Chen Guangcheng

Since 2010, scores of Chinese rights activists sought to challenge his extralegal detention by flocking to Dongshigu village in futile attempts to see him. The journeys, many of them publicized through social media, always ended the same way: The guards paid to keep Mr. Chen and his family incommunicado would use violence to drive visitors away. 

For months, he played a cat-and-mouse game with the phalanx of guards encircling his home. He dug a tunnel to try to escape, a friend says, but was found out. And he sneaked out a video that alerted his supporters to the smothering confinement he said he and his wife endured at the hands of the men who kept them virtual prisoners in their rural farmhouse.

Then on April 22, Mr. Chen scaled the wall that had been built around his house, slipped past his security detail and made a desperate sprint to apparent safety in Beijing. The daring rush for freedom could not have been possible without a small network of activists who risked detention to help him and who, supporters with knowledge of the escape said, used coded messages to communicate and elude a surveillance apparatus that is one of the world’s most pervasive.

That the underground network of activists was able to help Mr. Chen evade his captors and move around the capital undetected for days has undoubtedly shaken Chinese leaders, who have become increasingly determined to suppress dissent through technology and brute force. Friends say his escape was so well executed that local officials did not realize for days that he was gone.

Mr. Chen injured a foot during his escape, and when he left the embassy was walking with the aid of a crutch.

During his time at the embassy, Mr. Chen adhered to his position that he was not seeking asylum in the United States but wanted to stay with his family in China as a free person.

His escape put the United States in a delicate position, caught between a desire to affirm its support of human rights in China, while not wishing to cause a rift with Beijing at a time when it was seeking to work more closely on issues like Iran, Syria and North Korea.

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