PLAYBOY:As China has opened to the West, what’s the impact of a nondemocratic system in which the Communist Party selects its leaders from within?

AI: The way to survive in this party is to hide yourself or to become a person who obeys orders from above. These are not people with new ideas who are bold. One generation chooses the next, and one is worse than the former. It’s like inbreeding. After so many generations, it becomes weaker and weaker. You can see in the first generation— Chairman Mao’s generation, Castro’s generation—the first revolutionaries are strong characters, maybe crazy but a bit romantic. Idealistic. Now you see nothing. They cannot even remember what
64 their ancestors said.

PLAYBOY:Along with your Twitter messages, is your art largely a result of frustration with the current political system?

AI: I’m a person who likes to make an argument rather than just give emotion or expression a form and shape in art. I became an artist only because I was oppressed by society. I was born into a very political society. When I was a child, my father told me, as a joke, “You can be a politician.” I was 10 years old. I didn’t understand it, because I already knew that politicians were the enemy, the ones who crushed him. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. But now I understand. I can be political. I can say something even though we grew up without true education, memorizing Chairman Mao’s slogans. I memorized hundreds of them. I can still sing his songs, recite his poetry. Every morning at school we stood in front of his image, memorizing one of his sentences telling what we should do today to make ourselves a better person.

[Source]

Ai also discusses his venture into the medium of rock and roll, calling heavy metal music “poetry within a storm.” This morning, he posted a new heavy metal music video to his website in which he recreates scenes of his 2011 detention:

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Source]

Ai told The New York Times that he made the video and related music album because he “wanted to do something impossible:”

“It’s about the whole condition,” he said in an interview at his studio last week after showing final cuts of the video to a reporter and a photographer. “It’s not really about me. I think it’s about how the power of the state tries to manage and maintain this kind of control.”

Mr. Ai wrote the lyrics in one morning. He asked a friend, the rocker and contemporary artist Zuoxiao Zuzhou, to handle the music. Six songs are expected to be released together in an album called “The Divine Comedy” on June 22, the second anniversary of Mr. Ai’s exit from detention. The video was shot by the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, an Australian resident of Hong Kong who is best known for his work with Wong Kar-wai, a director of highly stylized films, and Zhang Yimou, who has in recent years been a favorite of the Communist Party.

Near his studio Mr. Ai has created a full-scale model of the austere room in which he was kept for much of his time in detention. He said the actual prison was in western Beijing and was used to house prominent detainees.

[Source]

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention, Beijing, detention, dissidents, music
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A public letter that he wrote on January 6, 1989, urging Deng Xiaoping to release all political prisoners, including Wei Jingsheng , in a “massive amnesty” to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, only annoyed the paramount leader further, Fang writes.

[...] Besides a sole public appearance to persuade Anhui students to end street demonstrations in 1986, Fang says he tried his best not to show up at student gatherings, especially the remarkable two-month-long Tiananmen protests, which ended with a bloody military crackdown on June 4, 1989.

After the incident, Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian , a Peking University physics professor, found themselves at the top of the authorities’ list of “black hands” behind the protests.

“If there was something we had contributed to the [democratic] movement, it might be our simple [democratic] message, which had struck a chord … with the public,” Fang writes.

See more on Fang Lizhi via CDT.

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Post tags: 1989 protests, democracy, dissidents, Fang Lizhi, June 4th, scientists
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Liu Shihui, a lawyer from Inner Mongolia now living in Guangzhou, and Chengdu-based activist Chen Yunfei told the Post they were stopped by plainclothes state security officials on a road leading to Lin’s grave. They said they had been ruffed up and insulted by the plainclothes officials, who also deleted photos on their phones.

“Last year, I went to the grave and no one stopped me,” said Chen.

“This year it seems to have become a sensitive issue. They are trying to tarnish Xi Jingping’s constitutional Chinese dream,” he said, referring to a slogan by the new president that stirred hope among liberals for an unprecedented enforcement of rights guaranteed in the constitution.

