Authoritarian states often silence critics of their policies by jailing them or forcing them into exile. Yet they also aim to create a unified narrative about the nation’s history, and any past event that threatens the established power structure can be subject to disappearance or revision. This can also mean removing individuals associated with past dissent from public circulation and public memory, so that future generations will ideally not know that such dissent ever existed.

Major figures in Chinese political and business life have continued to vanish, the fate of each one proving the maxims: in an authoritarian state, you are powerful, until you are not.

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