During the Cold War, educated people in free societies were so familiar with figures on the other side of the Iron Curtain that they were referred to just by their last names: Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Havel, Forman. They knew the name, too, of the Soviet system’s most notorious instrument of control, the Gulag network of forced labor camps. Chinese people have experienced seventy-six years of a similar kind of autocracy, longer than the entire existence of the Soviet Union. But outsiders still know little about independent thinkers in China—or even that they exist. That neglect extends to Ai Xiaoming, the author of the essay that follows, who is one of the most important public intellectuals in China today. A seventy-two-year-old native of Wuhan, she began as a scholar of Eastern European literature, translating Kundera into Chinese, before slowly migrating to feminist studies. In the early 2000s, having become a tenured professor in literature at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, she adopted the new technology of digital cameras to make films about social issues in China. A …