Badiucao

For Chinese political cartoonist Badiucao, art left an indelible mark on the trajectory of his life, his family, and ultimately, his career, before he was even born.

His paternal grandfather and great-uncle were pioneers in the Chinese film industry. In the 1950s, when Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign led to a crackdown on artists and political dissidents, Badiucao’s grandfather was sent to a forced labor camp, where he died in 1957—leaving Badiucao’s father, then six years old, an orphan. Badiucao learned this story gradually, in bits and pieces throughout his childhood, mostly told as a means of dissuading him from becoming an artist himself. “My dad didn’t want me to be an artist—he thought it was dangerous,” says Badiucao, who adopted a pen name during his early days as a political cartoonist. “But I always wanted to be an artist.” 

Although he grudgingly went to law school at his parents’ urging, before long he told them that he wanted to pursue his dreams. To keep himself and his family safe from persecution, he decided to leave the country and moved to Australia in 2009. He soon realized, however, that being an artist would not qualify him for a green card or allow him to stay in Australia long term, so he applied for a residency permit as a teacher instead. Two years later, when he received his green card, he was finally able to transition from teaching into working full-time as a political cartoonist. He selected cartooning as his medium of choice both because he liked to draw and because he felt that cartoons were particularly effective for sparking discussions of public affairs and social issues. His greatest artistic inspiration is Käthe Kollwitz, a German painter and sculptor who depicted poverty and the working class during Weimar and Nazi Germany and who later became influential in Chinese leftist-artist circles. “She observed the pain” of those with the lowest status, he says. “I was drawn to this type of art. Outside of China, in Europe and in America, there’s an argument that art should be for the sake of art. . . . But in China, art is about reality.”

For the first few years of his career in Australia, Badiucao kept his identity anonymous, seeking to protect himself and his family from the Chinese authorities. He carried out much of his work online or on the streets, and he hid his face behind a mask during public exhibitions. In 2011, he joined Weibo, China’s popular alternative to Twitter, where he drew cartoons about a deadly high-speed train crash in Wengzhou and soon expanded to other topics, gaining thousands of followers. After his profile was deleted more than 30 times by the platform, he was forced to give up on Weibo.

“Safety is never a promise, it is just a way to get me to compromise. There’s no ending to it. It would be a slippery slope. I would become their pawn. I would never really get my peace or my freedom back. I will never fulfill the person that I want to be, which is being an artist, which is about not censoring myself, and creating whatever the fuck I want.”

In 2018, Badiucao organized “Gongle,” his first major solo exhibition. Part of Hong Kong’s Free Expression Week, the show dealt with internet censorship in China and criticized Google for its complicity with authoritarianism in building a censored search engine. It was co-organized by Hong Kong Free Press, Amnesty International, and Reporters Without Borders. Badiucao worked hard to promote the exhibition, inviting numerous prominent activists to the opening, including Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong and members of the Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot.

Just before opening night, Badiucao’s relatives in mainland China were arrested and taken to the police station, where they were detained and interrogated for several hours. Upon their release, Badiucao received messages that revealed that the Chinese police knew his real identity and wanted him to cancel the exhibition. “In their words, they wanted me to ‘be a good boy’ and stop making political art at all,” he says. “As long as I’m a good boy, my family back in China would be fine and I would be fine, too.” The authorities threatened to send police from mainland China to Hong Kong—which was unheard of at that time. The organizers ultimately decided to cancel the exhibition for safety reasons.

Badiucao, who had poured significant time, money, and effort into the exhibition, calls this decision “a devastating moment” for him. He was forced to grapple with the implications of losing his anonymity as well as his identity as an artist. “I was relying on this layer of being anonymous,” he says, “but this was completely shattered, and this way of being safe was no longer the case for me. The Chinese police wanted me to stop making art at all—not just this exhibition but for all my future life. . . . What do I do? Do I still be an artist? Do I continue making things that I’m making?”

For the next six months, Badiucao wrestled with these questions. In the end, the answer was clear: He would continue to work as an artist. He knew that even if he agreed to stop, the state wouldn’t guarantee his safety. He understood that the Chinese authorities might make him offers of safety or financial prosperity—but only in exchange for information about other dissidents or human rights organizations. “Safety is never a promise,” he says. “It is just a way to get me to compromise. There’s no ending to it. It would be a slippery slope. I would become their pawn. I would never really get my peace or my freedom back. I would never fulfill the person that I want to be, which is being an artist, which is about not censoring myself and creating whatever the fuck I want.”

To go public with his story, Badiucao decided to release China’s Artful Dissident, a documentary about his experiences that aired on ABC Australia and 60 Minutes. He began going out in public without a mask and attended screenings to promote the film and his story around the world.

