China's disappeared: Some of the people who vanished at the hands of the Chinese state in 2018

Canadian citizens, a famous actress, a security insider and a student Marxist disappeared in China this year
The Associated Press
Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig briefly disappeared this month before it was revealed they were taken into custody by Chinese officials. The two men's detention followed the arrest and detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou by Canadian authorities. 

It's not uncommon for individuals who speak out against the government to disappear in China, but the scope of the "disappeared" has expanded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.
Not only dissidents and activists, but also high-level officials, Marxists, foreigners and even a movie star — people who never publicly opposed the ruling Communist Party — have been whisked away by police to unknown destinations.
The widening dragnet throws into stark relief the lengths to which Xi's administration is willing to go to maintain its control and authority.
Here's a look at some of the people who went missing in 2018 at the hands of the Chinese state:

Canadian citizens
China threatened "grave consequences" if Canada did not release high-tech executive Meng Wanzhou, shortly after the Huawei chief financial officer was detained in Vancouver earlier this month for extradition to the U.S.
The apparent consequences materialized within days, when two Canadian men went missing in China. 

Both turned up in the hands of state security on suspicion of endangering "national security", a nebulous category of crimes that has been levied against foreigners in recent years.
Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was taken by authorities from a Beijing street late in the evening, a person familiar with his case said. 

He is allowed one consular visit a month and has not been granted access to a lawyer, as is standard for state security cases.

Kovrig, an adviser with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, remains in detention in China.

Also detained is Michael Spavor, who organizes tours to North Korea from the border city of Dandong. 

China has not said whether their detentions are related to Meng's, but a similar scenario unfolded in the past.
A Canadian couple was detained in 2014 on national security grounds shortly after Canada arrested Su Bin, a Chinese man wanted for industrial espionage in the U.S.
Like Spavor, Kevin and Julia Garratt lived in Dandong, where they ran a popular coffee shop for nearly a decade. 

They also worked with a Christian charity that provided food to North Korean refugees.
While Julia Garratt was released on bail, her husband was held for more than two years before he was deported in September 2016 — about two months after Su pleaded guilty in the U.S.

Tax-evading actress
Fan Bingbing was living the dream. 

Since a breakthrough role at the age of 17, Fan has headlined dozens of movies and TV series, and parlayed her success into modelling, fashion design and other ventures that have made her one of the highest-paid celebrities in the world.
All this made her a potent icon of China's economic success, until authorities reminded Fan — and her legion of admirers — that even she was not untouchable.
For about four months, Fan vanished from public view. 

Her Weibo social media account, which has more than 63 million followers, fell silent. 

Her management office in Beijing was vacated. 

Her birthday on Sept. 16 came and went with only a handful of greetings from entertainment notables.
When she finally resurfaced, it was to apologize.
"I sincerely apologize to society, to the friends who love and care for me, to the people, and to the country's tax bureau," Fan said in a letter posted on Weibo on Oct. 3.
Chinese actress Fan Bingbing poses for photographers upon arrival at the opening of the Cannes film festival in southern France in May. One of China's highest paid celebrities, Fan disappeared from public view for four months before apologizing for tax-evasion. 

Fan later admitted to tax evasion. 

State news agency Xinhua reported that she and the companies she represents had been ordered to pay taxes and penalties totaling 900 million yuan ($130 million US).
"Without the party and the country's great policies, without the people's loving care, there would be no Fan Bingbing," she wrote, a cautionary tale for other Chinese celebrities.
Xinhua concurred in a commentary on her case: "Everyone is equal before the law, there are no `superstars' or `big shots.' No one can despise the law and hope to be lucky."

Security insider
Unlike most swallowed up by China's opaque security apparatus, Meng Hongwei knew exactly what to expect.
Meng — no relation to the Huawei executive — is a vice minister of public security who was also head of Interpol, the France-based organization that facilitates police cooperation across borders.
When he was appointed to the top post, human rights groups expressed concern that China would use Interpol as a tool to rein in political enemies around the world.
Instead, he was captured by the same security forces he represented.
Former Interpol president Meng Hongwei delivers his opening address at the Interpol World congress in Singapore in July 2017. 

In September, Meng became the latest high-ranking official caught in Xi's banner anti-corruption campaign. 

