A Chinese dissident jet-skied 250 miles across the open sea to reach safety in South Korea after becoming an outspoken critic of leader-for-life Xi Jinping.
American-educated Kwon Pyong jumped on a jet ski last week and sped 250 miles across the Yellow Sea from China’s eastern Shandong province to Incheon, South Korea, equipped with only a helmet, binoculars, a compass — and five 6.6-gallon fuel tanks tied to his small craft.
His dramatic escape – revealed Wednesday – came after a series of China’s best-known figures, from billionaire developer Whitney Duan to tennis star Peng Shuai to mega-businessman Jack Ma of Alibaba, vanished almost completely from the public eye in a harsh expression of Xi’s power.
Outspoken critics of Xi are in just as much danger, if not more.
Kwon, who is in his 30s, attended Iowa State University and his X (formerly Twitter) account, “Brave Johnny,” gives Ames, Iowa, as his location and says one of his goals is to “overthrow communism.”
He returned to China after college, however, and participated in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in 2014, then gained notoriety in 2016 for mocking Xi with a T-shirt reading “Xitler.” He served time in jail for his social media posts, human rights organization Freedom House reported.
Another Chinese activist and friend told CNN that Kwon fled China because of an ongoing investigation and surveillance of him.
Lee Dae-seon, who works with pro-democracy group Dialogue China in South Korea, said Kwon had been held for an immigration violation and wants to seek refugee status in an English-speaking country.
Kwon’s great escape was revealed by authorities in South Korea just as Xi attended a summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the BRICS group of countries, which is made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Last week, Xi acknowledged his country’s stuttering economy in a speech demanding its people “build a socialist ideology with strong cohesion” and care less about material wealth.
Xi has been ruthless since coming to power in 2012, wielding his absolute authority to suddenly remove the country’s most high-profile figures from public view — most of whom seemed to lack Kwon’s instincts or opportunity to flee before being “disappeared.”
Notably many are those associated with the country opening up to the world economy, including Ma and other billionaires. Analysts say a struggling economy could make Xi step up the pace of “disappearances.”
Some are trotted out for what appear to be staged photos, only to return to almost certain house arrest, their whereabouts unknown, experts on China say.
A few are miraculously allowed to return to public life, itself a display of Xi’s raw power. He became the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong in 2022 when he was given a third term in office, effectively ensuring that he would rule until he dies.
“A key feature of a government disappearing people it doesn’t like is the opacity and secrecy which, by definition, accompanies disappearances,” Andrea Worden, a Stanford-educated human rights lawyer who worked at the Department of Justice and is a China specialist, told The Post. “Needless to say, enforced disappearances are a violation of international human rights law.”
“There’s a simple rule,” China analyst Gordon Chang told The Post. “No one in China is safe. Even Xi Jinping. But anyone without his name is at even more risk.”
Where the disappeared end up is almost always a mystery — but Chang said the detention can take place in high-end “Club Fed”-type prisons, house arrest in locations chosen by the party or actual Chinese state prisons, which are notoriously rough.
Whitney Duan’s now-ex-husband Desmond Shum, who wrote in his 2021 book, “Red Roulette,” about her abrupt disappearance in 2015, told The Post that Chinese officials sometime take over a three-star hotel for a disappeared person, then make it into a suicide-proof prison.
“They turn the rooms into cells so that entire room is padded so make sure you won’t be able to knock your head on the wall and kill yourself,” he said.
“There are cameras everywhere including the toilet and bathroom so you are monitored 24/7. They don’t do physical beatings as a rule. It’s more a lot of sleep deprivation and being forced to write confession letters.”
The French Open winner silenced over ‘sex assault’
Peng Shuai, a former French Open and Wimbledon doubles champion, wrote a lengthy post in November 2021 on China’s Weibo social media platform alleging that she’d been sexually assaulted by former top Chinese Communist Party politician Zhang Gaoli in 2018 — years after apparently starting an affair with him before his rise in the Politburo.
Shuai’s post was deleted within 30 minutes. The 37-year-old recanted the allegations twice not long after she made the post.
She told the French sports outlet L’Equipe in a highly controlled interview in February 2022 that she “never said anyone assaulted me,” that it was a big “misunderstanding” and that she was living freely in Beijing.
After Shuai was disappeared, the Women’s Tennis Association suspended tournaments in December 2021, vowing a boycott until it could be sure Shuai was safe and “if the Chinese authorities conducted a ‘full, fair and transparent’ investigation of her initial claims.”
But in April, the WTA abruptly reversed its decision, with CEO Steve Simon telling the Associated Press it had “assurances” that Shuai was safe. She has not been seen in public since.
Xi’s own foreign minister vanished and so did his ‘lover’
China’s 57-year-old foreign minister was ousted from his post in July after disappearing from the public eye for more than a month — prompting rumors on social media that he fathered a love child with a Cambridge University-educated TV presenter.
Qin Gang was replaced by his predecessor, Wang Yi, 69, in a dramatic move inside the Chinese government.
Rumors swirled on Chinese social media that Gang, reportedly a married man, had fathered a love child with Fu Xiaotian, 40.
