Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal advocate who challenged the Chinese government over its harsh family planning policies, is nothing if not a politically astute survivor. He outsmarted the phalanx of guards who kept him under house arrest and then made his way into the American Embassy, setting off a diplomatic crisis that was resolved only after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton intervened and negotiated his freedom.
Mark Makela for The New York Times
Chen Guangcheng; his wife, Yuan Weijing; and their children, last month on a visit to Pittsburgh.
But Mr. Chen’s political savvy has not translated well in the complex and fiercely partisan terrain he has encountered in the United States. Even before he could recover from jet lag in May 2012, Mr. Chen was besieged by human rights activists, opponents of abortion and an array of politicians from both parties eager to harness the celebrity wattage of the man who stood up to the Chinese Communist Party.
His sponsors at New York University cautioned Mr. Chen to stay clear of a partisan minefield he did not understand. “I told Chen there was a presidential election coming up and he should spend a year studying the American political landscape before wading in,” said Jerome A. Cohen, a law professor and close confidant.
That advice, friends say, never really sank in, and Mr. Chen, 41, has found himself enmeshed in controversy. Backed by a coterie of conservative figures, Mr. Chen has publicly accused N.Y.U. of bowing to Chinese government pressure and prematurely ending his fellowship this summer. The university says the fellowship was intended to be for only one year. Some of those around Mr. Chen also accuse the university of trying to shield him from conservative activists.
The sparring has grown fierce, with N.Y.U. officials accusing one of those conservative activists, Bob Fu, the president of a Texas-based Christian group that seeks to pressure China over its religious restrictions, of trying to track Mr. Chen surreptitiously through a cellphone and a tablet computer that Mr. Fu’s organization donated to him.
The controversy kicked up by Mr. Chen’s accusations against N.Y.U. have dismayed some of his supporters so much that a wealthy donor who had pledged to finance a three-year visiting scholar position for him at Fordham University recently withdrew the offer. That means Mr. Chen, who declined to be interviewed for this article and who returns to New York from a visit to Taiwan on Thursday, has to line up another source of financing. If that does not pan out, he will be left with a single job offer: from the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative research organization in New Jersey that is perhaps best known for its opposition to same-sex marriage and stem cell research.
The sniping has become a distraction from Mr. Chen’s work pressuring Beijing, but he is by no means the first Chinese activist to find his voice muted after arriving on American shores.
Since the late 1980s, a long list of high-profile Chinese exiles who were granted refuge in the United State have found their work diminished, or their reputations compromised. Some, like Chai Ling, a student organizer during the Tiananmen protests who later embraced evangelical Christianity, alienated many of her supporters by repeatedly suing the creators of a documentary that she says defamed her. Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in Chinese prisons for his pro-democracy activism, was feted by Congress and human rights groups after his arrival in 1997, but later became far less prominent after feuding with other activists.
“You have to be a tough nut to be a dissident, but those same qualities don’t always serve them well outside China,” said Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has helped many Chinese exiles adapt to life in the United States.
Friends of Mr. Chen say that he has been eager to solicit others’ advice, but that he has often been swayed by the last person with whom he spoke. Although they describe him as fiercely principled, they say he may have overestimated his ability to navigate the partisan shoals of American domestic politics. “Chen often told me he had no interest in siding with the Democratic or Republican Party, but that he was on the side of democracy and freedom,” said Hu Jia, a Chinese dissident who frequently speaks with him on Skype. “I think that maybe he got in over his head.”
Even before he landed at Newark Liberty Airport last year, veteran human rights advocates predicted a tug of war over Mr. Chen and his superhero élan, both among elected officials and the tangle of Chinese exile groups that often vie for attention and scarce financing.
John Kamm, the director of the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that advocates for Chinese political prisoners, said at the time that the prospect of someone with Mr. Chen’s profile coming to the United States was electrifying. “In the dissident community, someone with his kind of stature doesn’t come along every day,” Mr. Kamm said shortly before Mr. Chen arrived. “His face, with those sunglasses, is the kind of Che Guevara-like image you can stick on a T-shirt.”
Among those most eager to stake a claim on Mr. Chen’s celebrity was Mr. Fu, whose organization, China Aid, played a high-profile role in publicizing his long persecution at the hands of the local officials in Shandong Province, which included nearly six years of jail and house arrest.
Most dramatically, it was Mr. Fu, during a Congressional hearing convened by Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, who held aloft the cellphone that allowed Mr. Chen to plead for refuge in the United States as he recovered in a Beijing hospital from the injuries sustained during his escape.
After Epic Escape From China, Exile Is Mired in Partisan U.S.
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