The initiative is a major reason for the Chinese leader's broad popularity, but he has been accused of using it to eliminate political rivals.
Xi pledged to confront both high-level "tigers" and low-level "flies" in his crackdown on graft — a promise he has fulfilled by ensnaring prominent officials.
Meng was missing for weeks before Chinese authorities said he was being investigated for taking bribes and other crimes. 

A Chinese delegation later delivered a resignation letter from Meng to Interpol headquarters.
His wife Grace Meng told the AP that she does not believe the charges against her husband. 

The last message he sent her was an emoji of a knife.

Daring photographer
Lu Guang made his mark photographing the everyday lives of HIV patients in central China. 

They were poor villagers who had contracted the virus after selling their own blood to eke out a living — at a going rate of $7 a pint, they told Lu.
A former factory worker, Lu traversed China's vast reaches to capture reality at its margins. 

He explored environmental degradation, industrial pollution and other gritty topics generally avoided by Chinese journalists, who risk punishment if they pursue stories considered to be sensitive or overly critical.
His work won him major accolades such as the World Press Photo prize, but his prominence likely also put him on the government's radar.
This November, Lu was travelling through East Turkestan, the far west colony that has deployed a vast security network in the name of fighting terrorism. 

He was participating in an exchange with other photographers, after which he was to meet a friend in nearby Sichuan province. 

He never showed up.
More than a month after he disappeared, his family was notified that he had been arrested in East Turkestan, according to his wife Xu Xiaoli. 

She declined to elaborate on the nature of the charges.

Marxist student
In the past, the political activists jailed in China were primarily those who fought for democracy and an end to one-party rule. 

They posed a direct ideological threat to the Communist Party.
This year, the party locked in on a surprising new target: young Marxists.
About 50 students and recent graduates of the country's most prestigious universities convened in August in Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing hub, to rally for factory workers attempting to form a union
Among them was Yue Xin, a 20-something fresh out of Peking University. 

Earlier this year, she made headlines by calling for the elite school to release the results of its investigation into a decades-old rape case.
This time, she was one of the most vocal leaders of the labour rights group, appearing in photographs with her fist up in a Marxist salute and wearing a T-shirt that said "Unity is strength" — the name of a patriotic Chinese communist song.
Yue, a passionate student of Marx and Mao Zedong, espoused the same values as the party. 

She wrote an open letter to Xi and the party's central leadership saying all the students wanted was justice for Jasic Technology labourers.
Her letter quoted Xi's own remarks: "We must adhere to the guiding position of Marxism." 

Yue called Marx "our mentor" and likened the ideas of him and Mao to spiritual sustenance.
Nonetheless, she ended up among those rounded up in a raid on the apartment the activists were staying at in Shenzhen. 

While most have been released, Yue remains unaccounted for.
She has been missing for four months.

China’s Khashoggi Can Still Be Saved

Photojournalist Lu Guang has fallen victim to Chen Quanguo's vendetta

BY KATHLEEN E. MCLAUGHLIN 

Chinese photographer Lu Guang attends the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Pingyao, in Shanxi province, China, on Sept. 20, 2014. 

In early November, the renowned Chinese-born photographer Lu Guang traveled from his home in New York to the city of Kashgar, in China’s western region of East Turkestan. 

He was there to give a workshop for local amateur photographers, one of many he’s conducted in recent years. 

Lu’s photos have helped the world to understand the fate of some of China’s most vulnerable people, including coal miners and cancer patients poisoned by industrial pollution.
But Lu’s arrival in East Turkestan rang alarm bells in the Chinese state. 

The photographer, a three-time winner of World Press Photo awards, is known for his images of lives of people on the margins. 

In East Turkestan, where the authorities have interned at least a million people in so-called reeducation camps, he was a dangerous element. 

Agents from the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent of the KGB, detained him and others; his arrest—though no specific crime—was confirmed on Dec. 10.
Yet Lu’s arrest may not just be because of the security paranoia that now seizes East Turkestan, or the general climate of repression in Xi Jinping’s China. 

Instead, it may go back to coverage of the catastrophe that made him famous—and that the official in charge of East Turkestan’s brutal repression also presided over.
Lu, born in 1961, grew up in Zhejiang province, where as a young man he worked in a silk factory but after learning to use a camera started a photo studio. 

