Ronald Reagan’s Lessons for the Chen Guangcheng Case
China’s blind activist expertly used the power of the U.S. to magnify his cause. In this article from The Daily Beast, Senior Scholar Walter Reich describes how Obama should keep up the pressure: by taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s dealings with Russia.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” That’s what Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, said 2,300 years ago. And that’s what Chen Guangcheng, the blind rights lawyer who escaped house arrest in rural China in a dash to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, tried to do.
Chen’s lever was the nobility of his cause to protect Chinese women from forced abortions and sterilizations. That lever was made long by friends who used social media and a congressional hearing to highlight that cause.
The fulcrum he used was American power—the presence in China of the American secretaries of state and treasury, there to negotiate matters of security and trade.
Read the full article in The Daily Beast.
About the Author
Walter Reich
Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior, and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at The George Washington University; a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center; and a former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
