Special Report: How a Chinese dissident walked into America's culture wars

(This is the second part of a two-part story.) INTO THE BELTWAY By July 2012, Cohen's hope that Chen might steer clear of the capital until after the election was put to the test. Smith and other lawmakers wanted Chen to testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2012. Cohen and others at NYU tried to convince Chen this was a bad idea, at least for now. "Whether the requests came from Chris Smith, Bob or various other groups, my view was that Chen should take some months to learn about American life and should not allow himself to be injected into the presidential election campaign, whether in favor of or critical of either political party," Cohen says. "When I told Smith's staff man that I thought Chen should wait till January, he said: ‘That will be too late.' I said: ‘Too late for what?'" Dennis Halpin, a staffer who worked for the committee's Republican chairwoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, says he was "under the gun" to get Chen. He had helped book hearings for a dozen years, but the difficulties in getting Chen to appear stand out in his mind. On one occasion, he got Chen on the phone and, in halting Mandarin, invited him down. Chen, who had also received a written invitation from Smith, said yes. But otherwise Halpin was dealing with Cohen or other NYU intermediaries. They told him they were concerned that a committee appearance might cause problems with Chen's book negotiations, and might do more harm than good for his relatives back in China. About a week before the hearing, as Halpin was drawing up the final agenda, he found himself unable to get anyone on the phone. He learned that Cohen and Chen had gone with their families to the Hamptons. There, he was told, they were often preoccupied with beach strolls, and in any case the mobile phone reception was bad. Defeated, Halpin gave up. The hearing would take place without Chen. The Chens had been looking forward to the Hamptons trip, hosted by a rich admirer at a beachside estate, his former NYU colleagues say. (No one would disclose the host's identity.) Chen's children were especially excited - they had never been on a beach before. But by some accounts, it was not nearly as relaxing as had been hoped. Chen thought it would be graceless to not accept the invitation to testify from Smith, who had played a role in his exit from China. He felt he had given his word to Halpin that he'd appear, and was upset at the idea of reneging. Chen also did not like being told by Cohen and others at NYU that his expectations were unrealistic or that his understanding of American politics was still lacking, say people who worked with him at NYU. These arguments increased in frequency and intensity over the summer, before spilling over out on Long Island's wealthy eastern tip. "That was a very big rupturing point," says an aide to Chen who joined the family on the trip. "It was just incredibly emotionally wrought." Fu, on the other hand, virtually never made Chen feel naive or misguided. Quite the opposite - he could be critical of NYU, believing people there sometimes condescended to Chen. Fu says he and Chen have never once had a disagreement. Asked about the trip, Cohen says he was "puzzled" to hear it described as stressful. "My wife and I had a very good time and enjoyed the discussions about how to handle matters in the fall, although I would not say the discussion was especially passionate," he wrote in an email. "I think the Chens also had fun. My son Ethan even tried to teach Chen how to hit a tennis ball guided by the sound of the bounce." Fu, who also had been complaining that he couldn't reach Chen while he was away, spoke with Chen's wife after they returned to Manhattan. According to Fu, Yuan was nearly in tears as she described how her husband was sitting at home sweat-soaked and distraught on the couch, head cast back to the heavens, racked by anxiety. Later, Fu tried to ask Chen about the trip. Chen was reluctant to say much, Fu recalls, but described being harangued by some people who visited the estate. The visitors told Chen he would be making a huge mistake to travel to Washington, warning that if he did, he would be used by Republican politicians. Chen replied with a rhetorical question, according to Fu: So if I don't go, will I get used by Democrats? About a week later, on August 1, with the help of NYU colleagues, a determined Chen went to Washington. A MYSTERIOUS GETAWAY There was a little noticeable tussling between Republicans and Democrats over who would see Chen when, but the trip to Capitol Hill was successful. A bipartisan photo-op was organized for Chen with John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats. Chen gave a short speech to lawmakers and journalists. With no sign of an investigation into his family's treatment forthcoming, Chen toughened his tone toward the Chinese government. "So if a case as high-profile as mine cannot be properly handled in accordance with Chinese law, and with international legal norms, how are we able to believe that China will respect human rights and the rule of law?" he said. Soon after his return to New York, an aide organized a meeting with Chen to discuss in greater detail what he might do once he left NYU the next summer. Fu says this was punishment for insisting on going to D.C. and fraternizing with Republicans. Chen saw it as evidence that NYU was succumbing to