Bob Fu, president of the Texas-based human rights group ChinaAid, said that he had talked to Chen the previous night and he was crying and felt “isolated.”
Chen said that he was told that if he did not leave the embassy on May 2, he should not expect to be reunited with his family.
He had felt “pressured” to leave the embassy, Fu said, and that he had no other option because he did not want to abandon his family to be tortured.
Fu questioned the U.S. government’s handling of the situation, asking why Chen’s family had not been brought to the embassy so that they could all safely discuss their future.
Reggie Littlejohn, an expert on China’s one-child rule, believes that China is trying to make an example of Chen in order to show what happens to people who oppose its central policies.
The founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an organization that works to oppose forced abortions in China, Littlejohn also testified at the hearing.
She observed that in covering Chen’s plight, much of the mainstream media has ignored the cause for which he has been fighting.
Chen has worked to document “horrific” cases of human rights abuses relating to China’s one-child policy, she explained. He has spoken out against forced sterilizations and abortions, as well as other “untold suffering” that the policy brings to women, she said.
Alone in hospital, she said, Chen is in a “very, very vulnerable position.”
Littlejohn said that the United States has “very seriously mishandled this entire situation.”
She explained that the Chinese people have long considered the U.S. Embassy to be a safe place and are now feeling extremely “betrayed” that America would hand Chen back over to the Chinese government, which is not likely to keep its promises of treating him humanely.
The way that the United States has dealt with the situation has done “untold damage” to its reputation as human rights defender, Littlejohn said.
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U.S. officials maintain that Chen had said that he wanted to remain in China and never asked to come to the United States. They acknowledge that he now seems to have had a “change of heart” and say that they are planning to discuss various options with him.
Michelle La Rosa is deputy editor-in-chief of Catholic News Agency. She has worked for CNA since 2011. She studied political philosophy and journalism at the University of Dallas.