After watching “Navalny,” the documentary concerning the Russian opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese language businesswoman messaged me, “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” She was speaking concerning the retired actual property tycoon who was sentenced to 18 years in jail for criticizing China’s chief, Xi Jinping.

After Mr. Navalny’s tragic demise this month, a younger dissident dwelling in Berlin posted on X, “Trainer Li is closest to the Chinese language model of Navalny.” He was referring to the insurgent influencer referred to as Trainer Li, who used social media to share details about protests in China and who now fears for his life.

There are others: Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in authorities custody in 2017, and Xu Zhiyong, the authorized scholar who’s serving 14 years in jail on costs of subversion.

The unhappy reality is that there’s no Chinese language equal of Mr. Navalny as a result of there’s no opposition social gathering in China, and subsequently no opposition chief.

It’s not for lack of making an attempt. Many brave Chinese language stood as much as essentially the most highly effective authoritarian authorities on this planet. Since 2000, the nonprofit humanitarian group Duihua has recorded the circumstances of 48,699 political prisoners in China, with 7,371 now in custody. None of them has the kind of title recognition among the many Chinese language public that Mr. Navalny did in Russia.

Beneath President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia is extremely illiberal of dissent. Mr. Putin jails his critics and hunts them down even in exile. In China, Navalny counterparts as high-profile figures couldn’t exist. They’d be silenced and jailed lengthy earlier than they may attain the general public consciousness.

“Are you able to think about the PRC giving famous political prisoners the persevering with entry that Navalny needed to public opinion through numerous direct and oblique strategies?” Jerome Cohen, a retired regulation professor at New York College, wrote on X, referring to China’s full title, the Individuals’s Republic of China.

That was what members of the Chinese language dissident group had been pondering as they watched the information of Mr. Navalny’s demise with grief and horror. His demise was tragic and his life heroic. However it was exhausting for them to course of the revelations that he was capable of ship tons of of handwritten letters from jail. Individuals wrote to him, paying 40 cents a web page, and acquired scans of his responses. A video hyperlink of him behind bars throughout his final court docket look was launched on-line.

“Regardless of more and more harsh situations, together with repeated stints in solitary confinement,” my colleague Anton Troianovski wrote, “he maintained a presence on social media, whereas members of his group continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.”

None of that might be potential in China. The names of most Chinese language political prisoners are censored on-line. As soon as arrested, they’re by no means heard from once more. Nobody can go to them besides their direct kin and their legal professionals, though that’s not assured. China’s political prisoners can’t correspond with the skin world and are left to rot behind bars, even when they’re scuffling with well being issues — precisely how Mr. Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died from late-stage liver most cancers in authorities custody.

Some individuals name Mr. Ren, the retired actual property tycoon, “China’s Navalny.” He as soon as had most likely the best public profile amongst Chinese language political prisoners. He was among the many nation’s most influential social media bloggers, with almost 38 million followers. In 2016, his Weibo account was deleted after he criticized Mr. Xi’s declaration that each one Chinese language information media needed to serve the social gathering.

Final yr, once I talked about him to a younger Chinese language, the person gave me a clean look. He was 15 when Mr. Ren was silenced and had no concept who he was.

I’ve recognized Mr. Ren since 2010. However since his arrest in March 2020, I’ve had no direct communication with him. Nor have his buddies. None of us has firsthand information of his life in jail.

Days earlier than his arrest, Mr. Ren advised me that he was scheduled for a biopsy on suspicion of prostate most cancers. For months, I’ve heard from individuals who communicated along with his household that he’s not getting correct therapy for his prostate situations and that he’s getting up a dozen instances an evening to go to the bathroom. I can’t attain out to members of his household as a result of giving interviews to overseas media can get them in bother.

Gao Zhisheng was a human rights lawyer who spent years in jail and was tortured, after which disappeared in 2017. His household has not heard from him since. Nobody is aware of his whereabouts and even whether or not he’s alive. By now, only a few Chinese language know his title.

“Their disappearance is a standard incidence,” wrote Guo Yushan, an activist who helped the lawyer Chen Guangcheng search asylum in the US in 2012. “They’re pushed to extinction by the system, shunned and guarded in opposition to by mainstream society, forgotten by the general public,” Mr. Guo mentioned. “And sometimes, the extra thorough their resistance, the extra thorough their disappearance.”

Mr. Guo wrote these phrases in 2013, the primary yr of Mr. Xi’s rule, for a company that supplied monetary help to households of political prisoners. Such packages can be unimaginable in China at this time. Mr. Guo himself disappeared from public view after being launched from almost a yr of detention in 2015.

In a society as tightly managed as China underneath Mr. Xi, it’s unattainable for anybody to have the sort of affect that Mr. Navalny had. The Communist Social gathering’s best concern is organizations and people that might problem its rule. That’s why it doesn’t like spiritual teams or nongovernmental organizations. It fears entrepreneurs who it believes have the monetary energy and organizational abilities to pose a menace to the social gathering.

It snuffs out any spark that might doubtlessly develop right into a prairie hearth.

Proper now it appears to be obsessive about Trainer Li, a social media influencer with a cat avatar. Li Ying is a painter who in 2022 turned his Twitter account right into a one-person information hub that informs the Chinese language public of reports it doesn’t obtain from the closely censored media and web. This week, he urged his followers in China to unfollow him as a result of police questioned a few of them. Inside a day, the variety of his followers fell to 1.4 million from 1.6 million.

Mr. Li, who lives in Milan, advised me final yr that he was making ready himself psychologically for the chance that he could possibly be murdered.

Russia has been studying from China exert management over its individuals within the social media age. It has blocked most main Western platforms besides YouTube since its invasion of Ukraine two years in the past. With the demise of Mr. Navalny, essentially the most outstanding opposition determine, it could possibly be troublesome for different opposition leaders, largely in exile, to construct up a nationwide following as he did.

Regardless of the totally different types of authoritarianism they face, Russian and Chinese language political prisoners share the aspiration that their nations are usually not doomed and can develop into regular, democratic and free.

They’re all Navalnys.

Mr. Navalny selected to return to Russia although he knew he can be arrested. Xu Zhiyong, the authorized scholar who’s serving 14 years in jail, made the same alternative.

In 2013, he wrote in an essay that between dwelling and jail, he selected the latter. It was a painful alternative for him, however he felt he couldn’t not make the choice he did. After he was launched from jail in 2017, he mentioned, he was prepared to return once more.

“For a few years,” he wrote on Jan. 1, 2020, “I’ve been pondering which might be extra precious for my nation: staying in jail or remaining out of it.”

A month later, he was arrested once more.