After watching “Navalny,” the documentary about Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese businesswoman texted me: “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” He was talking about the retired property tycoon who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for criticizing China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
After Mr Navalny’s tragic death this month, a young dissident living in Berlin posted on X: “Master Li is closer to the Chinese version of Navalny.” He was referring to the rebel influencer known as Master Li, who used social media to share information about protests in China and who now fears for his life.
There are others: Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in state custody in 2017, and Xu Zhiyong, the legal scholar serving 14 years in prison on subversion charges.
The sad fact is that there is no Chinese counterpart to 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 resisted the most powerful authoritarian government in the world. Since 2000, the non-profit humanitarian organization Duihua has documented the cases of 48,699 political prisoners in China, with 7,371 now in custody. None of them have the type of name recognition with the Chinese public that Mr. Navalny did in Russia.
Under President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia is extremely intolerant of dissent. Mr. Putin imprisons his critics and even pursues them in exile. In China, Navalny’s counterparts as high-profile figures could not exist. They will be silenced and imprisoned long before they can reach public awareness.
“Can you imagine the DPRK giving important political prisoners the continued access that Navalny had to public opinion through various direct and indirect methods?” Jerome Cohen, emeritus professor of law at New York University; He wrote in X, referring to China’s full name, People’s Republic of China.
That’s what members of the Chinese dissident community were thinking as they watched news of Mr Navalny’s death with sadness and horror. His death was tragic and his life heroic. But it was difficult for them to process the revelations that he was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters from prison. People wrote to him, paying 40 cents a page, and received scans of his replies. A video link of him behind bars during his last court appearance has been released online.
“Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated periods of solitary confinement,” wrote my colleague Anton Troianovski, “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 this would be possible in China. The names of most Chinese political prisoners are censored online. Once captured, they are never heard from again. No one can visit them except immediate relatives and their lawyers, although this is not guaranteed. China’s political prisoners cannot correspond with the outside world and are left to rot behind bars, even as they battle health problems — just how Mr. Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died of late-stage liver cancer under state detention.
Some call Mr. Ren, the retired property tycoon, “China’s Navalny.” He once had perhaps the highest public profile among Chinese political prisoners. He was one of 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 media should serve the party.
Last year, when I mentioned it to a young Chinese man, the man gave me a blank look. She was 15 years old 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 not had any direct contact with him. Neither did his friends. None of us know firsthand what life is like in prison.
Days before his arrest, Mr. Wren told me he was scheduled for a biopsy of suspected prostate cancer. For months, I have been hearing from people who have contacted his family that he is not receiving proper treatment for his prostate conditions and that he gets up a dozen times a night to go to the bathroom. I can’t contact his family members because giving interviews to foreign media might get them into trouble.
Gao Zhisheng was a human rights lawyer who spent years in prison and was tortured, then disappeared in 2017. His family has not heard from him since. No one knows where he is or even if he is alive. So far, few Chinese know his name.
“Their disappearance is a common occurrence,” wrote Guo Yushan, an activist who helped lawyer Chen Guangcheng seek asylum in the United States in 2012. “They are driven to disappear by the system, shunned and sheltered 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 offered financial assistance 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 in detention in 2015.
In a society as tightly controlled as China under Mr. Xi, it is impossible for anyone to have the influence that Mr. Navalny had. The Communist Party’s greatest fear is organizations and individuals who might challenge its rule. That’s why he doesn’t like religious groups or non-governmental organizations. He fears businessmen who he believes have the financial power and organizational skills to pose a threat to the party.
It neutralizes any spark that could possibly develop into a prairie fire.
She currently seems to be obsessed with Master Lee, a social media influencer with a cat avatar. Li Ying is a painter who in 2022 turned his Twitter account into a one-man news hub that informs the Chinese public about news they are not getting from the heavily censored media and internet. This week, he urged his followers in China not to follow him because police questioned some of them. Within a day, his follower count dropped to 1.4 million from 1.6 million.
Mr Lee, who lives in Milan, told me last year that he was mentally preparing himself for the possibility of being killed.
Russia has learned from China how to control its people in the age of social media. It has blocked most major Western platforms except YouTube since invading Ukraine two years ago. With the death of Mr. Navalny, the opposition’s most prominent figure, it could be difficult for other opposition leaders, especially in exile, to build a national following like he has.
Regardless of the different forms of authoritarianism they face, Russian and Chinese political prisoners share the ambition that their countries are not doomed and will become normal, democratic and free.
They are all Navalny.
Mr Navalny chose to return to Russia despite knowing he would be arrested. Xu Zhiyong, the legal scholar serving 14 years in prison, made a similar choice.
In 2013, he wrote in an essay that between home and prison, he chose the latter. It was a painful choice for him, but he felt he couldn’t make the decision he did. After being released from prison in 2017, he said, he was ready to go back again.
“For many years,” he wrote on January 1, 2020, “I have been thinking about what would be more valuable for my country: to stay in prison or to stay out of it.”
A month later he was arrested again.