pressure from China to end its ties with him. People at NYU say they were only trying to give Chen as much time and help to sort out his next steps as they could. The book deal that Cohen and others at NYU helped arrange was finally completed and announced, and Chen signed what his publisher - Times Books, a division of Macmillan - said was a standard agreement not to disclose the memoir's exclusive contents before publication. Chen's publisher and agent declined to discuss Chen's advance. Several people who worked with Chen say it was around $500,000. (Fu released his own memoir last month, titled "God's Double Agent.") Chen was growing increasingly independent. Cohen and others at NYU say they often didn't know who Chen was speaking to or where he was going. They didn't really object, they say, although they would wonder why he sometimes seemed so secretive. By this point, his NYU colleagues and some of his closest supporters were clearly divided. His way of dealing with the breach, it seems, was to tip-toe around it. As August had drawn near, Chen's colleagues had been asking him if he wanted help sorting out a family vacation. Chen eventually declined their offer, saying he'd made his own arrangements. An aide set about cancelling classes and appointments. "They mysteriously announced they would be away for a week's New Jersey holiday and plainly did not want to tell our NYU group who their host was," Cohen says. "We were glad they returned looking tanned, fit and happy. They subsequently made various commitments without asking or telling us." They speculated, wrongly, that the mystery host was Congressman Smith, whose district includes part of the Jersey Shore. They were correct to infer from Chen's quietness, however, that Chen's host was someone in the other camp. In fact, the Chens had joined Bob Fu's wife, Heidi Cai, and Fu and Cai's daughter for the vacation. (Fu stayed home to look after the couple's other two children.) The trip was hosted by a friend of Fu's from Philadelphia at a Jersey Shore beach house - "an ordinary Christian businessman," Fu says, declining to elaborate, saying the host did not want publicity. Only a few weeks prior, Fu was complaining that Chen had "disappeared" with the Cohens to the Hamptons. Now the roles were reversing. According to Fu, Chen increasingly confided in him the concerns he felt he could not share with people at NYU. "He asked me a question," Fu says: "‘So why do people in New York so hate the Christians or the religious people, why are they so panicked?' So he had heard enough, so you can tell it backfired. He could just not believe their propaganda anymore." Cohen says this is a cartoonish picture. If this is indeed how Chen felt, Cohen and his colleagues say, then Chen misunderstood their advice, which was to simply to be cautious about being seen to align closely with any one faction. Still, Chen's NYU colleagues weren't oblivious to the tensions. They looked to Chen's background to explain this. Chen was used to taking the path of most resistance. He came from a poor family of farmers. He had refused to let himself be funneled into becoming a massage therapist, one of the few professions that, in much of China, are thought to be within the ken of blind people. He had instead taught himself law and used that knowledge to defend a widening circle of beleaguered neighbors, often in defiance of the government's most authoritarian representatives. Seven years of often harsh detention had not dulled his spirit. Now Chen, a lifelong sole trader, was ensconced in one of America's largest universities. Aides wondered if a part of him had come to see NYU as the authority figure against which his instinct was to rebel. Chen's main source of anguish, Fu says, was his uncertainty about what he could and couldn't say about forced abortions back home - "the most central issue in his life," Fu says. "You didn't see him mention this word ‘forced abortion' in any of his public speeches," Fu says. "I can see Jerry Cohen was very successful in those terms: ‘Just talk about the rule-of-law issues.'" Fu recalls a conversation with Chen from the early months. "He told me, ‘Last night, I learnt in my hometown there's another woman with eight months pregnancy, they forcefully aborted the baby,'" Fu said, "and he didn't sleep all night and he was just agonized and painful, but then he told me, ‘Don't tell anyone.'" On August 30, Chen made his first substantial public comments on the issue in the United States, in an open letter to Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple. The letter urged Apple to use its clout in China, where many of the company's phones and computers are manufactured, to do more to criticize the country's family-planning policies. (Apple didn't respond to the appeal, telling reporters that the issues were addressed in its annual corporate-responsibility reports.) The letter was co-signed by Fu, Littlejohn and Andrew Duncan, a human-rights advocate who was to play an increasingly close role behind the scenes as one of Chen's supporters. THE ACCUSATION As 2013 rolled around, Chen seemed to have patched up an equilibrium with his fractured circle of supporters. In February, he joined Cohen at the New School in New York to give a talk on human rights in China. In April, Fu helped arrange a trip to the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas, to meet the former president and record an interview with the center's director about his