China has confirmed that an outspoken former tycoon who went “missing” last month is indeed under investigation by authorities in Beijing

Ren Zhiqiang is undergoing disciplinary review and supervisory investigation by the Beijing Xicheng District Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision for suspected “serious violations of discipline and the law,” according to a brief statement published by Chinese state media on Tuesday evening.

The 69-year-old former chairman of the Beijing Huayuan Group went missing in March after penning a lengthy and strongly-worded essay criticizing the way in which the Chinese government handled the coronavirus that was widely circulated.

A full translation of the essay has been published here. It contains passages like this:

China’s ruling party hid the reasons for the original outbreak of the virus, then relied upon state power to quarantine the cities, it cheated the World Health Organization to gain its trust, and it even won the praise of the international community. But having lived through this, the Chinese people are not so easily lied to again. Maybe people who live in countries with freedom of expression don’t know the pain of living in a country without a free media or freedom of expression, but the Chinese people have the pain of knowing that the virus outbreak and everything that came after should never have happened, that it’s all because of a system which strictly bans a free media and freedom of expression.

And this:

In this epidemic, you can see reality, the Party is protecting the Party’s interests, officialdom is protecting its interests, the supreme ruler is only protecting his core position and interests. It’s precisely this kind of system which only heeds the destiny of the emperor, it never cares about the people’s situation. When the epidemic had already broken out, no one dared to tell the people without the authorization of the supreme ruler. Not daring to publicize the facts, on the contrary they used the arrest of a group of ‘rumor-mungers’ to restrict and prevent communication about the real situation, and in that way made sure the virus became uncontrollable.

Nicknamed “the Big Cannon,” Ren has long been one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese government in China, amassing 37 million followers on Weibo until his account was deleted in 2016 after he wrote a post declaring that Chinese media should serve the people rather than the party following Xi Jinping’s inspection tour of the headquarters of Xinhua, People’s Daily, and CCTV.

Since then, Ren has kept a comparatively low profile and has reportedly been under surveillance.

Though he was allowed to continue to talk to friends, that freedom ceased when his essay leaked from his friend circle and went viral.