Five high-profile people who disappeared in China

The disappearance of Chinese

The disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she
accused a senior Communist Party official of sexual assault has
made headlines worldwide in recent weeks.

Demands from international leaders for proof of her well-being
show that while the Chinese government “has become extremely
effective in controlling what the country’s 1.4bn people think and
talk about”, influencing the rest of the world “is an entirely
different matter”, said The New York
Times^[1] columnist Li
Yuan. 

Peng
went missing^[2] for more than two weeks
after claiming in a social media post that former vice premier
Zhang Gaoli had “forced” her to have sexual relations with him.
Amid growing global concern, the 35-year-old tennis champ spoke to
the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during a
30-minute video call on Sunday.

But while Peng insisted she was safe and well at her home in
Beijing, experts told The Telegraph^[3] that she might have been
abducted under the Chinese regime’s programme of “enforced
disappearances”, known officially as RSDL – Residential
Surveillance at a Designated Location. People who have
criticised the Beijing regime often vanish “for several months,
while they are interrogated in a nondescript government building”,
said the paper.

Many then “re-emerge in society with an outwardly different
personality, their plucky mode of resistance replaced by a supine
deference to Beijing authorities”.

Here are five other high-profile people who have disappeared
after falling foul of President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party.

Zhao Wei  

One of China’s most popular actresses, Zhao disappeared from
public view in August. Films and TV series in which she appeared
were removed without explanation from video platforms, and her name
was scrubbed from the Chinese internet.

Her profile on social media platform Weibo – where she had
accumulated 86 million followers – was also shut down. And social
media users were censored when trying to discuss Zhao, the
Chinese ambassador for luxury Italian fashion house Fendi.

Chinese state newspaper Global Times^[4]
said that Zhao was “widely known as a billionaire investor
surrounded with lawsuits” and that she and her husband had
previously been banned from “China’s securities markets” for five
years for market violations.

But according to Variety^[5], her disappearance
“epitomises many aspects of the Chinese government’s campaign to
tear down fandom, celebrity and the driving forces behind
them”.

“Zhao Wei is like a poster child for what the Communist Party
sees as what’s wrong with celebrity culture in China,” Stanley
Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California
specialising in Chinese films and politics, told the magazine.
“Going after her without offering a smoking-gun explanation as to
why they did it will certainly make other celebrities extremely
cautious and proactive in embracing regime goals.

“It’s a demonstration that no one, no matter how wealthy or
popular, is too big to pursue.”

Whether Zhao is now “under house arrest” or just “keeping a low
profile” is unclear, said The Guardian^[6]. She was reportedly
spotted in her hometown in eastern China “posing for a photo”
in September. And Chinese internet portal Netease has claimed that
Zhao took part in a recent “online shopping event”. 

Jack Ma

The billionaire entrepreneur behind e-commerce giant Alibaba
went missing for three months shortly after criticising the Chinese
financial system in a controversial speech in October last
year. Ma told an audience including senior Chinese officials
at the Bund
Summit in Shanghai that traditional lenders
operated with a “pawn shop” mentality.

His criticisms “angered the banking establishment and reportedly
reached the attention” of President Xi, said the BBC^[7]. China analyst Christina
Boutrup told the broadcaster that Ma “apparently crossed the
invisible red line for what can be said and done” in Xi’s
China.

Within a fortnight, Ma and two of his close colleagues were
summoned to meet financial regulators, who halted the flotation of
Ant Group – his financial technology firm and China’s biggest
payments provider. 

Ma wasn’t seen in public again until 20 January, when he took
part in an online charity event for rural teachers. According
to local media, the tycoon said he had been “studying and thinking,
and we have become more determined to devote ourselves to education
and public welfare”.

He Jiankui

The Chinese biophysicist went missing after telling a
summit in Hong Kong that he had engineered the world’s first
genetically edited babies. Addressing the Human Genome Editing
Conference in November 2018, the scientist said that he felt
“proud” of the historic feat. 

But fellow scientists in China and worldwide “denounced” the
work as “a step too far”, said The New York
Times^[8] (NYT), with
some dubbing him the “Chinese Frankenstein”. 

China’s National Health Commission ordered an investigation into
He’s claims and the scientist disappeared from public view shortly
after the conference. 

He was not seen again until late the following month, when the
newspaper reported that he was “sequestered” in a small guesthouse
on the Southern University of Science and Technology campus in
Shenzhen, and was being kept “under guard by a dozen unidentified
men”. 

After an “initial flurry of reports”, China’s domestic media,
“complying with a directive from the propaganda department, have
been silent on Dr He”, the NYT added.

A year later, the controversial researcher was sentenced to
three years in prison and fined the equivalent of $430,000 by a
Chinese court, after pleading guilty to carrying out “illegal
medical practices”. 

Fan Bingbing

Another well-known actor, Fan mysteriously disappeared for four
months in 2018, a year after gracing the cover of Time
magazine.

It later emerged that the X-Men star had been detained by
the Chinese government over alleged tax evasion, for which she
was subsequently fined the equivalent of nearly $70m,
as Time^[9] reported at the
time. 

In a statement titled “letter of apology” posted on social media
platform Weibo after she reappeared, Fan wrote that she felt
“unworthy of the trust of the society and let down the fans who
love me”. She promised to “try my best to overcome all difficulties
and raise funds to pay back taxes and fines”.

Fan then only emerged “from time to time to glorify the Chinese
Communist Party”, said Business
Insider^[10], and is continuing to
keep a relatively low profile. 

Ai Weiwei

In 2011, dissident contemporary artist Ai disappeared after
being arrested by the Chinese police as he was about to board a
flight from Beijing to Hong Kong. He had spent years under constant
surveillance and harassment as a result of his open criticism of
the Chinese government. 

Ai later revealed that he had been taken to a secret detention
centre, where he was kept under surveillance around the clock. He
was released after 81 days, amid intense international
pressure.

“I felt powerless in secret detention,” he told The Times^[11] correspondent
Anthony Loyd in 2020. “They said that if I did ever get finally
released then my son, who was two, wouldn’t recognise me. That
moment gave me a sense of how cruel authority can be to an
individual. I’m lucky it didn’t destroy me.”

In 2015, the Royal Academy of Arts in London held a major retrospective of
Ai’s work^[12] that included a
mock-up of his life in the detention centre. “Thinking Ai might
shut up after his 81-day incarceration in 2011, and the bulldozing
of his newly completed Shanghai studio by the authorities, the
Chinese government got it wrong,” said The
Guardian^[13]’s art critic Adrian
Searle in a five-star review of the
show.