China has thousands of Navalnys, hidden from the public

After watching “Navalny,” the documentary about Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese businesswoman messaged me: “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” She was talking about the retired real estate magnate who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for criticizing Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

After Mr. Navalny’s tragic death this month, a young dissident living in Berlin posted on X: “Teacher Li is the closest to the Chinese version of Navalny.” He was referring to the rebel influencer known as Teacher Li, who used social media to share information about protests in China and who now fears for his life.

There are others: Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in government custody in 2017, and Xu Zhiyong, the legal scholar serving a 14-year prison sentence on subversion charges.

The sad fact is that there is no Chinese equivalent of Mr Navalny, because there is no opposition party in China, and therefore no opposition leader.

It’s not for lack of trying. Many courageous Chinese rose up against the most powerful authoritarian government in the world. Since 2000, the humanitarian non-profit organization Duihua has recorded the cases of 48,699 political prisoners in China, of which 7,371 are now in custody. None of them have the kind of name recognition among the Chinese public that Mr. Navalny had in Russia.

Under President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia is very intolerant of dissent. Mr. Putin jails his critics and even hunts them into exile. In China, Navalny counterparts could not exist as high-profile figures. They would be silenced and imprisoned long before they could enter the public consciousness.

“Can you imagine if the PRC would give known political prisoners the continued access that Navalny had to public opinion through various direct and indirect methods?” Jerome Cohen, a retired law professor at New York University, wrote on X, referring to China’s full name, the People’s Republic of China.

That’s what members of China’s dissident community thought as they watched with sadness and horror the news of Mr. Navalny’s death. His death was tragic and his life heroic. But it was difficult for them to come to terms with the revelations that he could send hundreds of handwritten letters from prison. People wrote to him, paid 40 cents per page, and received scans of his responses. A video link of him behind bars during his final court hearing was released online.

“Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated periods in solitary confinement,” wrote my colleague Anton Troianovski, “he maintained a social media presence as members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt exile elite.”

None of that would be possible in China. The names of most Chinese political prisoners are censored online. Once arrested, they are never heard from again. No one can visit them except their immediate family members and their lawyers, although that is not guaranteed. Unable to communicate with the outside world, China’s political prisoners are left behind bars even as they face health problems – just as Mr Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, died of late-stage liver cancer while in prison. was in custody.

Some people call Mr. Ren, the retired real estate magnate, “China’s Navalny.” He once probably had the highest public profile among Chinese political prisoners. He was among the country’s most influential social media bloggers, with nearly 38 million followers. In 2016, his Weibo account was deleted after he criticized Mr Xi’s statement that all Chinese news media should serve the party.

When I mentioned it to a young Chinese person last year, the man looked at me blankly. He was 15 when Mr. Ren was silenced and had no idea who he was.

I have known Mr. Ren since 2010. But since his arrest in March 2020, I have had no direct communication with him. Neither do his friends. None of us have firsthand knowledge of his life in prison.

Days before his arrest, Mr. Ren told me that he was scheduled for a biopsy on suspicion of prostate cancer. For months I have heard from people communicating with his family that he is not receiving proper treatment for his prostate conditions and that he gets up dozens of times a night to go to the bathroom. I cannot contact members of his family because giving interviews to foreign media could get them in trouble.

Gao Zhisheng was a human rights lawyer who spent years in prison, was tortured and then disappeared in 2017. His family has not heard from him since. No one knows where he is or even if he is still alive. Nowadays, very few Chinese people know his name.

‘Their disappearance is a common phenomenon’ wrote Guo Yushan, an activist who helped lawyer Chen Guangcheng seek asylum in the United States in 2012. “They are threatened with extinction by the system, shunned and protected by mainstream society, forgotten by the public,” Mr Guo said. ‘And often the more thorough their resistance, the more thorough their disappearance.’

Mr. Guo wrote these words in 2013, the first year of Mr. Xi’s rule, for an organization that provided financial aid to families of political prisoners. Such programs would be unthinkable in China today. Mr Guo himself disappeared from public view after being released from nearly a year of detention in 2015.

In a society as tightly controlled as China under Mr. Xi, it is impossible for anyone to have the kind of influence that Mr. Navalny had. The Communist Party’s greatest fear is organizations and individuals that might challenge its rule. Therefore, the country does not like religious groups or non-governmental organizations. She fears entrepreneurs who she believes have the financial power and organizational skills to pose a threat to the party.

It snuffs out any spark that could possibly grow into a prairie fire.

Right now it seems to be obsessed with Teacher Li, a social media influencer with a cat avatar. Li Ying is a painter who in 2022 turned its Twitter account into a one-person news center that informs the Chinese public about news it is not receiving from the heavily censored media and internet. This week he urged his followers in China to unfollow him as police questioned some of them. Within a day, the number of his followers dropped from 1.6 million to 1.4 million.

Mr. Li, who lives in Milan, told me last year that he was psychologically preparing for the possibility that he might be killed.

Russia has learned from China how to control its population in the age of social media. It has blocked most major Western platforms except YouTube since the invasion of Ukraine two years ago. With the death of Mr Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure, it could be difficult for other opposition leaders, many in exile, to build a national following like him.

Regardless of the various forms of authoritarianism they face, Russian and Chinese political prisoners share the aspiration that their countries are not doomed and will become normal, democratic and free.

They’re all Navalnys.

Mr Navalny chose to return to Russia even though he knew he would be arrested. Xu Zhiyong, the legal scholar serving a 14-year prison sentence, made a similar choice.

In 2013 he has wrote in an essay that between home and prison he chose the latter. It was a painful choice for him, but he felt like he couldn’t not make the decision he made. After he was released from prison in 2017, he said he was ready to go back.

“For years,” he said wrote on January 1, 2020: “I’ve been thinking about what would be more valuable to my country: staying in prison or staying out.”

A month later he was arrested again.