Sydnie Kohara:
Blind activist Chen Guangcheng could be leaving China and coming to the US as soon as next week. The American embassy in Beijing says his US visa is ready.

The only thing now holding him up is his Chinese passport and exit visa. It generally takes about two weeks to process these travel documents, and Chen applied for them 11 days ago.

But there is another issue. Will the government investigate the detention, beatings and harassment Chen and his family suffered for 19 months in Shandong province? While he was on the run, Chen posted this video to YouTube appealing to Premier Wen Jiabao to investigate the conduct of officials in Shandong province.

Referring to those who kept him under house detention, broke into his house, and beat him, he said, "Whoever made the decision has to be investigated and punished according to law." While he says all these abuses are against the law, Chen charges that an official told him, "We don't care about the law. We are ignoring the law. So what're you going to do about it?"

What chance does Chen Guangcheng have in his appeal to Premier Wen? Will his charges be investigated, and will the guilty be punished?

To help us answer those questions, we have Mayling Birney on Skype. She's a political scientist at the London School of Economics and is studying how China's communist party governs. Welcome to LinkAsia, Mayling. Chen first got into trouble for defending people in Shandong province on land rights and forced abortions and sterilizations. Those practices are against Chinese law, aren't they?

Mayling Birney, London School of Economics:
That's right, they are against Chinese law. But actually China encourages, or forces, its local officials to uphold things that I call party mandates ahead of its own laws. So the most important mandates that the center puts forth are for social stability--what we can also think of as political stability, for economic development, and in many places, still for the One-Child Policy.

So since Chen threatened at least two of these mandates, so threatened the ability of the local government to maintain what it thought of as social stability and threatened their ability to implement the One-Child Policy, they saw him as a threat even though he was upholding China's own laws.

So it's not that Chinese officials don't get credit for upholding the laws, it's just that they don't get a lot of credit. So let me just give you an example. In one place that I studied, local officials get 40 percent of their evaluation points--so these are the points that will determine if they get rewarded, if they get demoted, promoted, punished--they get 40 percent of their points for how well they do on economic growth. But they only get 10 percent of their points for whether they act lawfully.

Sydnie Kohara:
Now, abuses of the family planning mandate, those forced abortions and sterilizations, as well as the house arrest and beatings Chen complains about in the video, all of these had to have been known to higher authorities, all the way to Beijing. Yet, Shandong officials, according to Chen, didn't seem worried. So does that mean that Chen's appeal to Wen Jiabao will likely fall on deaf ears?

Mayling Birney, London School of Economics:
If there's any positive response to that appeal, it won't be because central officials just found out about the situation. They've known about the situation. If anything positive comes of that, if those people are actually investigated, it will be because of the high-profile case, even higher-profile case this has become.

Or, alternatively, it will be because those officials may be punished not because they illegally held Chen Guangcheng under house arrest and they illegally beat him, but rather because they failed to do so effectively enough to keep him from getting away.

Sydnie Kohara:
Even though they have these mandates, can't the local officials act in a more humane and less coercive way to fulfill them and still do their jobs?

Mayling Birney, London School of Economics:
That's a good question, and what I will say is that many officials in China are very upright individuals, very honorable individuals, and they wouldn't do anything like that. But some officials are under more pressure than other officials. These mandates do come from the center, they do come from Beijing. But as they filter down from level to level, so from the provincial level to the district level, the details are filled in in terms of what exactly is the specific target you need to meet. But it all flows from the top in terms of what the priorities are. And Beijing will turn a blind eye to the unlawful means that are used to implement its highest priorities.

Sydnie Kohara:
Thanks, Mayling. Mayling Birney is a political scientist at the London School of Economics. You can learn more about her on our website.