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.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS