Chen Guangcheng – the brave Chinese activist who David Cameron refused to meet

How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week I met up with him in London.

Chen, who is 41, has been blind since childhood and wears smart dark glasses. At our meeting place in central London — the headquarters of a Christian organisation which has helped arrange his visit — he sits upright, suited and tied, occasionally repositioning himself by feeling the corners of the table.

He does not share the world’s fascination with his personal story. ‘What I want to tell about my past story most is the rule of law situation in China. It is far worse than the ordinary Briton or the international community has been told by the Chinese propaganda.’

He traces his own awakening about what the Communist party is really like to the 1990s. Having tried to raise awareness of the gruesome realities of the party’s ‘one-child policy’, he met with resistance at the local level. In 1996 he took his petition to the central government and met with the same response. ‘That made me realise it’s the same from local to central. It made me realise it was a mistaken idea that only the local guys are bad guys and the central government guys are good guys.’ The system was rotten throughout.

‘The one-child policy has been very, very, very bad throughout.’ Yet even those cases which have been publicised are, he says, ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The morning before we meet he has received information from his home town of a woman who was nine months pregnant being dragged away and having her baby ‘forcefully aborted’.