activism. That month, Chen returned to belatedly testify at a hearing of Smith's subcommittee and meet lawmakers in D.C., where he began sharing the concerns that would lead to the year's unraveling. At the subcommittee hearing chaired by Smith on human rights in China, Chen began by holding up a piece of paper. It listed the names of "corrupt officials" he said had "blood on their hands" because of their alleged involvement in 130,000 forced abortions in Shandong Province. He asked that they be barred from entering the United States under a 2000 law written by Smith. During that same trip, Chen and Fu also visited Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader, in her office. Pelosi had long supported Chen's cause, and they had met several times after he arrived in the United States. Chen told her the allegation against NYU that, a couple months later, he would make public. Pelosi seemed concerned, and someone got Cohen on the phone for her. "I assured her as briefly and clearly as I could that there was nothing to the story that Chen was being ousted because of Chinese pressure, and I guaranteed her that the Chens would not be cast into the street and told her we were working on better opportunities for his next step," Cohen says. (A Pelosi spokesman declined to make her available for an interview.) Chen has not said whether he has any evidence for his claim. There is some indication that Chinese officials were sore over Chen's embarrassing arrival at the American embassy. But whether this consisted of pro-forma and ultimately ineffectual complaints from Chinese emissaries, or was something fiercer that forced NYU to change course, seems stuck in the realm of speculation. "Feelings were hurt on the Chinese side, no question about it," says John Kamm, who has known both Cohen and Fu for years and is the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which seeks to free Chinese political prisoners. "They were embarrassed, they certainly let me know they were very unhappy." Still, he says, he does not think China threatened to "pull the plug" on the Shanghai campus. Two government officials involved in the talks and an official at the U.S. embassy in Beijing say they saw no evidence of Chinese pressure. About five months after Chen arrived at NYU, China's education ministry gave its final approval for the Shanghai campus. In any case, Cohen suggests, any effort from China would have been redundant. Aside from funding, there were more commonplace reasons for not extending Chen's time at NYU, Cohen says: The dissident was getting on his colleagues' nerves. "For example, our burgeoning U.S.-Asia Law Institute has a severe shortage of space," Cohen said in an email. "Nevertheless, we gave him one of our very few offices, making it necessary for two of our permanent research scholars to work in open cubicles, a big inconvenience and status deprivation. Chen-related activities tied up our conference room many times a week and involved our U.S.-Asia Law Institute scholars in interpretation, scheduling and other matters. His delightful children were sometimes in the office. Inevitably, there were frictions, and the group got the impression that he was not very appreciative of their efforts." Cohen's own office is in a separate part of NYU, away from the institute, and he says it took time for news to trickle down the corridors to him. "The group's desire to see him leave at the end of the academic year had nothing to do with politics," Cohen said, "but was a matter of personalities, misunderstandings and his frequent secretiveness about certain visitors and activities." "SABOTAGE!" NYU had been telling Chen since at least the autumn of 2012 that he would need to find a new place to work by the end of the academic year. After Chen's April trip to Washington, Fu recalls, the matter took on urgency. Cohen had already managed to arrange a tentative place - "really a wonderful position," he says - for Chen at the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers. Cohen is an adviser to the committee, housed at Fordham University's law school in Manhattan, a few miles uptown from NYU. There, Chen would join a small team of legal scholars who monitor and ease the harassment of human-rights lawyers in China. Virtually everyone, including Fu and Smith, said it seemed a good fit. Andrew Duncan, one of the co-signers of Chen's open letter to the CEO of Apple, agreed in principle to fund Chen's position, according to Fu and two other people familiar with the negotiations. Duncan did not respond to emails seeking comment. Duncan, a former private-equity executive now working as a rights advocate, had become a generous supporter of the Chens after meeting them in New York, Cohen and Fu say. He briefly emerged into view in an interview with Bloomberg News to discuss the Apple letter, but otherwise preferred to remain behind the scenes, Fu says. Duncan became a rare figure in Chen's close circle who seemed to make a point of getting along equally with both Cohen and Fu. As negotiations with Fordham continued, Fu, Duncan, Smith and other supporters worked to rustle up offers from other institutions. Smith had the most luck. The congressman spoke with a contact on the board of the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative research center in Princeton, New Jersey, across the street from Princeton University. Witherspoon is best known for producing research that opposes same-sex marriage, abortion and