China's Artful Dissident

A visual artist, street artist, illustrator and performer, Badiucao is one of China's few political cartoonists : having built his reputation on social networks, he has since been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and featured on the BBC and CNN. Convinced that artists have the power to deconstruct the arrogance of authoritarian rule, he regularly ridicules Xi Jinping, represented as Winnie the Pooh, or Mao Zedong. The artist also created a performance around Tank Man, the man who famously faced a column of tanks on Tiananmen Square, which went viral worldwide. A masked operative, Badiucao has long been nicknamed the "Chinese Banksy".