Does anyone have recentish claims of that for investigation and possible debunking?
If you speak Chinese and get on any Chinese social media you will see a lot of people criticizing the government. China has more people publicly striking every year than the US for sure, probably US and EU combined. You might get disappeared for plotting sedition or something but that isn't simply criticizing the government.
Indeed you often see people petitioning the central government to intervene against the provincial governments (which are very powerful and ideologically diverse, representing the 5 broad fractions (not factions) of the CPC (capitalist reformist, Left-nationalist, neo-confucian nationalist, Party-centre, and Neo Maoist))
Conversely, local and provincial governments are often sharply critical of central government policy and say so. The Shanghai left-wing papers (of which Sixth Tone is an English offshoot) are often shockingly so.
I didn't know about the fractions in the Party, where can I read more about it?
I get it mostly from actual party members. That said my understanding is second hand, the actual groups in the party split along several axis and my Mandarin is aggressively middling. So take what I say with several grains of salt. Also keep in mind party members are quite rightly restricted in what they can say and I am reading between the lines.
in 2021 western media tried to pretend that a tennis player got disappeared:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/the-missing-star-athlete-peng-shuai-is-not-missing-at-all.html
she was not even missing.
they did a similar thing when Jack Ma didn't do public events for a few weeks after getting a talking-to from financial regulators over some sort of new microfinance bullshit that would have circumvented China's capital controls
I have seen Where is Peng Shuai tshirts at an op shop (thrift store) because Drew Pavlou got a stack made up for the Australian Open
Edit: before anyone else can do it I'll kelly myself
Op shop
Gonna get them in red and get my homies to wear them to her next AU match
China has this thing where if you do a shitty job in a government position, or you get involved in a scandal, you actually get fired and face consequences for doing a bad job. Usually after getting fired, this government official will lay low, maybe do some soul searching, and reappear in a much lower position, if at all. Western media will pretend this person has instead been "disappeared" and has simply vanished from the face of the Earth.
in china it's the law that you HAVE to follow xi jingping on instagram and you HAVE to like ALL of his posts AND EVEN HIS STORIES. every single one, even tho he posts multiple times a day. if you're found to have not liked any of his photos, you get sent to jail. and the real kicker? instagram is banned in china. so they make you break the law to follow the law, and then they send you to jail for following him anyway! and when you get to jail, chinese jail is the worst in the world. it's actually a jail inside of another jail, and they intentionally house the non-violent offenders with hardened violent criminals just to make it that much more unsafe. they ban your runescape account too. and in jail the only entertainment you're allowed to have is a CD player that constantly skips and then when it doesn't the headphones cut in and out a bunch no matter what way you bend the wire or if you try to wrap it around the cd player or anything.
I think someone used to a low security western prison, especially on the Scandinavian model might find them a bit confronting but I've seen high security au prisons and Indonesian prisons and let me tell to Chinese prison is much better than the former and a sparkling utopia compared to the latter.
it's actually a jail inside of another jail
And the warden?
Xzibit
"Disappear" is a great word because it immediately conjures up images of having a bag thrown over their head and being whisked away never to be seen again, but it's also vague enough that you can use it any time someone doesn't make a public appearance for any amount of time. When Western media says someone "disappears," it typically just means they haven't seen them on TV recently, it's not like they're checking in at their houses or contacting neighbors or relatives or anything like that, and obviously it doesn't mean anyone's reported them missing. If the person reappears, first off they never technically said anything bad happened to them, but also, once they've got the audience primed to believe something's going on, they can keep running stories about how "questions remain" to keep the story going for a couple more cycles even though the only thing that raised any questions in the first place has been resolved.
See Peng Shuai for an example of this.
In addition to what others have said, Western media has a new cold war thing going where if they haven't seen a Chinese figure in a while they declare them "missing" and start presenting guesses as plausible explanations for someone that pops up two weeks later saying, "why are you talking about me?"
They made a bunch of CIA assets disappear
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of_CIA_sources_in_China
I was looking into it, but I don't know enough about national security law to know if the international community saw it as fair game as far as espionnage goes. The wikipedia sources I read up til now are as vague as can be.
Treason is usually punished severely, even in the "rules based international order"
