Outspoken Chinese Communist Party (CCP) critic and millionaire property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang (任志強) has been placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law,” an anti-graft watchdog said.
The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced late on Tuesday that the 69-year-old former chairman of the state-owned real-estate developer Beijing Huayuan Group (北京市華遠集團) was under investigation.
Rights campaigners have accused Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and the CCP of using charges such as “disciplinary violations” — often considered to refer to corruption — as a way to silence dissent.
Photo: AP
Beijing has stepped up its crackdown on civil society since Xi took power in 2012, tightening restrictions on freedom of speech, and detaining hundreds of activists and lawyers.
Ren disappeared from the public eye last month, shortly after penning an essay that was fiercely critical of Xi’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The retired entrepreneur has emerged in the past few years as one of the CCP’s most prominent critics in the business world.
His essay has been scrubbed from China’s Internet, which regularly censors content that challenges the authorities, but it has been shared online outside China and a copy has been saved by news aggregator China Digital Times.
“This epidemic has revealed the fact that the Party and government officials only care about protecting their own interests, and the monarch only cares about protecting their interests and core position,” Ren wrote, without referencing Xi by name.
It also accuses the government of concealing the initial outbreak.
Nicknamed “Big Cannon” for his fiery rhetoric, Ren formerly enjoyed close links with major figures in China’s political establishment, including his former classmate Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan (王岐山).
A CCP member for decades, Ren was also an influential blogger on Sina Weibo, where he had millions of followers. His account was closed by authorities in 2016 after he repeatedly called for greater freedom of the press.
Wang Yaqiu (王亞秋), a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the probe against Ren fitted a pattern of the CCP using charges such as “disciplinary violations” to silence its critics.
“It is quite clear that the Chinese government is punishing Ren for his speech critical of President Xi Jinping and Chinese government under the veneer of law. The government has a record of criminalizing peaceful speech using bogus charges,” Wang said.
Ren is likely being held in a form of extrajudicial secret detention known as liuzhi (留置), Wang said.
“Under liuzhi, detainees are held incommunicado — without access to lawyers or families — for up to six months,” Wang said.
Human rights lawyer Li Fangping (李方平) said the announcement was deliberately timed to minimize its effect, coming just hours before travel restrictions were lifted in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus first emerged.
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