A top economist has joined the growing list of China’s elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China’s cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a “body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership.”
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China’s sluggish economy and criticizing Xi’s leadership in a private group on WeChat.
I try to take such claims seriously and I think we all should, just in case there’s any truth to them and someone is actually kidnapped. Of course knowing that they may not have been. Flagging certain individuals as potentially at risk isn’t wrong per se. But I get your point about how it is a relatively easy claim to make and exploitable politically. Still, I think it should be taken seriously, just in case.
That’s perfectly fine, I just think it’s important to treat claims critically, and to understand what it actually means to say that someone has “disappeared” in this context - it doesn’t mean that their friends or family have reported them missing, it doesn’t mean that a reporter has checked their house and found it abandoned, it just means that they haven’t been on TV, and it requires a lot of assumptions on the part of the audience to conclude from that that they’ve been kidnapped or extrajudicially detained.