Xiaotian also disappeared from public view around the same time, according to news outlets in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Xi’s predecessor dragged off Communist Party’s biggest stage
One of the starkest apparent examples of Xi asserting his power came in October 2022 when Hu Jintao, the former leader of China, was forcibly removed from his seat next to Xi in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People during the Communist Party Congress.
While there was some speculation that Hu was escorted out because of concerns for his health, it was equally noted that Xi and other party officials seated near Hu did not show any emotion or worry for him as the now-80-year-old was dragged past him.
Some China observers felt the public ejection of Hu was meant to send a message that Xi is the undisputed strongman of China.
Hu has been seen in public since just once, in footage released by the state broadcaster CCTV from the funeral of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, the South China Morning Post reported.
China’s answer to Jeff Bezos simply disappeared
For years, nobody flew higher in China than Jack Ma, the pixie-faced and flamboyant founder of the $500 billion powerhouse e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, the Amazon of Asia and the country’s richest man.
Ma addressed Davos, appeared at Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation summit in Manhattan and hobnobbed with Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig.
But he found his wings abruptly clipped at the end of 2020 after he made an apparently ill-advised speech about China’s bankers having a “pawnshop mentality.” He vanished from sight and China launched an antitrust probe into Alibaba.
While early speculation centered on Ma being under house arrest, he was seen several times in 2021 and was at one point reported to be living in Japan.
He is reportedly now interested in farming, and in May it was announced he would teach agriculture at a research institute at the University of Tokyo.
Country’s richest woman taken from her apartment
Real estate mega-developer Whitney Duan, who rose from poverty with a killer combination of grit, brains and political savvy to become China’s richest woman, was snatched by Chinese security forces from her Beijing apartment in 2017.
Duan’s downfall was considered all the more chilling since her rise coincided with her uncanny knack for aligning herself with top party officials.
Her ex-husband Desmond Shum said he believes that Duan was targeted after a series of articles in the New York Times in 2012 that detailed the family wealth of then-Premier Wen Jiabao, China’s No. 2 leader, with whom Duan had deals.
Shum and his now-14-year-old son did not hear from Duan until the eve of publication of Shum’s controversial book, “Red Roulette.”
Shum said she phoned him but it was clearly a controlled call. He said she now calls their son on a fairly regular basis but does not disclose details about her detention. Her mother died without ever hearing from her.
Top security official sent to Xi’s ‘Gulags’
Meng Hong Wei, the 69-year-old former head of Interpol, who had 40 years’ experience as a top police and security official in China, was disappeared in 2018 — ostensibly for taking bribes by Chinese anti-corruption authorities.
He was later tried and imprisoned and is now believed to be somewhere in China’s massive penal system.
His wife, Grace, gave an extraordinary interview to the AP in 2021, calling the Chinese Communist Party a “monster.”
“I don’t want the children to have no father,” she said, crying. “Whenever the children hear someone knocking on the door, they always go to look.”
Bookseller of Hong Kong abducted in Thailand
In 2020, Chinese officials sentenced the Hong Kong-Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai to 10 years in prison for “providing intelligence” overseas.
Gui first disappeared in 2015, when he was believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents from his seaside home in Thailand.
He and four others who worked for the same Hong Kong publishing company all went missing around the same time, only to turn up months later in police custody in mainland China.
The actress scrubbed from China’s internet
Once one of the biggest actresses in China, who broke through in 1998 in the film “My Fair Princess,” Zhao Wei was suddenly scrubbed from the Chinese internet in August 2021 and her films were deleted from Chinese streaming platforms.
Last March, she was heard from for the first time in 19 months when two photos of her were posted on social media, apparently by her staff.
From movie stardom to house arrest and back
Once the country’s biggest movie star, Fan Bingbing was disappeared in 2018 for alleged tax evasion and was out of sight for months. She eventually wrote a fawning apology to the Communist Party on her social media pages and reportedly paid a tax bill of at least $70 million.
No one knows where Fan was disappeared to, but one source told Vulture that she had been kept under “residential surveillance at a designated location” described as a holiday resort in the coastal province of Jiangsu.
This year she appeared at the Oscars and at the Cannes Film Festival for the first time since 2018, saying her relaunched career was “like a restart for me.”
‘GM babies’ scientist went straight to jail
Biophysicist He Jiankui gained worldwide attention in 2018 when he claimed that he had created the first genetically modified babies. He was sentenced to prison the following year for “illegal medical practices.”
He resurfaced last year, announcing on social media that he was opening a research lab in Beijing to develop gene therapy for rare diseases.
Human rights attorney fed a slice of bread a day
The 59-year-old human rights attorney and political dissident Gao Zhisheng has endured years of nightmarish imprisonment at the hands of Chinese officials, which has involved some escape and reimprisonment.
The author of “A China More Just,” Gao reportedly at times was fed only a slice of bread and some cabbage daily.
Gao escaped from house arrest in August 2017 but was recaptured three weeks later. No information on his current whereabouts is known.
But artist Ai Weiwei reappeared — and was allowed to flee China
The 65-year-old dissident artist is one of the lucky ones. His studio in Shanghai was demolished in 2011, just after it was constructed, because of his outspoken critiques of the Chinese government.
He was imprisoned for three months shortly thereafter and then placed on house arrest for another three months. In 2015, his passport was returned to him and he left the country.
He hasn’t returned since. He now lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal, where he has a big new art studio.
