A Chinese cartoonist whose anonymous political satire earned him comparisons with Banksy — and the wrath of Beijing — has outed himself as a former law school student who became politicized after watching a Tiananmen Square documentary in a dorm room.
Badiucao (巴丟草), whose subversive pieces regularly mock Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), has revealed his face and his personal story for the first time in the hope that it would help protect him from Chinese authorities.
He said that he and his family have been under threat ever since he was forced to cancel a highly anticipated show in Hong Kong last year, with Chinese police allegedly telling relatives that “there would be no mercy” if he did not pull out.
“I don’t think the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] will ever forget or forgive its enemies, which in this case is me,” he told reporters from Melbourne, where he lives.
“The only way to defeat that kind of terror is to expose everything openly ... so everyone around in the world can see what’s going in China,” he said.
Badiucao, 33, grew up in Shanghai and was considering a career as a lawyer until one night when he and three friends began to watch a downloaded Taiwanese drama. They were unaware that the file had The Gate of Heavenly Peace (天安門) — a detailed documentary about the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters — spliced in.
The group was transfixed. None of the young men — all students at East China University of Political Science and Law — had ever heard of the uprising or its bloody ending, thanks to CCP censors and the “Great Firewall.”
“It was three hours. Everybody just sat there and the room was completely dark. Nobody even got up to turn on a light,” Badiucao said. “Not a single teacher talked about that issue in law school.”
FREEDOM IN AUSTRALIA
Haunted by this new knowledge and the memory of his grandfather who died in a concentration camp during the anti-intellectual movement of the late 1950s, he left for Australia to begin a career satirizing political suppression.
When reporters visited his makeshift studio in Melbourne, it was clear that the space — a shipping container — was designed to be moved at short notice.
The artwork inside featured Badiucao’s typically political works: a portrait of fellow dissident artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) and a three-panel painting based on the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian refugee who drowned trying to make it to Europe.
After a detour into teaching at a kindergarten, Badiucao’s first solo international exhibition and his first in a Chinese territory was scheduled for November last year in Hong Kong.
Billed as “black comedy for Hong Kong, China and the world,” he had secretly used Alibaba’s online marketplace Taobao.com to commission factories in China to produce his works.
Among them was a portrait of Xi and Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥), their faces merged to highlight growing fears that freedoms in the territory are deteriorating in the face of an increasingly assertive Beijing.
Another was of late Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) and his widow Liu Xia (劉俠) — both faceless, but whose outlines glow in neon light.
FAMILY THREATENED
That work followed a performance organized by Badiucao a few months prior, at the Louvre Museum in Paris, in which volunteers held up large cloth prints of the Mona Lisa sporting Liu Xia’s glasses and shaved haircut in front of the original painting itself.
However, three days before the Hong Kong opening, Badiucao said that he was contacted by his family to say that relatives in China had been taken by police for questioning.
It is a tactic that has been routinely deployed by Chinese authorities to silence Uighur dissidents living overseas.
“My family in China had no idea what I’m doing,” he said. “They got told I’m having this exhibition in Hong Kong and the message from the police is pretty clear: They want me to shut down everything.”
Police threatened to send two officers from China to the opening — which would have been in breach of Hong Kong’s rules, he added.
Badiucao felt that he had no option, but to comply.
Chinese authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
Beijing had initially been ignorant of who he really was, he said, but they were able to piece together his identity after a fellow dissident revealed on Twitter that he was working as Ai’s assistant in Berlin.
There was no longer reason to hide his real identity, he said, adding that he has abandoned the full face masks he wore at public appearances.
The 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on Tuesday seemed like a good moment to make the revelation “as a way to remember their courage,” he said. “Those young bodies can be crushed by a tank, but their spirit lives and they give me the power to step out.”
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