Kai Chen, possibly the best forward in China’s national basketball team in the late 1970s, quit the team at the peak of his career to break free of the Chinese authorities’ manipulation. However, his love for basketball never diminished.
In 1981, after his marriage in Beijing to Susan, an American exchange student, Chen moved to Los Angeles. He had yearned to visit the U.S. ever since he had played against the American team in Mexico in the summer of 1975.
“Before I knew there was a country called America, America had already saved me, because America invented basketball. So I am always grateful to America. My connection to America started with basketball,” he said.
He graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor in Political Science and published an autobiography about his life in China, “One in a Billion—Journey Toward Freedom”
“I really wanted to rethink and reinterpret the entire struggle I went through in China,” said Chen, now a real estate investor with two grown daughters.
In August 2007, Chen launched the Global Olympic Freedom T-shirt Movement in Taipei, Taiwan, to “express the true spirit of the Olympics—the spirit of freedom.” Between then and the start of the Beijing Games a year later, he ran in ten cities on four continents, including New York, Berlin, Sydney, and Vancouver.
“The Chinese regime wanted to use the Beijing Olympics to legitimize themselves. The Chinese torch was an offensive by the regime onto the world’s conscience, basically to confuse the world and to intimidate the world. And at the same time to unite Chinese nationalists around the world, which is what they did.”
After reaching the stadium in Berlin where Hitler held his 1936 Olympics, Chen ran six miles from there to the Berlin Wall to symbolize freedom from tyranny.
When the Chinese regime crumbles just like that of East Germany, said Chen, he hopes a “Chinese Holocaust Memorial” can be built to remember those who have been “persecuted and murdered” by the regime, just like the one to commemorate the Jews beside the stadium in Berlin.
“I want all people in the world to know: One day, human beings will eventually progress from despotism and tyranny to reach freedom. When that day comes, I will go back to a free China and also run a freedom run. I believe that day will come—and it will come soon.”