stem-cell research. In May, Smith phoned Luis Tellez, Witherspoon's founder and president. "To tell you the truth, at that point I didn't even know who Chen was," Tellez says, "but I heard from my donors that this is an important person and I quickly concluded that he probably was." Hiring the dissident would be a new direction for Witherspoon, which had given little scrutiny to human rights breaches in China. Tellez has long been the coordinator of the Princeton University activities of Opus Dei, a conservative organization within the Catholic Church which teaches that ordinary people can be saintly in their daily lives. Witherspoon is not officially a Catholic or Opus Dei institution, although it is influenced by Catholic ethics, Tellez says. Tellez also helped found the National Organization for Marriage, now one of the largest lobbying groups opposed to same-sex marriage. This was not the sort of cause Chen had ever been involved in. Still, Tellez saw they had common ground in their shared abhorrence of forcing abortion upon a resisting expectant mother. With Fu helping as a bilingual go-between, Tellez invited Chen to lunch at Princeton University's faculty club. "If you trust us, we are here to help," Tellez recalls saying at the lunch. Chen had some "misgivings" - in particular, he was keen to be affiliated with a university. Tellez said he and his colleagues would see if they could help with that. In June, news of Chen's discussions with Fordham and Witherspoon appeared in the Financial Times, which reported that the dissident was being courted by institutions with "opposing views". Cohen was quoted as saying: "If he takes the Witherspoon position that would diminish his stature in the U.S." Fu saw Cohen's quote. In a mirroring of events a year earlier, when Cohen accused Fu of being meddlesome in the press, it was Fu's turn to be angry. "Sabotage!" he thought. "How could you just preemptively destroy the only available job offer by doing a public interview, without even talking to Chen?" Cohen says he thought that Chen "would do better in a more neutral, academic setting, especially one that focused on the plight of Chinese lawyers. But, of course, the purported Witherspoon offer had some attractive benefits, and I felt that Chen was mature and informed enough by late spring to make his own choice." Tellez, who hadn't heard back from Chen, read the story and recalls thinking Fordham's offer was a good one. He assumed that's where Chen would end up. TABLOID HEADLINES On Thursday, June 13, the New York Post published an article with the headline: "NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid Shanghai expansion." It quoted an unnamed "New York-based professor familiar with Chen's situation." The story quickly spread, but journalists from New York to Beijing were unable to reach Chen. Cohen, then traveling in China, had been emailing Chen urging him to focus on finding a new apartment before his lease at NYU expired. Then he heard the reports, and sent another message. "I wanted Chen to make a statement because if he keeps quiet it will look like there's some truth to that New York Post story," Cohen says, "but what he never told me until it was too late was that he turned the statement over to people in Washington who turned it into something with, shall we say, a Republican spin." Chen's statement, released three days after the Post story, said it was true that NYU had asked him to leave by the end of June. "In fact, as early as last August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University," the statement went on, "so much so that after we had been in the United States just three to four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us." He nonetheless thanked NYU and Cohen, and finished by saying China's plan was "to make me so busy trying to earn a living that I don't have time for human rights advocacy, but this is not going to happen." Fu says Chen wrote every word of it, with Fu's only role being to proofread it and get it translated into English. Viet Dinh, the Republican lawyer who had offered Bancroft's legal services the previous summer, says he received Chen's statement and passed it on to Mark Corallo, his public relations consultant and a friend since they worked together in George W. Bush's Justice Department, who circulated it to the press. Dinh disagrees with Cohen's suggestion that Chen's statement was spun. "Unless you think human rights and freedom and free speech is solely a Republican cause or Republican issue, which I do not think it is, I think these types of namby-pamby conspiracies are senseless," he says. Within hours of the statement, the old tensions flashed across newspapers, websites and television channels. Fu, Smith and Littlejohn told journalists about the weirdness they'd encountered in their dealings with Chen. The people who worked with Chen at NYU talked about how they were left hurt and mystified by Chen's claim, and told the same journalists all the reasons it couldn't be true. China's foreign ministry declared itself bemused at the allegation, with a spokeswoman saying she didn't know whether Chen was wrong or just making stuff up. "If I thought there was any attempt to muzzle me or muzzle him, I assure you I would have announced it in the Post," Cohen said in a brief phone interview with Reuters from China shortly after Chen's statement. He also briefly chastised Chen, saying he risked being seen as "biting the hand that feeds