The soft-spoken Yuan Weijing may be one of the bravest people in China. Over the past two years, the 31-year-old woman has been followed constantly, insulted, threatened, beaten and kidnapped. But despite the pressure, the mother of two has refused to back down.
While the police have failed to offer any justification for the treatment of the young woman, the reason is understood. Ms Yuan is the wife of Chen Guangcheng , a blind activist who has exposed forced sterilisations and late-stage abortions by family planning officials in Linyi , in his native Shandong province .
Ms Yuan says her situation is 'extremely bad'. Her house is guarded by two separate shifts of seven police, who stand there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She says she's only allowed to go out to buy food, and can't even visit her four-year-old son, who is living with her mother in another town. 'My teeth hurt, but they won't let me see a dentist,' she says in a telephone interview. 'I'm in a lot of pain, but I can't force my way past them. I'm just one woman with a child and they're seven men.'
Chen was charged with 'deliberately damaging property and gathering a mob to disrupt traffic' in June last year, and in August was sentenced to four years and three months in prison. Ms Yuan and her lawyers say the charges were trumped up and the trial was a farce. Key witnesses say they were coerced by the police into lying, and others did not show up at the trial after police threatened them. Chen had to be represented by court-appointed lawyers after the authorities detained three members of his defence team the night before his trial.
After visiting her husband in prison and seeing he was injured - he was apparently beaten by other inmates on the orders of prison officials for refusing to shave his head - she became even more determined to fight for his release.
In order to get the word out on how her husband was being treated, Ms Yuan made a daring escape on July 3. Under the pretext of going out to shop for vegetables, she visited a neighbour. While the police relaxed their guard outside, she slipped out the back door, climbed over three walls, and then walked to a nearby bus station where a relative was waiting with her two-year-old daughter. Mother and child then boarded a bus for the 10-hour ride to the capital.