From Gao Yaojie to Mao Yushi: The high cost of being a whistleblower in China

Cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/12912116

Long before eye doctor Li Wenliang sounded the alarm on COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus in early 2020, Dr Gao Yaojie was China’s best-known whistleblower. Her decision to expose the source of China’s AIDS epidemic made her an exile for the last 14 years of her life.

At 81, Gao was the oldest dissident ever to have fled China. Barely one month after her death, prominent economist Mao Yushi set a new record. Mao, whose liberal think tank known for advocating market reforms was shut down by officials, shared pictures on social media of his 95th birthday celebrations in Vancouver, Canada, not long after he fled China.

Gao kept writing books into her last days, and she never took her final years in exile for granted.

“The US is no paradise,” wrote Gao, but she added: “Had I never left [China], I wouldn’t have lived past 90.”

She died last December at the age of 95 in New York.