After watching “Navalny,” the documentary about the Russian opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese businesswoman messaged me, “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” She was speaking about 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 dwelling in Berlin posted on X, “Teacher Li is closest to the Chinese version 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 fees of subversion.
The unhappy reality is that there’s no Chinese equal of Mr. Navalny as a result of there’s no opposition social gathering in China, and due to this fact no opposition chief.
It’s not for lack of attempting. Many brave Chinese stood as much as the strongest authoritarian authorities in the world. Since 2000, the nonprofit humanitarian group Duihua has recorded the circumstances of 48,699 political prisoners in China, with 7,371 now in custody. None of them has the sort of identify recognition amongst the Chinese public that Mr. Navalny did in Russia.
Under President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia is extremely 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 public consciousness.
“Can you imagine the PRC giving noted political prisoners the continuing access that Navalny had to public opinion via various direct and indirect methods?” Jerome Cohen, a retired legislation 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 neighborhood had 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 laborious for them to course of the revelations that he was in a position to ship a whole bunch of handwritten letters from jail. People wrote to him, paying 40 cents a web page, and obtained scans of his responses. A video link of him behind bars throughout his final court docket look was launched on-line.
“Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement,” my colleague Anton Troianovski wrote, “he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team 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 isn’t assured. China’s political prisoners can not correspond with the outdoors world and are left to rot behind bars, even when they’re combating well being issues — precisely how Mr. Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died from late-stage liver most cancers in authorities custody.
Some individuals name Mr. Ren, the retired actual property tycoon, “China’s Navalny.” He as soon as had most likely the highest public profile amongst Chinese political prisoners. He was amongst the nation’s most influential social media bloggers, with almost 38 million followers. In 2016, his Weibo account was deleted after he criticized Mr. Xi’s declaration that each one Chinese information media needed to serve the social gathering.
Last 12 months, after I talked about him to a younger Chinese, the man 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 mates. None of us has firsthand information of his life in jail.
Days earlier than his arrest, Mr. Ren informed 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 situations and that he’s getting up a dozen instances an evening to go to the rest room. 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 common occurrence,” wrote Guo Yushan, an activist who helped the lawyer Chen Guangcheng search asylum in the United States in 2012. “They are driven to extinction by the system, shunned and guarded against by mainstream society, forgotten by the public,” Mr. Guo stated. “And often, the more thorough their resistance, the more thorough their disappearance.”
Mr. Guo wrote these phrases in 2013, the first 12 months of Mr. Xi’s rule, for a company that supplied monetary help to households of political prisoners. Such packages can be unimaginable in China as we speak. Mr. Guo himself disappeared from public view after being launched from almost a 12 months of detention in 2015.
In a society as tightly managed as China beneath Mr. Xi, it’s inconceivable for anybody to have the type of affect that Mr. Navalny had. The Communist Party’s biggest concern is organizations and people that might 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 social gathering.
It snuffs out any spark that might probably develop right into a prairie fireplace.
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 information 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 some of them. Within a day, the quantity of his followers fell to 1.4 million from 1.6 million.
Mr. Li, who lives in Milan, informed me final 12 months that he was getting ready himself psychologically for the risk that he may very well be murdered.
Russia has been studying from China how you can exert management over its individuals in 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, the most outstanding 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 totally different kinds of authoritarianism they face, Russian and Chinese political prisoners share the aspiration that their international locations are usually not doomed and can change into regular, democratic and free.
They’re all Navalnys.
Mr. Navalny selected to return to Russia although he knew he can be arrested. Xu Zhiyong, the authorized scholar who’s serving 14 years in jail, made an analogous 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 many years,” he wrote on Jan. 1, 2020, “I’ve been thinking which would be more valuable for my country: staying in jail or remaining out of it.”
A month later, he was arrested once more.
