Tycoon Ren Zhiqiang gets 18 years after calling Xi Jinping a clown

A Beijing property tycoon has been sentenced to 18 years in prison six months after he called President Xi Jinping a ‘clown’.

Ren Zhiqiang was called China’s Donald Trump for his brash style. Picture: AFP

An outspoken Beijing property tycoon has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, six months after he called President Xi Jinping a “clown” and criticised China’s early handling of coronavirus.

The swift sentencing of Ren Zhiqiang — once called China’s Donald Trump for his brash style — was nominally for corruption, bribery and embezzlement of public funds, according to a court statement released on Tuesday.

But the former Chinese Communist Party member’s true crime was widely interpreted to be an essay that criticised Mr Xi in early March.

“Everybody knows why he was convicted,” one of Mr Ren’s supporters, who asked not to be named, told The Australian.

The tough sentence comes as officials in China’s law and security apparatus pursue a widespread campaign to “root out ‘two-faced people’ who are disloyal and dishonest to the party”, as Mr Xi further tightens control in the world’s most populous country.

The 18-year sentence for the 69-year-old Mr Ren would likely be a life sentence, a sign of the intolerance­ of political dissent in Mr Xi’s China.

It was revealed on the website of the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court on Tuesday, less than a fortnight after Mr Ren’s brisk trial began on September 11.

Mr Ren, the former chairman of the state-owned property business Beijing Huayuan Group, had become a rare champion of the press in China, which Mr Xi’s administrati­on has explicitly put under the party’s control.

“The judgment on him is not his shame, but his glory,” one Chin­ese entrepreneur and supporter told The Australian.

An essay by the unusually forthright Mr Ren — who was often referred to as “The Cannon” by his 37 million followers on Weibo, a Chinese social media account­ similar to Twitter — was circulated around China in early March, as COVID-19 was spreading around the country and the world.

It pointedly criticised China’s media control.

“Without a media representing the interests of the people by publishing the actual facts, the people’s lives are being ravaged by both the virus and the major illness of the system,” Mr Ren wrote in the essay that was purged by China’s state censors.

“I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes’, but a clown who stripped naked and insisted on continuing being emperor,” he wrote, in a criticism apparently directed at China’s President.

In Tuesday’s verdict, the Beijing­ court said Mr Ren had “abused his power” when in his role at Huayuan Group, which it said caused more than 116 million yuan ($23m) of losses to the state-owned holding company and more than 53 million yuan worth of property losses for the group.

Mr Ren — the son of a former vice-commerce minister — stood down as chairman of the group in 2014, six years before the ­Communist Party’s disciplinary investigation was launched in April.

In July, four months into his detention, he was expelled from the Communist Party, which he joined in the mid-1970s.

The court’s statement said the 69-year-old had “voluntarily and truthfully confessed all his crimes”, and would not appeal against the court’s decision.

A fortnight ago, book publisher Geng Xiaonan, founder of privately-run publishing company Ruiya Books, and her husband, Qin Zhen, were taken away by police in Beijing.

The pair were supporters of Xu Zhangrun, a former law professor at Tsinghua University, who was dismissed from his job at the prestigious Beijing university in early July, five months after he wrote a separate essay critical of China’s early handling of coronavirus.