In his new book, Chen Guangcheng writes that he used echoes to navigate his way to freedom
Chen Guangcheng escaped after being kept under house arrest for 20 mo
nths Photo: EPA
Washington8:23AM GMT 19 Mar 2015
It was a mystery that led many to question whether it was even possible: how did a totally blind Chinese dissident escape unaided from house arrest in a village in northeastern China from under the noses of dozens of local guards?
Now Chen Guangcheng, popularly known as the “Barefoot Lawyer”, has revealed that he escaped using a “bat-like echolocation” technique to navigate his way more than a mile to a neighbouring village and the safety of a friend’s home.
• Real life ‘Bat man’ uses echoes to navigate without sight
“I drew on an old skill I had developed when I was three or four years old, a kind of bat-like echolocation,” he writes in his new memoir, ‘The Barefoot Lawyer’, which is published this week.
“By making just the slightest ‘shhhh’ sound, no louder than a light wind in a pine tree, I could determine from the returning sound waves what was in front of me, whether large object or wall, forest or field.
“I hissed under my breath and listened carefully to the patter of the raindrops for clues about what surfaces were ahead of and around me.”
Mr Chen, 43, caused an international diplomatic incident when he took refuge in the US embassy in Beijing in the spring of 2012, forcing Hillary Clinton, the then secretary of state, into last-minute negotiations for his safe passage to the United States.
Now living in Washington DC and working as a fellow in human rights at the Witherspoon Institute, a Princeton-based think-tank, Mr Chen recalled his bat-like skills in a breathless account of his escape from the village of Dongshigu in Shandong Province on the night of April 20 2012.
Aided by his wife, Weijing, the 43-year-old lawyer waited for nearly 12 hours after first climbing on to the roof of his house, crossing a neighbour’s yard and crawling through three goat pens before – finally – reaching the edge of the heavily guarded village.