[…] About a hundred people managed to get to the grave site, where they were met by just as many police officers, urban management officials and plainclothes state police, said 40-year-old Chen Zongyao from Wenzhou. “We were allowed to light incense, but not allowed to speak,” he said. “We are trying to go up to the grave again tomorrow.”

Scene at Lin Zhao’s grave in Suzhou today RT @wbchczy 四二九苏州灵岩山.奠林昭现场 twitter.com/wbchczy/status…

— Joshua Rosenzweig (@siweiluozi) April 29, 2013

Scores of Chinese visited dissident Lin Zhao’s tomb today on the anniversary of her death, w/ police loitering nearby twitter.com/Yuxin_Gao/stat…

— Helen Gao (@Yuxin_Gao) April 29, 2013

At The Washington Post (via Austin Ramzy), Philip Pan tells Lin’s story through that of filmmaker Hu Jie in an extract from his book, Out of Mao’s Shadow.

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Post tags: Cultural Revolution, dissidents, execution, history, Lin Zhao, Mao era, writers
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Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Nobel Peace laureate serving an 11-year term for subversion after calling for an end to one-party rule and greater democracy in China, has recently been reading a popular nonfiction book about the history of Soviet Communism and Russian intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Christian philosophical texts. He has also gained weight, said Mo Shaoping, a Beijing lawyer.

“He’s gotten fatter,” said Mr. Mo, citing Mr Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who is allowed to visit her husband for about half an hour each month in jail in Jinzhou, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. “It’s visible,” he added.

Mr. Mo spoke by telephone one day after meeting with Liu Xia on Tuesday for the first time in nearly two years, he said. Mr. Mo, a high-profile lawyer who has taken on many politically sensitive cases, has known the Lius for years and was in court to defend Ms. Liu’s brother, Liu Hui, against business fraud charges. Mr. Mo says Liu Hui is innocent and entered a not guilty plea Tuesday on his client’s behalf.

Liu Xia was seen in public on Tuesday for the first time since being placed under house arrest in October 2010, when husband Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize.

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The use of the controversial laojiao system will be tightly restricted, with lawmakers expected to approve its abolition this year, a top government legal adviser has confirmed.

Chen Jiping, deputy director of the China Law Society, said the changes to laojiao, or re-education through labor, announced at the national political and legal work conference on Jan 7, are imminent.

As part of discussions with legal experts from law societies nationwide about the major tasks, he said the closed-door conference had committed to reducing the use of the controversial punishment this year until the National People’s Congress, the top legislature, can entirely scrap the system.

AFP has more background on the system and recent public anger over its implementation:

It is another signal that the widely criticised system – where people can be sentenced to up to four years’ re-education by a police panel, without an open trial – is coming to an end.

The comments come after the Communist Party’s newly installed leader Xi Jinping said the organisation recognised as a “pressing problem” that it was “out of touch with the people”.

Opponents say the camps are used to silence government critics and would-be petitioners who seek to bring their complaints against officials to higher authorities.

Earlier this month reports emerged briefly that the system – known as laojiao – would be abolished, but they were swiftly deleted and replaced with predictions of reforms, with few details and no timetable.

Because of its use against dissidents and petitioners, human rights activists have expressed concern that the government has not yet explained if another form of “administrative detention” will replace laojiao. From a statement from Human Rights Watch:

Public outrage over RTL cases has grown in recent months, particularly about RTL punishments given to individuals who complain about the government and who express their opinions online, including Tang Hui, a mother sent to RTL in 2012 for complaining to the government about the rape of her young daughter. In 2012, a senior official responsible for judicial system reforms acknowledged that there was “consensus” for “reforming the RTL system.” Other recent government decisions, such as removing the head of the Ministry of Public Security as a permanent member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 2012, may also reflect central government awareness of public anger over the impunity enjoyed by the domestic security apparatus.

Over the summer of 2012, authorities announced a pilot scheme in four cities to test out reforms to the system. Little is known about these “reforms” except that the name of the system has been changed to “Education and Correction.” It is therefore unclear, after the government “stops using” the system, whether it will be reformed, abolished, or replaced by another administrative detention system with a different name.

