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.
We’re really entering into conspiracy theory territory here. Imagine if I monitored every public figure in the US and whenever one of them didn’t appear in public for a while, I automatically assumed that they had been abducted by the NSA, and when they later showed up and were fine, I concluded that the only reason they weren’t talking about it was because the NSA was holding their family hostage or something. Do you need any actual evidence to make conclusions like that, and is there any form of evidence that could possibly falsify such conclusions?
It’s impossible to account for ever minute of every person’s life so it’s always theoretically possible that any time someone doesn’t have an alibi, it means that they’re being held in detention where they are also sworn to secrecy about being held in detention - but just because it’s theoretically possible doesn’t make it a reasonable assumption.
This isn’t people being unaccounted for for a few minutes. It’s people who normally doesn’t do things for sensationalism saying something controversial and then going missing, and this happening in a pattern in one country in particular.
Yes by definition it’s a conspiracy theory, but these people aren’t providing a detailed accounting of the time they were away. That should rightly raise questions, and international media is absolutely ethically in the right in wondering publicly about their wellbeing.
Is it actually that it happens in one country in particular, or is it that nobody makes a note of it when it happens in other countries because someone not being in the public eye for a bit is normal and routine, and it’s only because China is treated with suspicion that it’s considered noteworthy?
Of course, I can’t even imagine the shitstorm that would happen if another country tried to demand that public figures in the US provide, not only testimony saying they were fine, but a detailed account of any time they were out of the public eye, to confirm that they weren’t being interrogated by the NSA and then forced to lie about it. It’s absurd, as you admit, it’s a conspiracy theory. There are so many actual real problems that have actual real evidence that I don’t understand why anyone would care about something that’s grounded on pure conjecture and circumstantial evidence.
Probably because most other countries aren’t under the justified suspicion that China is for directly repressing speech it doesn’t like. It’s a conspiracy theory but it’s not at all absurd, it is plainly the most reasonable explanation for what is happening.