppose dictators dissidents or are the dictators themselves dissidents? If the whole world sees those of us who oppose dictatorship as

dissidents, I don't think that's quite the case. So, you should think about it. Guangcheng considers a dissident to be someone

swimming against the current, opposing the mainstream. A dissident by construct is in the minority, while standing up for freedom should be the majority position. I told Guangcheng that I take his point, but I do like the title of our show, dissident at the doorstep. The doorstep suggests an opening,

a multitude of possibilities. By walking through the door and crossed, Singapore, Guangcheng is no longer a lone warrior under an authoritarian regime. By his own definition, he is no longer in a minority. Guangcheng has emphasized that Beijing's long arms reached well beyond its territorial bounds and digital technologies have collapsed physical distances. So there is much work to do here in the U.S. Yet, I cannot help but see an exiled fighter in search of a new fight. I do wonder, when he joined the crowd on January 6th,

whether Guangcheng was picturing himself again as a member of the persecuted minority, shining light and truth against oppressive machinery of the state. And I wonder, is this the kind of freedom he was searching for? I want to take you back to a document we talked about earlier in the series. It's a State Department report about Guangcheng's first visit to the U.S. in 2003. That's when he was invited as an emerging Chinese leader, not long before his first arrest and about a decade before he became famous for his escape. During this trip, Guangcheng

traveled all over the U.S. with his wife, Wei Jing. Along with them was a handler from the State Department. This woman was also the author of the report, and her impressions of Guangcheng are strikingly familiar. She writes that Guangcheng was chatty and eloquent. She describes him as a passionate, smart spokesperson for the disabled in rural China. But she also doesn't hesitate to note that, quote, Mr. Chun could be belligerent, impatient, and too demanding sometimes. There's one story that really stands out. During the trip, Guangchung and Wei Jing spent several days in Burlington, Vermont.

There, from what it sounds like, he got into an intense fight with the staff at a hotel they were staying in. Their rooms smelled terrible, and it was noisy. And if that wasn't bad enough, when he and Wei Jing went to check out, They discovered the hotel wanted to charge them extra for the weekend nights they had stayed. For Guangchung, that was it. He categorically refused to pay the difference, and nothing could persuade him otherwise. Eventually, the hotel owner gave up.

Here's how the report's author sums it all up. She writes, The matter was settled, but Mr. Chen was still unhappy. Fighting was his nature. I had to laugh when I read this. This was definitely the same Guangcheng we'd gotten to know. someone who does not back down when he believes he is right, no matter what. We all like to think that we stand up for what we believe in,

but there really aren't many of us who, like Guangcheng, will just never relent. In this way, he is totally unchanged, and it's incredible to think about how far his doggedness has carried him, from Dong Shurgu to the U.S. Embassy to the insurrection. There are only a handful of people in this world who could claim to have lived a life at such a huge dramatic scale. I'm happy for the fact that Guangcheng has landed well, that he has a house and a job and that his immediate family is safe.

There are so many other Chinese activists, for whom things have gone much worse, who are still in jail or who are dead. In that way, he's kind of the ultimate survivor. He's overcome so much when we revere people like that, who go through hell and emerge on the other side. But we tend to spend much less time thinking about the toll those experiences exact,

a toll that also feels largely unprocessed by Guangcheng himself. In our final interview with him, we asked if he thought he might have been traumatized by all the horrible things that he had to endure. He said no. The only thing he really admits to is the physical pain. He could list broken ribs and feet and bouts of severe illness that went untreated while he was in detention.

But Guangcheng doesn't see. any lasting emotional trauma. The only thing these experiences really did was harden his resolve. Yang Yang thought he was in denial about his trauma. She told Guangcheng that after trying experiences in her own life, she sometimes has nightmares or can get triggered by certain scenes.

Then Guangcheng sort of softened. He said that he has nightmares too. It felt like he was admitting to some vulnerability. And over all the hours of interviews with him, I'd almost never heard him do this. His clarification was more on brand. That I do.

For most people, they're nightmares. But for me, they're not bad dreams. They're dreams of rage. I'm often watered up by rage for my dreams. Guangcheng said he never has dreams about running away from something. He never has dreams where he's scared. What he does have are dreams where he gets so angry, he almost can't stand it.

In one of these dreams, hordes of communist thugs show up at his house while he's lying in bed. They trash his library and take away his law books, and they search him while he's just lying there. He wants to strangle them when this happens. He says he imagines grabbing one of the thugs by the neck and snap. But he knows he can't. And so he lies there and seethes. When that happens, I just so angry, my whole body trembles. So here are some ideas that Guangcheng does not identify with.

Nightmares, trauma, the title of dissident. Here's one he is comfortable owning. Rage. It served him well, especially here in America where rage is maybe the one public emotion that Americans of all stripes seem to share. But I also wonder if he's at risk

of being consumed by it. I hope for his sake, that's not the case. Dissident at the Doorstep is an original podcast from Crooked Media. Our hosts are Colin Jones, Yang Yang Chung, and me, Alison Clayman. From Crooked Media, our executive producers are Tommy Vitor,

Sarah Geismer and Katie Long, with special thanks to Mary Knoff and Alison 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 Yang Chung and Richard Yeh. Voiceovers by Richard Yeh. Our fact checker is Tamika Adams.

Sound design and mixing by Hannes Brown, original score by Ilan Isikoff. And our podcast art is by John Lee.