He helped design China’s political reforms in the 1980s and tried to avert the bloodshed that ended the democracy protests. After prison, he became a critic of the party.
For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which if read in good faith could have been perceived as reassuring.Instead, establishment outlets reverted to familiar narratives regarding China’s Covid mitigation strategy and tied these into renewed predictions of a long-prophesied econo