Read more background about the re-education through labor system and recent cases that have generated public outrage, via CDT.

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This reawakened the heavy criticism of Mo’s politics that followed the announcement of his prize in October, but had substantially subsided after he expressed hope that Liu could soon be free. Compounding matters, the Associated Press published the first interview in over two years with Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, while Chinese activists, international Nobel winners and hundreds of thousands of others signed petitions calling for the couple’s release.

Mo addressed his critics at several points during his lecture. From Howard Goldblatt’s translation at NobelPrize.org:

My greatest challenges come with writing novels that deal with social realities, such as The Garlic Ballads, not because I’m afraid of being openly critical of the darker aspects of society, but because heated emotions and anger allow politics to suppress literature and transform a novel into reportage of a social event. As a member of society, a novelist is entitled to his own stance and viewpoint; but when he is writing he must take a humanistic stance, and write accordingly. Only then can literature not just originate in events, but transcend them, not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics.

Possibly because I’ve lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. I know what real courage is, and I understand true compassion. I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer gives free rein to his talent. So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.

The announcement of my Nobel Prize has led to controversy. At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I’ve come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me. Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers. I was afraid he would succumb to the assault, but he emerged from the garlands of flowers and the stones, a smile on his face; he wiped away mud and grime, stood calmly off to the side, and said to the crowd:

For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated. I would like you to find the patience to read my books. I cannot force you to do that, and even if you do, I do not expect your opinion of me to change. No writer has yet appeared, anywhere in the world, who is liked by all his readers; that is especially true during times like these.

Many interesting things have happened to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that truth and justice are alive and well.

So I will continue telling my stories in the days to come.

Video of the speech is available on YouTube, though not yet with subtitles.

Mo’s critics responded by comparing him to a prostitute and a dwarf and calling his speech “powerless, disgraceful, a betrayal and a sellout”.

Meanwhile, fellow author Salman Rushdie wrote of Mo’s comments on Thursday that it was “hard to avoid the conclusion that Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the régime.” At The Atlantic, James Fallows warned that “as a public figure, [Mo] will forever be diminished by the stands he is taking, and avoiding, now.” The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos acknowledged that “the timing of Mo’s words could not have been worse”, but was more sympathetic regarding his general predicament:

For Mo Yan, China’s most famous user of words these days, they have never carried higher stakes. When Mo won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, the first Chinese writer to do so, the Communist Party’s propaganda chief, Li Changchun, made it clear that he intended Mo to remain in the fold. Li wrote to congratulate him, saying that the “victory reflects the prosperity and progress of Chinese literature, as well as the increasing national strength and influence of China.” It was impossible not to sympathize with Mo’s excruciating position: he was being asked to take a stand that would, without exception, alienate one side or another. The Chinese government, with one stroke, could choose to make his life miserable, and the rest of the world would decide how history remembers him. Until he won the Nobel, had spent his life tiptoeing back and forth across the line, kowtowing at some moments, speaking his mind at others. The time when he could perform that kind of balancing act was over. Nobody who has not borne the weight of writing under authoritarianism could casually dismiss his dilemma.

The AFP, quoting a Swedish newspaper, noted that some of Mo’s other comments had been less Party-friendly:

Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Friday said the writer’s comments that the Nobel Prize was “personal” and not “for a country” could […] be seen as a snub to the Chinese establishment.

“He made it clear to Chinese journalists that the prize has not been given to China, where it is being used on patriotic grounds,” it wrote.

[…] It also quoted Shelley W Chan, the US-based author of a book on Mo Yan, who called his writing “brave”. Chan accused his critics of not having read his work.

She argued that some of his criticism of the Chinese regime is quite explicit while some was more indirect. Parts of it could be seen as referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, still a taboo subject in Chinese society, she added.

