By Junius Tian
One of the pathetic circumstances in this world is when two individuals of similar age live under the same sky and on the same land: one basks in the adoration of countless people as a star, experiencing abundant glory and favor, while the other endure the vicissitudes of life and the sorrow, and suffering that the former will never notice or imagine.
The Esu Wiki case that occurred in China in 2019 rewrote the lives of 24 teenagers, including nine minors. Chinese authorities publicly tried this case for the crime of infringing on citizen’s personal information. But ironic is that the Chinese government has never shown such concern for citizen’s privacy as in this case in the past. Reports indicate that the real reason for this sudden change in the Chinese government’s consistent stance on citizen’s privacy rights is that the victims of this private information leak are relatives of Xi Jinping.
The individual identified by the authorities as the mastermind, Niu Tengyu, is still detained in Sihui Prison in Guangdong for starting his 14-year-long sentence. Recently, his mother found that Niu Tengyu’s health was abnormal a lot and similar to those caused by poisoning or abuse when she went to visit him in prison. In contemporary China, orchestrating accidental deaths through non-public executions is a method employed against weak public influence political prisoners. However, according to reports from Kyodo News and The Epoch Times, Niu Tengyu played a limited role in the Esu Wiki case, far from being to that extent considered the mastermind. There is even some controversy regarding whether Niu Tengyu can be classified as a political prisoner in traditional meaning because the true leaker of Xi Jinping’s family’s private information is a member of an anti-Chinese government website called Zhina Wiki that is outside the jurisdiction of the Great Fire Wall. Due to some connections that once existed between the Zhina Wiki and Esu Wiki websites, Niu Tengyu, a Website operation member of Esu Wiki who can apprehended within China’s borders, became a convenient scapegoat for Chinese authorities.
According to the creator of the Zhina wiki, Niu Tengyu had once “watched” the anti-extradition law amendment bill protests in Hong Kong together with him, and this might have been a partial reason for the Chinese authorities to perceive him as a dissident and which led him to get further persecution. But in this case, whether Niu Tengyu is a political prisoner or not, the persecution from authorities in the 21st century due to offense or suspicion of offending those in power is truly sickening. What’s important is that we see in countries like China how insignificant an ordinary person is to Communist leaders and their families. The slightest suspicion of offense toward those in power and their families is enough to destroy everything in the life of an ordinary civilian and their families, no matter how trivial.
Niu Tengyu grew up in a single-parent family, living with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Since the 2019 Esu Wiki case, his grandparents passed away successively due to the unbearable shock. His mother, the only one he relies on, spends her days in tears, enduring the torment of heart disease. She eagerly anticipates an early reunion with her son. On his birthday, she wrote a letter to him in prison, filled with longing and love, although this letter might never reach him due to obstruction by the Chinese authorities:
“Just last night, I dreamt of you again, and you had grown much taller. Tears filled my eyes when I saw you, yet you smiled and said, ‘Mom, you look beautiful when you smile. I always love seeing you smile. Mom, please don’t cry for me!’ As my vision began to blur, I opened my arms to embrace you, but suddenly, I woke up…”
Under the totalitarian grip of Marxist ideology, numerous young individuals like Niu Tengyu and their families suffer the same pain for various reasons. The creator of the anti-Chinese government website Zhina Wiki, Xiao Yanrui, is also from a single-parent family. However, when his mother attempted to travel abroad in 2022 to visit her son studying in Canada, she encountered obstruction from Chinese authorities. The Chinese police, in a mocking tone, asked her, “Would you miss your son?” Xiao Yanrui’s mother retorted, “Would you miss your mom?”
There is also a group of young people in this world who share the same ethnicity as Niu Tengyu but are the primary win-over targets of the Chinese communist united front policy. They are those free-world citizen of Chinese communist family background. Some of them excel in calculation and navigate adeptly between the conflicting identities of free-world citizens and supporters of the Chinese authoritarian regime. They use the guise of political correctness to promote their so-called diversity and inclusivity defined by themselves, which has become their defense of the tyranny’s diversity from tyrants around the world, allowing them to find a fashionable excuse to flatter tyrants like Xi Jinping. They are not entirely ignorant of what is happening in China, nor are they coerced by someone into their doing. Instead, they willingly, as privileged individuals of Chinese descent, come to China, an authoritarian state, to advance their careers, looking down upon the masses with a superior attitude and relishing the flowers and applause arranged for them by the authorities.
They have confirmed a cruel truth that even in the 21st century, freedom, this fundamental human right, is still perceived by many as a privilege and regarded by some as a source of their own sense of superiority. In China, the masses attempting to bypass the Great Firewall using VPNs to access the international internet is considered illegal. However, Eileen Gu, who holds significance for Chinese authority’s united front purposes, enjoys numerous freedoms in China, including unrestricted use of international social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Ironically, when someone brought up the Chinese government’s restrictions on people’s internet access to Eileen Gu, she defended the Chinese government by stating that anyone in China can download VPNs from the Google Play Store to connect to the international internet, which reminded me of an ancient Chinese story called Why Not Eat Meat Porridge (A Chinese story with similar ironic to the Let them eat cake).
Eileen Gu’s response to criticism from American netizens once again exhibited a form of elitist arrogance prevalent in the younger generation of the free world. When addressing questions from reporters regarding this criticism, she condescendingly mocked her critics as uneducated individuals who will never become Olympic champions. Eileen Gu is a typical self-serving ethnic minority leftist youth who grew up in a white elite culture education and elite family, playing the racial card based on post-colonial bullshit to gain an unfair competitive advantage. They have never experienced life under the tyranny of their native culture’s political traditions alongside those sharing their ethnicity. Even her grandparents were among the beneficiaries of the totalitarian government that is currently persecuting Niu Tengyu. However, such a group of people ardently play the rhetoric of affirmative action to position themselves as victims, attempting to deconstruct the cornerstone of Western values. Their critique of Western civilization is so sharp because they know that in a society of free speech, their cynical bullshit will only be praised or acquiesced by everyone, unlike what happened to Niu Tengyu, who offended Xi Jinping in China.
What has happened to this world? How can those who oppress others claim themselves as victims? International flights take off and land daily at Beijing International Airport, carrying numerous unsympathetic privileged individuals from so-called minority groups in the free world like Eileen Gu. These youth possess a keen sense of fashion trends and share hippie yet self-righteous short videos on TikTok. Their birthdays always file revelry, music, and whiskey, while their adolescence is always with sunshine, flowers, and pampering from others. But what about the young people who truly live under the tyranny of their native culture’s political traditions? Don’t they deserve to enjoy freedom like Eileen Gu? Don’t they have the right to grow up under the sunshine and flowers, receiving all the goodwill from the world as young Westerners do?
Another year passes, within the same world, Eileen Gu and Niu Tengyu continue to script their disparate youth. Another year passes, the joys and sorrows of humanity still do not resonate with each other.
