The following is part one of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports interview with Reggie Littlejohn. To listen to the other parts, please check the link in the description.

Guangcheng Chen: Dear friends, I would like to see a few words about Reggie Littlejohn. I was persecuted because I exposed the violence and brutality of the Chinese Communist Party’s one child policy. For over seven years. I was held in prison and under house arrest. I didn’t know what was going on outside and no one could speak to me from outside.

During that time, Reggie Littlejohn began a campaign to try to free me. I didn’t know this until much later. She organized online campaigns and collected over 11,000 signatures for a petition. She spoke in the U.S. Congress and at the European Parliament about my case. I’m so grateful for her support and for her tireless work for human rights in China.

I wish her many more years of success for her foundation. Thank you, Reggie. Thank you, my friend.

Will Deatherage: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China. My name is Will Deatherage, the producer, and joining me today is a very special guest, Reggie Littlejohn. Reggie, could you introduce yourself and we can just launch right away into how you know Guangcheng and your role in his incredible story.

Reggie Littlejohn: I am the founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. And I’m an attorney. As an attorney, I represented a Chinese refugee in her case from political asylum in the mid nineties who had been forcibly sterilized, meaning that she had been taken out of her home, dragged out and held down to a table, and they performed a tubal ligation on her, which is abdominal surgery, without anesthesia.

She got an infection and she was basically permanently disabled. At the time that I represented her. So that’s when I learned that the Chinese propaganda that the one child policy was voluntary was actually just a lie and that it is enforced with forced abortion, forced sterilization, and infanticide.

I left the practice of law, and there’s a longer story to that as well. I actually, I’ll just mention that I got really, really sick at the end of my time as an attorney and I was on a medical leave of absence. I was actually disabled for like five years. During which time I was just praying to God, “If you let me live, if I survive, please make my life worth living.” And I also said, “Please break my heart for whatever breaks your heart.” So He broke my heart for the people like this woman who are victims of the one child policy.

I founded the organization Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, the first goal of which was to stop forced abortion under China’s one child policy. And during the time that I was sick, I became aware of Chen Guangcheng, just in the research that I was doing on the one child policy. And my heart just broke for him that he was this heroic, blind activist that had sacrificed everything to be able to bring to the attention of the world the fact that the one child policy was enforced to force abortion, forced sterilization, and was suffering horrifically for it in jail. At the time I found out about him, he was still in jail.

Will Deatherage: What year?

Reggie Littlejohn: Oh, gosh, this must have been. You know, I can’t even remember the exact year. Remember, I was just coming out of an illness when I was doing this. But I think it was in the 2009 timeframe, something like that. So, I launched basically a worldwide campaign to free him.

And, um, we did many things in that campaign, but I testified at the European parliament, the British parliament, the Irish parliament, the Canadian parliament, andI don’t know how many times before Congress about his situation and advocating for his freedom. And many, many times on Voice of America. I can’t even remember how many times I was on Voice of America, which is always a thrill, because when you’re on Voice of America, or at least at that time when you were on Voice of America, you are getting over the Chinese firewall and speaking directly to the Chinese people.

But we produced a video, a three minute video of Chen  Guangcheng that was, I think, possibly the most powerful tool in raising awareness internationally for his case. I hope that you can play that video here,because that video really shows his heroism, and also my determination to not stop until he’s free, and that we did an English version and a Chinese version.

So I was working with somebody inside of China whose English pen name is Pearl, and when she was doing actions inside of China for Chen Guangchen, she would send out that video over and over again to incite people or to inspire people to go visit him, which, of course, when people visited him they would get beaten up and dragged off. So it was a big deal to try to visit him. That’s how I got started with this work.

Will Deatherage: Yeah. Well, one of the themes of this podcast and Guangcheng loves to, at the end of every segment every week when he covers the human rights abuse, to state how Americans can help people in communist China. So, you know, you launched a campaign that made international headlines, that resulted in his freedom.

How did that look like, especially in the early days of it? You know, like I said, we like to educate people, maybe it can inspire others to get involved in similar ways with different stories like Guangcheng’s.

Reggie Littlejohn: You know, it’s kind of crazy how this started for me, because it was completely unintentional. This is sort of like God just calling me to this. So what happened, basically, and I’ll just tell it quickly, is I was very sick, like I said. But I was obsessed with just putting together what was going on with the one child policy. There was no coherent analysis of it. So anyway, I got myself onto just about every single Chinese human rights email list that there is, including one of a certain organization, which I will not name. That said, “Hey, we’re having this symposium at the European Parliament. Here’s our list of experts. Here is our list of issues.” And I emailed the president of the organization, who’s now a friend of mine, but I emailed him saying, “Well, what about the one child policy? How come nobody’s talking about the one child policy?”

And he emailed me back saying, “Well, don’t you realize, my dear, that the one child policy is a thing of the past and everything’s voluntary?” I said, “Oh, really?” And that’s when my sort of lawyerly instincts kicked in. It’s like, well, what about this document? What about this document? What about this document? What about this document? So finally he said, “I surrender, Miss Littlejohn, I see that the one child policy is enforced coercively. Will you be our expert, and will you come to Brussels at our expense and testify about the one child policy? That’s how it started, it’s crazy. Like, the last thing I thought was going to happen from my little email. I mean, I remember sitting in my little red pajamas and practically falling out of my chair getting invited. So I just, I started out, you know, testifying at the European parliament, and that testimony is now in a book. You can get it on Amazon. And I testified about Chen Guangcheng. So then I went back to my little sick bed, and I thought, “Okay, well, that was amazing, but it was also exhausting. I’m tired and I’m not going to do this anymore.”

And then all of a sudden, just, the media was just, you know, everybody wanted to know my opinion about anything that had to do with the one child policy. And so I said, “Well, I guess this is a thing. Maybe this is God’s answer to my prayer, to make my life worth living.”

And so then I just followed it and became like this world expert without ever having the intention of doing so. So, I mean, I don’t know how you replicate that

Will Deatherage: Your persistence, yeah. 

Reggie Littlejohn: But the persistence has to come from God because I had no strength. God will strengthen you. If He wants you to do something. He will provide the strength and the courage and the connections and the money for you to do it. I was in a position of complete submission to the Lord. I mean, I didn’t know whether I was going to live or whether I was going to die.

I was just like, “Okay, Lord, my life is in your hands. Please take me and make me, make my life worth living. May I glorify you with my life?” And, you know, it wasn’t like, “Lord, I want to do this. Please bless what I want to do.” It was like, “I’m yours. Do with me what you will.” And that’s what He’s chosen to do with me.

Will Deatherage: Well, I think that’s one of the reasons that the Communist Party is so afraid of things like faith, things like religion and all the strength that we draw from those sources, especially in the Catholic tradition, and the strength we draw from God that can overcome any earthly authority. 

So it’s wonderful to hear that that’s what motivated you, that’s how you fight the Communist Party and governments like that. 

The Barefoot Lawyer reports on China is proud to announce the publication of a report on Confucius Institutes and the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of American academic institutions.

To read the report, which was published by the Catholic University of America’s center for Human Rights, please go to catholic.edu chr and visit our research and analyses page.