The political content of Mo’s writings has frequently been cited in his defence. The Kenyon Review’s Anna Sun, for example, while attacking Mo’s written language as an impoverished Maoist husk, wrote that “politically, Mo Yan is clearly a writer with a strong social conscience, although he has not been a dissident; he is unafraid to satirize contemporary Chinese reality in his novels, and he is wryly conscious of the game of political negotiation he has to play with the state [….]“

At The New York Review of Books, however, Perry Link suggested that the political aspects of Mo’s writing, and even his apparent words of support for Liu Xiaobo, might in fact serve the Party’s purposes:

Mo Yan writes about people at the bottom of society, and in The Garlic Ballads (1988) he clearly sides with poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by predatory local officials. Sympathy for the downtrodden has had a considerable market in the world of Chinese letters in recent times, mainly because the society does include a lot of downtrodden and they do invite sympathy. But it is crucial to note the difference between the way Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture.

[…] Defenders of Mo Yan, both on and off the Nobel Prize committee, credit him with “black humor.” Perhaps. But others, including descendants of the victims of these outrages, might be excused for wondering what is so funny. From the regime’s point of view, this mode of writing is useful not just because it diverts a square look at history but because of its function as a safety valve. These are sensitive topics, and they are potentially explosive, even today. For the regime, to treat them as jokes might be better than banning them outright. In a 2004 article called “The Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” Liu Xiaobo observes that “sarcasm…has turned into a kind of spiritual massage that numbs people’s consciences and paralyzes their memories.”

[…] Chinese writers today, whether “inside the system” or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country’s authoritarian government. This inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in various ways. Liu Xiaobo’s choices have been highly unusual. Mo Yan’s responses are more “normal,” closer to the center of a bell curve. It would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two.

For another side of the argument from October, see Brendan O’Kane’s ‘Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?‘ at Rectified.name. “Spoiler alert”, O’Kane wrote by way of introduction: “in keeping with the general rule about headlines posed as yes-or-no questions, the short answer is ‘no.’”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, dissidents, Evan Osnos, James Fallows, literature, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, perry link, Sweden, writers, writers and literature
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A story Monday by the Xinhua news wire reported that a senior security official had recently been “inspecting a security ‘moat’ project created in areas encircling Beijing for the congress’ smooth holding.” There was apparently no water involved, just a lot of police.

The story quoted Zhou Yongkang, a standing committee member who oversees domestic security, as urging authorities in Beijing and surrounding regions to form a “solid defense . . . thus creating a safe, orderly, auspicious and peaceful environment for the successful holding of the 18th National Congress.”

Amnesty International released a statement last week that gave an idea of what that might mean: More than 100 activists have been rounded up so far.

“The police have placed dozens of activists under house arrest, forcibly removed individuals from Beijing and have closed down the offices of community groups in attempts to suppress peaceful dissent,” the group said. “Scores of activists are believed to be held in ‘black jails’ across the country. . . . Hotels, hostels, basements of buildings and farm centers have all been reportedly used as black jails.”

A major thrust of the campaign has been to block petitioners from reaching the capital. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips visited Lü Number 3 Team Village on the outskirts of Beijing:

Lu is home to around 700 permanent residents, many of whom supplement their incomes by renting shoddily built shacks to aggrieved men and women bound for Beijing to seek assistance from the central government.

“I don’t care who the tenants are, as long as they pay,” said the owner of one of dozens of cramped guesthouses, who rents rooms for 10 yuan (£1) a night or 200 yuan (£20) a month.

But the village’s once-crowded guesthouses stand largely empty this week after police and security forces moved in to weed out potential troublemakers ahead of the highly sensitive leadership transition.

The state media has dubbed the crackdown the “zero petitions” policy. A report in the Global Times newspaper last month claimed”petitioning cases” in Beijing had fallen 12% since August, after 10,000 detentions.

Activists already in Beijing have faced house arrest or strong pressure to leave the city. From Gillian Wong at The Associated Press:

The crackdown has extended to lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong. He said Beijing authorities have held him under informal house arrest since mid-October, stationing four or five guards outside his apartment in Beijing around the clock.

[…] Even dissidents’ relatives have come under pressure. Beijing activist Hu Jia said he was warned by police to leave town, and that even his parents told him that police had told them to escort him to his hometown.

