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A Chinese tycoon who called President Xi Jinping a clown and criticized his handling of the coronavirus outbreak was jailed for 18 years on Tuesday for corruption, bribery and embezzlement of public funds.
Ren Zhiqiang, who was once in the inner circle of the ruling Communist Party, disappeared from the public eye in March, shortly after writing an essay criticizing Xi’s response to the pandemic.
His outspokenness earned the former chairman of state-owned real estate developer Huayuan Group the nickname “Big Cannon.”
Tuesday’s verdict said Ren embezzled nearly 50 million yuan ($ 7.4 million) of public funds and accepted bribes worth 1.25 million yuan, according to a statement from the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court.
He said the 69-year-old man “willingly and sincerely confessed to all his crimes” and would not appeal the court’s decision.
He was also fined 4.2 million yuan ($ 620,000).
Rights activists accuse Xi and the Communist Party of using corruption accusations to silence dissent.
Beijing has stepped up its crackdown on civil society since Xi took office in 2012, tightening restrictions on freedom of expression and detaining hundreds of activists and lawyers.
Tuesday’s verdict claimed that Ren also “abused his power” in his role at Huayuan Group, resulting in more than 116 million yuan in losses to the state holding company and more than 53 million yuan in property losses for the group.
The Communist Party’s disciplinary watchdog launched an investigation into Ren in April, and the trial was opened in a Beijing court on September 11 with a handful of supporters outside and a heavy police presence.
One supporter told AFP that they backed Ren because “he dares to tell the truth.”
Ren’s essay, from earlier this year, was removed from China’s internet, which regularly censors content that defies authorities, but was shared online outside of China.
“This epidemic has revealed the fact that the Party and government officials are only concerned with protecting their own interests, and the monarch is only concerned with protecting his interests and central position,” Ren wrote, without naming Xi.
“Standing there was not an emperor displaying his new clothes, but a stripped-down clown who insisted on being an emperor,” he wrote.
Ren’s influential blog on the Twitter-like Weibo platform drew millions of followers before authorities shut down his account in 2016 after he repeatedly called for greater freedom of the press.
Online reaction to Ren’s sentence was also quickly erased on Tuesday.
“The only real estate mogul who dares to tell the truth in China has been censored,” read a comment on Weibo.
“He was born in 1951 and this year he is 69 years old … he may not live to see the day when he gets out of jail,” said another.
The son of a former vice minister of commerce and a member of the Communist Party for decades before being ousted in July, Ren was well connected with the party’s elites.
He wrote in his memoirs that he had been friends with Vice President and former anti-corruption chief Wang Qishan since they were teenagers, when his school assigned Wang to mentor young Ren.
He is also a controversial figure, particularly in his defense of high house prices in China, once telling Chinese media that people who had not been willing to invest in real estate before the boom “now deserve to be poor.”
tjx-bys-lxc / rox