him," and wondered if he might have made it harder for the next political refugee from China to find a host in the U.S. But before ending the call, Cohen took a more magnanimous tone. "We are old friends," he said. "I have no regrets about this. Obviously, life would have been more simple, and fewer people would have been maligning me otherwise, but that is not much of a price to pay at this stage in my life." A couple of days later, Duncan, the donor behind the Fordham offer, sent around an email saying he'd reached a difficult decision: He would withdraw the funding. "A NEW STARTING POINT" A week or so afterwards, Chen and Cohen were reunited on a long-planned joint trip to Taiwan, where a former student of Cohen's has become the president. China's foreign ministry had warned Chen to behave in an appropriate manner while visiting the disputed territory. That didn't stop Chen from praising the island's democracy. Cohen had some old advice for Chen updated for a new setting, urging him to avoid being seen as too closely associated with either Taiwan's right-leaning Kuomintang party or its left-leaning Democratic Progressive Party. The trip required Chen to face journalists for the first time since his NYU broadside. He bristled at their questions about NYU, saying now was not the time to discuss the matter. Cohen, who joined Chen at a press conference, agreed: It would look bad to squabble in front of China. Chen returned to Manhattan to continue apartment hunting. It took time, and the school extended his stay a little longer, but, at the end of July, more than 14 months after Cohen said on PBS that Chen would come for "up to a year," Chen and his family left NYU. Meanwhile, up at the Witherspoon Institute, Tellez wondered what was going on. Chen still hadn't replied to the job offer, and Tellez contacted Fu several times to try to get an answer either way. In late summer, Tellez sweetened the deal, telling Chen that the Catholic University of America, the national university of the Catholic Church in Washington, seemed willing to discuss a joint affiliation. By early September, with attempts to revive the Fordham offer going nowhere, Chen made his decision. He would become a senior fellow in human rights at Witherspoon and a visiting fellow at Catholic University's Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. He would also become an advisor for the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice, a more liberal-leaning organization named after the late Tom Lantos, a Democrat Congressman from California, which had awarded Chen its annual human rights prize earlier this year. As Chen would explain, he hoped the mix of affiliations would neutralize the idea that anyone could pin him to any particular point on the American political spectrum. The day the news was announced, Fu told Reuters he felt "vindicated." "When those leftist ideologues, ideology-driven people who pick me as a target and tried to paint me as partisan, right-wing, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Obama," he said, "I think it's just baseless, groundless, when we have the three institutions like this come together in supporting Mr Chen, and I'm part of that process." Cohen, reached by phone that day, was more muted. "I'm very happy that all of this is resolved," he said. "I want to make it clear I'm happy for him, and wish for the best, and we'll continue to be friends." The next day, Chen joined his new colleagues at a news conference in Washington. To his left sat a professional interpreter, who scribbled notes as she parsed English into Mandarin and vice versa, apparently to nobody's concern. Yuan Weijing, Chen's wife, sat smiling warmly in the front row, and pulled out an iPhone to photograph and video her husband. A few seats down was Bob Fu. John Garvey, the president of National Catholic University, praised Chen's advocacy as aligned with Christ's message "that the poor and the vulnerable are especially worthy of our kindness and mercy." Chen rose to speak. "Today I'm at a new starting point," the dissident said. He now referred to China, which a little over a year before he had hoped would end and investigate his relatives' harassment, as an "evil power." Before ending his remarks, he said he wanted to express sincere gratitude to NYU. When asked by a reporter what he thought of the notion that he had been courted by conservatives in the United States, Chen replied that it would be a mistake to pigeonhole him. "I believe human rights supersede partisan politics, and it's greater than national borders," he said. Chen is taking up his new posts just as the cause that made him famous returns to the news. In a surprise announcement last week, China's government said it will make the most significant change to its family-planning policy in decades, allowing millions more urban couples to have a second child. What difference this might make in the countryside, where most couples have been allowed to have two children since the 1980s and where Chen did most of his work exposing forced abortions and sterilizations, remains unclear. Cohen, meanwhile, is working on his own memoir. He says he will probably devote a chapter to Chen Guangcheng. (Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee and Max Duncan in Beijing, Clare Jim in Taipei, and Paul Eckert in Washington, D.C. Edited by Michael Williams. Photo editing by Jim Bourg. Designed and illustrated by Troy Dunkley. Developed by Charlie Szymanski.)