“My parents said to me: ‘Hu Jia, you don’t know what kind of danger you are in, but we know,’” he recounted in a phone interview from his parents’ home in eastern Anhui province. “They said: ‘Beijing is a cruel battlefield. If you stay here, you will be the first to be sacrificed. Don’t do this.’”

Also pressured to leave Beijing was writer Wang Lixiong, whose Tibetan wife Woeser had already left for Lhasa. Wang wrote in a New York Times op-ed, translated by Perry Link:

The Communist Party has, for the sake of its own meeting, asked that my wife leave me and that I leave my elderly mother, who is too old to live without someone to care for her. Incidentally, she joined the Communist Party in 1947 (two years before the founding of the People’s Republic, and a time when joining was still dangerous) and did so in order to oppose the reigning Nationalist government, which she saw as “lacking humanity.”

Now, I want to ask her, “What do you think of the humanity of the Communist Party today?” but cannot bring myself to inflict on her the pain that the question would bring.

I have replied to State Security that a party conclave is no reason to disperse a family. They, in turn, threatened that if I refused to leave, things would become “uncomfortable” for me. They did not say how. I have decided to wait at home and see. What does a party that vows before the entire world that it follows the rule of law have in mind for my discomfort?

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Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Amnesty International, CCP, dissidents, Global Times, house arrest, Hu Jia, perry link, petitioners, security crackdown, stability preservation, Wang Lixiong, Woeser, Xu Zhiyong, Zhou Yongkang
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Yuan offers an unsentimental view of the global environment. His particular concern is not the common fear of direct military conflict with the United States (although he also addresses this), but rather the fortuitous advantage that China presently enjoys due to the international malaise in the wake of the post-Global Financial Crisis, one that, given the right leadership, could well work in favour of the People’s Republic. The essay provides, therefore, valuable insights into the canny calculations of one prominent analyst. Its message was, however, not greeted with universal equanimity. For, among other things, Yuan controversially identified what his critics immediately dubbed the ‘New Black Five Categories of People’ 新黑五类 that threaten China’s social stability and party-dominated top-down reform (groups that he claims are being infiltrated and manipulated by the American imperium for its nefarious ends).

[… O]f the ‘New Five Black Categories’ in Yuan’s analysis, four are not new. Nor indeed is the discussion of social anomie or unruly elements, given the fact that the Chinese party-state is presently much taken with the theory and practice of ‘social management’ 社会管理. What caused particular offence (apart from Yuan’s clear identification of perceived ‘threats’) was that ‘vulnerable groups’ 弱势群体 were included in the list. Critics were appalled that in a booming modern China that boasts of its aspirations to achieve global status the groups most deserving of support, protection and care were being identified as an incipient danger. That such a suggestion came from an analyst working for a government think tank that was itself created to protect the Chinese revolution, and its own elevation of the formerly dispossessed and oppressed classes of the country seemed nothing less than confronting. To offer the state policy advice that overtly targets the marginalised and disempowered appeared, to many, as inhumane and in blatant contradiction of the Communist Party’s founding principles and avowed value system.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Li Zhonghe, 65, a retired construction worker, told Reuters he would have to keep his 40 to 50 pigeons in their coops when the congress starts.

“There are currently some extra restrictions, so we are not supposed to let the pigeons out to fly,” Li said, adding he did not know the reason why. “It’s this way every time there is a congress. I’m accustomed to it by now.”

Unlikely as it seems, pigeons, often raised as a hobby in China, have been used as a tool of subversion before. In the late 1990s, dissidents released pigeons carrying slogans written on ribbons tied to the birds’ feet in southern China.

The Beijing Carrier Pigeon Association said in an online notice two annual autumn races, originally scheduled during the congress, would be postponed until December. It did not say why.

