EGN NEWS DESK
After watching “Navalny,” the documentary concerning the Russian opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese businesswoman messaged me, “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” She was speaking concerning the retired actual property tycoon who was sentenced to 18 years in jail for criticizing China’s chief, Xi Jinping.
After Mr. Navalny’s tragic loss of life this month, a younger dissident residing in Berlin posted on X, “Teacher Li is closest to the Chinese model of Navalny.” He was referring to the insurgent influencer often known as Teacher Li, who used social media to share details about protests in China and who now fears for his life.
There are others: Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in authorities custody in 2017, and Xu Zhiyong, the authorized scholar who’s serving 14 years in jail on expenses of subversion.
The unhappy truth is that there’s no Chinese equal of Mr. Navalny as a result of there’s no opposition party in China, and due to this fact no opposition chief.
It’s not for lack of making an attempt. Many brave Chinese stood as much as essentially the most highly effective authoritarian authorities on this planet. Since 2000, the nonprofit humanitarian group Duihua has recorded the instances of 48,699 political prisoners in China, with 7,371 now in custody. None of them has the kind of identify recognition among the many Chinese public that Mr. Navalny did in Russia.
Under President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia is very illiberal of dissent. Mr. Putin jails his critics and hunts them down even in exile. In China, Navalny counterparts as high-profile figures couldn’t exist. They can be silenced and jailed lengthy earlier than they might attain the general public consciousness.
“Can you think about the PRC giving famous political prisoners the persevering with entry that Navalny needed to public opinion through numerous direct and oblique strategies?” Jerome Cohen, a retired regulation professor at New York University, wrote on X, referring to China’s full identify, the People’s Republic of China.
That was what members of the Chinese dissident group have been considering as they watched the information of Mr. Navalny’s loss of life with grief and horror. His loss of life was tragic and his life heroic. But it was exhausting for them to course of the revelations that he was in a position to ship lots of of handwritten letters from jail. People wrote to him, paying 40 cents a web page, and obtained scans of his responses. A video hyperlink of him behind bars throughout his final courtroom look was launched on-line.
“Despite more and more harsh circumstances, together with repeated stints in solitary confinement,” my colleague Anton Troianovski wrote, “he maintained a presence on social media, whereas members of his workforce continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.”
None of that will be potential in China. The names of most Chinese political prisoners are censored on-line. Once arrested, they’re by no means heard from once more. No one can go to them besides their direct relations and their attorneys, though that’s not assured. China’s political prisoners can not correspond with the skin world and are left to rot behind bars, even when they’re fighting well being issues — precisely how Mr. Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died from late-stage liver most cancers in authorities custody.
Some folks name Mr. Ren, the retired actual property tycoon, “China’s Navalny.” He as soon as had most likely the very best public profile amongst Chinese political prisoners. He was among the many nation’s most influential social media bloggers, with practically 38 million followers. In 2016, his Weibo account was deleted after he criticized Mr. Xi’s declaration that every one Chinese information media needed to serve the party.
Last 12 months, after I talked about him to a younger Chinese, the person gave me a clean look. He was 15 when Mr. Ren was silenced and had no concept who he was.
I’ve recognized Mr. Ren since 2010. But since his arrest in March 2020, I’ve had no direct communication with him. Nor have his buddies. None of us has firsthand data of his life in jail.
Days earlier than his arrest, Mr. Ren instructed me that he was scheduled for a biopsy on suspicion of prostate most cancers. For months, I’ve heard from individuals who communicated along with his household that he’s not getting correct therapy for his prostate circumstances and that he’s getting up a dozen occasions an evening to go to the bathroom. I can not attain out to members of his household as a result of giving interviews to overseas media can get them in hassle.
Gao Zhisheng was a human rights lawyer who spent years in jail and was tortured, after which disappeared in 2017. His household has not heard from him since. No one is aware of his whereabouts and even whether or not he’s alive. By now, only a few Chinese know his identify.
“Their disappearance is a standard prevalence,” wrote Guo Yushan, an activist who helped the lawyer Chen Guangcheng search asylum within the United States in 2012. “They are pushed to extinction by the system, shunned and guarded in opposition to by mainstream society, forgotten by the general public,” Mr. Guo stated. “And usually, the extra thorough their resistance, the extra thorough their disappearance.”
Mr. Guo wrote these phrases in 2013, the primary 12 months of Mr. Xi’s rule, for a corporation that provided monetary help to households of political prisoners. Such applications can be unimaginable in China at this time. Mr. Guo himself disappeared from public view after being launched from practically a 12 months of detention in 2015.
In a society as tightly managed as China underneath Mr. Xi, it’s unattainable for anybody to have the type of affect that Mr. Navalny had. The Communist Party’s best concern is organizations and people that would problem its rule. That’s why it doesn’t like non secular teams or nongovernmental organizations. It fears entrepreneurs who it believes have the monetary energy and organizational abilities to pose a risk to the party.
It snuffs out any spark that would probably develop right into a prairie hearth.
Right now it appears to be obsessive about Teacher Li, a social media influencer with a cat avatar. Li Ying is a painter who in 2022 turned his Twitter account right into a one-person information hub that informs the Chinese public of stories it doesn’t obtain from the closely censored media and web. This week, he urged his followers in China to unfollow him as a result of police questioned a few of them. Within a day, the variety of his followers fell to 1.4 million from 1.6 million.
Mr. Li, who lives in Milan, instructed me final 12 months that he was getting ready himself psychologically for the likelihood that he may very well be murdered.
Russia has been studying from China how one can exert management over its folks within the social media age. It has blocked most main Western platforms besides YouTube since its invasion of Ukraine two years in the past. With the loss of life of Mr. Navalny, essentially the most distinguished opposition determine, it may very well be troublesome for different opposition leaders, largely in exile, to construct up a nationwide following as he did.
No matter the completely different types of authoritarianism they face, Russian and Chinese political prisoners share the aspiration that their international locations aren’t doomed and can grow to be regular, democratic and free.
They’re all Navalnys.
Mr. Navalny selected to return to Russia regardless that he knew he can be arrested. Xu Zhiyong, the authorized scholar who’s serving 14 years in jail, made the same alternative.
In 2013, he wrote in an essay that between dwelling and jail, he selected the latter. It was a painful alternative for him, however he felt he couldn’t not make the choice he did. After he was launched from jail in 2017, he stated, he was prepared to return once more.
“For a few years,” he wrote on Jan. 1, 2020, “I’ve been considering which might be extra worthwhile for my nation: staying in jail or remaining out of it.”
A month later, he was arrested once more.
