HispanicBusiness

Plain-clothes security officers blocked Hollywood star Christian Bale's attempts to meet a blind legal activist in eastern China, shoving him and a CNN news crew and trying to seize their cameras, the US broadcaster said on Friday.

CNN footage showed Bale and the camera crew confronted by several security guards on Thursday on a road leading to Dongshigu village in Shandong province, where activist Chen Guangcheng is held under house arrest.

The security guards pushed several members of the group, including Bale, and tried to grab a television camera and Bale's compact camera.

The CNN group returned to their van and were followed for several kilometres before they headed back to Beijing, where Bale has been promoting his film "The Flowers of War," a wartime drama directed in China by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

"What I really wanted to do was to meet the man, shake his hand and say what an inspiration he is," Bale said of Chen.

"This doesn't come naturally to me, this is not what I actually enjoy - it isn't about me," the actor told CNN. "But this was just a situation that said I can't look the other way."

Freeing Chen has become a cause celebre for Chinese rights activists.

Scores of activists have tried to meet him in recent months but all of them were repelled by the dozens of security guards posted around the village.

Many of the activists said they were beaten and some said they were robbed of mobile phones, cameras, cash and other valuables.

Police reportedly released Christian activist Wang Xuezhen, who tried to visit Chen several times this year, and her husband on Thursday after holding them in illegal detention for two weeks.

"I'm not brave doing this," Bale said. "The local people who are standing up to the authorities, who are visiting Chen and his family and getting beaten or detained, I want to support them."

Chen, 40, was left blind by a childhood illness. He has been held under house arrest since he finished a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence in September 2010.

The self-taught legal activist gained national prominence in 2005 when he supported dozens of locals accusing family-planning officials of forcibly sterilizing thousands of women and obliging some pregnant women to undergo late-term abortions. >