Dissident at the Doorstep Crooked Media
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- News
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What happens when someone becomes a human-rights icon – but then turns out to stand for something else entirely? Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng was locked up for fighting against China’s One Child Policy and suffered years of unlawful imprisonment. In 2012, following a daring midnight escape, he landed in the United States a hero. But that’s only the beginning of his story. Just a few years later, he would re-enter the spotlight as an avid Trump supporter and a “Stop the Steal” rally-goer. How did this happen? Alison Klayman, Colin Jones, and Yangyang Cheng set out on a journey to find out – did Guangcheng change, or was he totally misunderstood from the beginning? From Crooked Media, This is Dissident At The Doorstep.
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Introducing “Dissident At The Doorstep”
What happens when someone becomes a human-rights icon – but then turns out to stand for something else entirely? Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng was locked up for fighting against China’s One Child Policy and suffered years of unlawful imprisonment. In 2012, following a daring midnight escape, he landed in the United States a hero. But that’s only the beginning of his story. Just a few years later, he would re-enter the spotlight as an avid Trump supporter and a “Stop the Steal” rally-goer. How did this happen? Alison Klayman, Colin Jones, and Yangyang Cheng set out on a journey to find out – did Guangcheng change, or was he totally misunderstood from the beginning? From Crooked Media, This is Dissident At The Doorstep.
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Episode 1: Batman Gets Punched
It’s 2011. Hollywood A-lister Christian Bale is in China and gets punched in the face by security guards for trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, a local human rights activist under house arrest. It’s all captured by a CNN crew and broadcast across the world. A few months later Guangcheng would escape to the United States. But after you arrive in America as a hero, what happens next?
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Episode 2: The Barefoot Lawyer
Guangcheng fights his biggest case in China – exposing the brutality of the One Child Policy. This, and a series of public and legal victories in the early 2000s, makes him into an icon in the US and an enemy of the state in China, an unlikely place for a blind man who grew up in a poor village. So how did it all begin? We talk to Guangcheng himself to find out.
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Episode 3: A Dissident Is Born
Guangcheng is kidnapped by Chinese authorities and thrown in jail. By keeping him under lock and key, the government hopes to take away his power.
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Episode 4: Coming To America
Guangcheng escapes house arrest, but he’s not free yet. Without a real plan or a place to hide, he turns to the US embassy in Beijing. His moves set in motion a diplomatic maelstrom, where top officials from the two most powerful countries in the world negotiate over his fate – and their own.
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Episode 5: Guangcheng’s Year of Living Famously
Following a tense negotiation between the US and China, Guangcheng arrives in the United States. He is greeted with a hero’s welcome. He gives speeches. He wins awards. And he tries to adjust to life in New York, hosted by NYU. But quickly cracks start to emerge beneath the glamorous facade.
Customer Reviews
Great
I love the way they speak about the 45th president. They went easy on him. Rapist dirt bag
Some People Are Easily Triggered
They heard a host say that they were disappointed by for president Trump’s election to power and also at the steady march toward climate change etc in EP1 and people in these reviews have lost their minds. A host of the show also said that people on the left had tied their hopes to the figure covered by this show because they wanted to feel good about themselves ‘doing the right thing’.
The nature of the show is about the perceived shifting of politics by a Chinese activist. It would be weird not to cover the, you know, political impact of that. Since that’s, you know, a bit of what the show is about.
You can tell what the hosts’ political values are. But the reporting here feels pretty balanced and not shouted from some very High horse. I recommend.
Sounds like a political hit piece
I was interested to learn more about Cheng Guangcheng. But this is really just a political piece trying to neutralize his support of MAGA. Not a MAGA fan myself, but I feel this type of “journalism” is why people are becoming more and more disinterested in it.