A STATE-SECURITY officer peers over a pile of cornstalks, stacked high outside the home of Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who was released from jail in 2010, but who is now a prisoner in his own home.
The guard is staring straight into the lens, watchful, seemingly unconcerned about the attention, as Mr Chen’s farmhouse in northeastern Shandong province becomes his latest prison.
“I have come out of a small jail and walked into a bigger jail,” Mr Chen, who is blind, says in the video, released by the United States’ Christian activist group, ChinaAid. In the video, which was made 10 weeks after his release in September, he is wearing sunglasses as usual, but his moustache is new.
“No one is allowed to enter my home. Whenever fellow villagers try to help us, they are called accomplices and national traitors and counter-revolutionaries,” he says. It is the first contact by Mr Chen since his release.
The rights group Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Radio Free Asia reported that Mr Chen and his wife were beaten by police and security because of the video about their house arrest.
The security team has put devices into his neighbours’ houses to block phone calls, while only his 76-year-old mother is allowed to leave the house to buy food. As a cockerel crows outside, Mr Chen’s wife Yuan Weijing talks of her concerns for the couple’s two young children and weeps.
Mr Chen was jailed more than four years ago on trumped-up charges. His supporters say he was on trial for publishing a report about the status of women in his local area of Linyi, a region with about 10 million residents, which revealed how family-planning officials there enforced China’s one-child policy.
The report said tens of thousands of people were forced to undergo late-term abortions, or forcibly sterilised, and included accounts of men arrested while their wives were compelled to abort eight months into their pregnancies.
The government says no one is physically forced not to have children; since the policy was introduced, China has prevented over 400 million births.
Mr Chen was arrested after the report’s publication and jailed for “deliberately destroying public property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic”.
His conviction marked a major international setback to the image of China’s legal system.
Mr Chen was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Timemagazine in 2006 and has been the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay award and other international human rights awards over the years.
He is one of China’s most famous political dissidents, alongside jailed HIV/Aids campaigner Hu Jia and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, as well as the disappeared rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
Mr Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, is also under house arrest. It has not been possible to contact her since shortly after her husband won the prize in mid-October.
Mr Chen’s plight was mentioned by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton shortly before Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington last month.
Blind since childhood, Mr Chen is known as a self-taught “barefoot lawyer” for providing legal advice to peasants who say they have been victimised by official abuses.
He has done hard labour, with Amnesty International reporting that he was beaten in prison, tortured by guards. At one point he went on hunger strike to protest against his fate.
Anyone trying to enter his house is forced back by the 22- strong surveillance team, which comprises local officials and what witnesses say are paid thugs wielding clubs.
“Mr Chen is living in miserable conditions, cut off from all outside contact and detained illegally in his home,” said ChinaAid founder and president Bob Fu, of the video. It was provided to them by “a reliable government source who is sympathetic to Mr Chen’s cause”.