He subsidized his documentary work by doing wedding and family portraits, cutting a very unusual path in China—where most photographers work for censored publications—as an independent photojournalist. 

This independence, coupled with his drive to highlight the lives of China’s most marginalized people, has made Lu a hero to some and a target to others—including officials.
“Lu is a born educator. He’s someone who gives back. He realizes that he was very fortunate to have been given a camera once in his life, and how it changed his life,” said Robert Pledge, the president and editorial director of Contact Press Images, the agency that represents Lu.

In 2002, after spending months recording the horrors of an AIDS catastrophe ripping through China’s heartland of Henan, Lu sent off a package of his pictures to the World Press Photo competition, one of the world’s top prizes for documentary photographers.
The images he had made showed the ravages of a deadly calamity the Chinese government had tried to keep quiet. 

He put faces to the crisis: a 13-year-old orphan lighting incense at the grave of his parents, both dead from AIDS; a woman caring for her dying husband; seven toddlers bundled up in a row in a village orphanage.
While some of Lu’s pictures were published, they never made it to the international prize judges that year. 

Instead, it seems, they were intercepted by officials eager to conceal the disaster he illustrated in devastating detail. 

He entered the same series again a year later, and won first prize in 2004 for contemporary issues, establishing his place as China’s most influential documentary photographer.
“People saw the pictures. When we talked about dying people and orphans—Lu Guang helped people to see it,” recalled Wan Yanhai, an activist who started his career with the Chinese Ministry of Health and now lives in the United States. 

“Without the photos, I think the world might not have been shocked. It might not have been awakened.”
The importance of China’s homegrown AIDS epidemic, born out of government malpractice in a rush to profit off the blood of poor people, is often overlooked. 

The Henan AIDS catastrophe killed uncounted thousands. 

It also embarrassed government officials across the country, and while many of them still rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party after the scandal, every activist who exposed the deadly epidemic was silenced or pushed into exile.
Li Keqiang, the governor of Henan during the crisis as it evolved from 1998 to 2004, is now the premier of China. 

And Chen Quanguo, the deputy party boss in charge of managing the AIDS crisis, moved on to manage the government’s crackdown first in Tibet, now in East Turkestan.
News of China’s AIDS catastrophe, untold thousands infected with HIV after the government established a program to encourage farmers to sell their blood plasma in poor, rural parts of Henan, first emerged in 2000. 

China had painted AIDS as a foreign disease, and the result was a whole country unprepared to deal with the virus when it entered the blood-selling system. 

Chinese investigative journalists first broke the story, and some of Lu’s photos were published in the mainland not long after, even before he won the World Press Photo prize.
“When the photos were published, people understood what was happening,” Wan said.
Chinese officials also have long memories, and Lu’s arrest may stem from a grudge stemming back to that first triumph. 

The party official in charge of East Turkestan is the same man who was charged with handling the AIDS crisis all those many years ago. 

Over the years, Chen Quanguo has taken on some of the party’s most unsavory jobs—the Henan AIDS crisis, a crackdown in Tibet, and now East Turkestan. 

As one source close to Lu Guang said, given the security state in East Turkestan, there is no chance that Chen didn’t know Lu was in town.
First in Henan, and later in Tibet, Chen has been a hard-line enforcer the Communist Party’s worst tendencies. 

In 2007, the physician and AIDS activist Gao Yaojie, who now lives in exile in New York, told Reuters that when Chen visited her, he denied ever meeting anyone with AIDS in Henan—at a time when people were dying by the thousands.
Chen’s police state now holds the photographer who exposed the AIDS crisis with documentary evidence. 

According to the statement from Lu Guang’s wife, police in East Turkestan have admitted Lu is in their custody, but so far there is no news about what charges he might face.
In similar cases, international pressure has helped push China to follow the rules, rather than simply disappearing critical voices.
Like the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Lu is a legal permanent resident of the United States. 

Also like Khashoggi, he’s vulnerable to the dangers of retribution for an old feud in the country of his birth. 

This is the time for international, and especially American, organizations to speak up on behalf of Lu. He deserves better than to be disappeared into the depths of an increasingly unaccountable security state.
“He should be released. They have to come to grips with the fact that he is who he is, a documentary photographer with strong journalistic instincts,” Pledge said. 

“There’s nothing criminal about that activity.”