Badiucao has gained a significant following on social media—including hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and Instagram—for his powerful cartoons and their incisive commentary on Chinese politics and social issues, such as the crackdown on free expression in Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghur people. He has also been an active supporter of regional protest movements, including the 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong—which were “deeply personal” to him given the cancellation of his exhibition—and the 2022 blank paper campaign against China’s ban of slogans and phrases associated with protest. Of this movement (also known as the A4 Revolution) and the young activists on its front lines, Badiucao says: “You are a true inspiration to me, and I applaud your bravery. I applaud your courage that took you to the streets. You’ve done something that I never imagined to do when I still lived in China. And I want to learn that from you.” 

Much of Badiucao’s work explores the intersections between Chinese politics and global current events, from the ongoing war in Ukraine to the recent uproar over Chinese “spy balloons” in the United States. “I think my work paves a way to introduce a better understanding of China, of its problems, but also of its people’s resistance,” he says. “It is a bridge to introduce China to the rest of the world.”

Many of Badiucao’s illustrations feature Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh—a popular meme that first emerged in 2013 and has become shorthand for mocking the Chinese president. Badiucao says that he is particularly proud of his efforts to support and spread this meme, which challenges censors seeking to eradicate the seemingly innocuous children’s book character from the Chinese internet. “When you manage to connect the most taboo information, like Xi Jinping’s face, or deconstruct Xi Jinping’s authority with the most common and popular image, like Winnie the Pooh’s, then you make this unbeatable monster for the censors,” he says. “Because if they take down Winnie the Pooh, then people would ask: ‘Hey, yesterday my son was reading a book online and today it can no longer be reached, so what happened?’ So when people ask questions, the answer will always emerge from somewhere, and then people will know how this power is being used to deconstruct the seriousness of this regime.”

Badiucao regularly receives death threats on social media and has found himself subjected to a “character assassination” campaign by the Chinese regime, which has pushed narratives that he is a pedophile and a traitor to China. “When they cannot deny your art,” he says, “they deny you as a whole person, calling you all kinds of things.”

Badiucao notes that he often struggles with being far from China—not out of homesickness so much as relevance. “I don’t have firsthand experience like the people who are there,” he says. “So the biggest worry is how authentic my work is. Is it serving as their voices, the ones who are back in China and did not have a voice? Is my reading correct? Is my work truthful?” At the same time, he has accepted that he cannot safely return to China, where he would risk censorship and would likely be arrested and disappeared.

Although he is physically safe, Badiucao says that living in Australia—even as a “skilful migrant”—has posed significant career barriers. He has struggled to break into the country’s arts and culture sector and frequently experiences censorship due to his criticism of the Chinese regime. He attributes the reluctance to show his work to Australia’s broader strategic interest in protecting its economic relationship with China and curtailing criticism of its government. “They don’t want to exhibit my work,” he says, “because once they do, they will be accused as racist by the Chinese government”—a common tactic deployed by China to discredit criticism of its policies and practices. “It’s very tricky. And it’s working on people, because people do not want to take the risk. I tried publicly funded institutions, museums, private galleries—there is just no way to do that. . . . And it’s really hurting me that I cannot showcase my art, that I cannot earn fairly as an artist by having a gallery representing me and selling my works in Australia.”

“I don’t live [in China] anymore. I don’t have first hand experience like the people who are there. So the biggest worry is how authentic my work is. Is it serving as their voices, the ones who are back in China and did not have a voice. Is my reading correct? Is my work truthful?”

In November 2021, a similar brand of transnational posturing nearly derailed a major exhibition of his work in Grazie, Italy. The Chinese consulate accused Badiucao of “hurting Chinese feelings and creating fake news” and threatened to damage a cultural exchange program between China and Italy if the show were to open. “This is a direct intimidation from probably the highest level of representatives, and they do not even hide or kind of make it more diplomatic,” he says. “It’s basically blackmail.” Fortunately, the museum and the local government refused to cancel the exhibition, releasing a public letter that defended Badiucao’s right to freedom of expression.

Despite the pervasive censorship and the uphill battles to disseminate and exhibit his work, Badiucao says that he is a firm believer in the slow but steady march of progress. His personal hero is Sisyphus, the figure from Greek mythology who is forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill every day, only for it to roll back down.

“The rock’s gonna roll down eventually, no matter how hard you push,” he says. “But this does not mean the action in itself is meaningless, and you, as an artist, have the power to define that this is meaningful, regardless of the results. Is my art going to be a thing that will change China and start this revolution tomorrow and overthrow Xi Jinping? I don’t know! Who knows which art work is the last straw on the back of the camel?”