It has all the makings of a spellbinding screenplay: A blind Chinese dissident outwits a communist regime’s thugs to escape house arrest and seek sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
Chen Guangcheng scaled walls, crossed fields, slept in a pig pen, injured a foot, and — after 17 hours — connected with an activist he’d never met who drove him toward the capital with the help of an underground network. All this under the eye of China’s domestic security system, which has a bigger annual budget than the nation’s military.