The Wall Street Journal has published a series of photos showing the heightened security in Beijing, and The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs has more on the government’s full-court press:

As this sprawling city of 20 million people steels itself for the 18th Party Congress, all sorts of potentially buoyant objects — balloons, homing pigeons, Ping-Pong balls and remote-control toy airplanes — are finding their way onto lists of suspicious items that could potentially carry protest messages and mar the meticulously choreographed political spectacle.

And this is just a tiny portion of the government’s rules and restrictions, circulated on the Internet but never officially acknowledged, that seem likely to make daily life especially challenging during the weeklong congress, which one provincial police department likened to a “state of war.”

In recent days, kitchen knives have been removed from store shelves, Internet access has mysteriously slowed to the speed of molasses, and international news channels like CNN and the BBC have disappeared from television sets in upscale health clubs.

As Jacobs reports, “hundreds, if not thousands” of dissidents have either been placed under house arrest or asked to leave Beijing. The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman caught up with prominent activist Hu Jia, who said he has been under tight surveillance for the past six weeks:

On 20 October, state security officers escorted Hu to a train station in Beijing and bundled him off to his hometown in Anhui province. Hu said the police threatened his parents with violence if he returned to Beijing before the end of the meeting.

“This has been way worse than the 17th party congress,” Hu said, referring to a similar event in 2007, while he was formally under house arrest. “At that time I was allowed to go out and buy things to eat. This time there’s just no way.”

Meanwhile, although state media published several cherry-picked comments from Sina Weibo users on Friday, David Bandurski of The China Media Project details the difficulty of finding microblog posts mentioning the congress:

Searches for “18th Congress” using both numerals and Chinese characters are blocked on Chinese social media sites. Apparently, it is possible to make posts using the terms, but it is not possible to see what others have posted unless you are following them. The goal, it seems, is to restrict conversation about the meeting while not outright banning the terms.

Searches for the terms yield a message that reads: “We’re sorry, results related to ’18th Congress’ cannot be found.”

See additional coverage of China’s upcoming 18th Party Congress, via CDT.

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Dissident artist Ai Weiwei served as guest editor and appears on cover of the latest issue of British magazine New Statesman, in which he leads with a challenge for China to re-evaluate and recognize its position in the world as it seeks answers to the many problems it faces:

The future of China is uncertain. I believe that the world is becoming a better place, largely thanks to advances in technology which help us to address so many of the problems that we face. The expanding use of social media and the internet will help China become a more conscious and intelligent country, but the future remains uncertain. There are problems ahead which we can’t even identify yet, and it is vital to be prepared and to meet these challenges in every way we can.

Whatever the future problems are, I believe that, both as an in­ternational society and as an individual, you have to see the human problem as one. We share this planet and we have been divided for too long, for ridiculous reasons. Now, we have to come together and say, as one, that we share the same values, that we can respect differences and that, together, we can create the best possible solutions.

If I have one message for you, the readers of the New Statesman magazine, whether you are reading this in English or in Mandarin, on the page or online, it is this: the only way we can be successful, in China and in life, is through greater communication and wider awareness, in constantly questioning our standards and our conditions. You, as readers, are part of this, you are active members of this family, and you can be proud of that.

Ai, who placed third in ArtReview’s 2012 ranking of the most powerful figures in the art world, becomes the eighth guest to edit the New Statesman. The magazine’s features editor, Sophie Elmhirst, details the story behind Ai Weiwei’s role:

Ai Weiwei agreed to guest edit the New Statesman in April this year. We had sent the invitation to him six months earlier via his London representatives, the Lisson Gallery, but, understandably, it took him a little while to respond. Last year, Ai spent 81 days in detention. An artist already renowned for his work and fearless irreverence towards the Chinese authorities became a global cause when he was arrested at Beijing Capital Airport and detained in a secret location. Given the level of international attention and the ongoing pressure on Ai even after he was released (he was quickly filed with a £1.5m fine for tax evasion), it seemed unlikely that we would hear back from him. But then, suddenly, he said yes.

Looking back, that out-of-nowhere yes makes more sense than it did at the time. After spending a week with Ai at his studio in Beijing, I learned that he likes to do things on instinct. The more unexpected an opportunity, the more attractive it is to him, especially if it offers a platform for challenging the Chinese government. And when he says yes, he means yes.

…

Over a week in Beijing I met with Ai almost every day and his team – a group of highly talented and motivated photographers, organisers and writers in their own right – pitched a stream of ideas. We could have made a book: the challenge was to edit down the material into a series of pieces that could fit into a magazine. And there was another test too: language. The vast majority of this issue of the New Statesman – for the first time in its history – was written originally in Chinese by Chinese writers, activists, academics and artists. After I returned from Beijing and had firmed up with Ai and his team which article commissions, photography essays and interviews were going to be included, we started, slowly but surely, to receive the copy, which had to be translated into English and then edited in both languages. The plan from the start was to produce the issue in both Chinese and English (see deputy editor Helen Lewis’s account of distributing the Chinese version behind the “great firewall”). Usually we produce one magazine a week; this time it was two, with one version in a language that no one in the New Statesman office could speak, read or write. But with the help of translators, Chinese friends, Ai Weiwei and his team we got there in the end.

New Statesman also produced a digital PDF version of this week’s issue in Chinese, which it uploaded to file-sharing sites in order to circumvent a censorship regime that has “tried to obliterate the existence of Ai Weiwei from the internet”. From an essay about censorship by former newspaper editor and secret detainment victim Cheng Yizhong, to an interview Ai conducted with a paid internet troll charged with disrupting netizen debates, deputy editor Helen Lewis promises Chinese readers they will find “a story very different from the one they are told by the state-controlled press”.

See also previous CDT coverage of Ai Weiwei, including an interview he gave to German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, Cheng Yizhong, dissidents, Great Firewall, netizens, New Statesman, online public opinion
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SPIEGEL: You’re expected in Washington for the opening of a major show of your work, and in Berlin to begin the professorship that the Academy of the Arts has offered you. But there is no mention whatsoever in the Chinese state media about you, your case and the fact that you’ve been barred from leaving the country.

Ai: Strange, isn’t it? Not a word about me in the gossip columns, and not a word on the political pages, and yet in a single night there were more than 500 articles about me in the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: But with your lawsuit, aren’t you practically challenging the authorities to lock you up?

Ai: I don’t want to be trapped by that logic. Of course they’ll win against me in the short term, but not in the end, because they are weak. In fact, they’re so shy that they don’t even dare to discuss my case in public. I’ve seen shy girls, and shy little boys, too — but have you ever seen such a shy government?

Ai also expresses hope for the new generation of leaders set to take power early next year:

SPIEGEL: A new group of men will assume China’s leadership in a few weeks, the fifth generation since Mao, the generation of the princelings. It’s also your generation. Xi Jinping, the designated party leader, is only four years older than you.

Ai: And I became aware of that recently. I came across a photo showing my father, the poet Ai Qing, next to the father of Xi Jinping, the politician Xi Zhongxun. For quite some time, both followed similar life paths, both were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps we, their sons, could share a few experiences with each other. I believe that the new leaders know that they have to make great changes in this country. It’s impossible for things to remain the way they are.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, dissidents, Xi Jinping
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“They’re still holding my passport,” Mr. Ai said. “They said they want to give it to me but have no clear time schedule for that.”

Mr. Ai was detained for 81 days last year and put on probation for one year after his release. That probation ended June 21. Mr. Ai said at the time that police officers in Beijing had told him that he could not leave China, but that he would soon have his passport returned.

“I think it’s that the person who’s responsible for my case didn’t get a clear order from above,” he said. “And maybe the people from above are busy with much more important issues.”

In a preview for an article which will appear in this week’s Huffington iPad magazine, Gazelle Emami sat down with Ai Weiwei at his Beijing studio:

Of everything discussed in an 80-minute interview at Ai Weiwei’s studio on the outskirts of Beijing -– including his 81-day detention in April last year, the government’s iron hold on his passport and the tax case that would never end–nothing roused the dissident artist so much as his fellow Chinese artists who stayed silent during his disappearance, while the Western art world cried, “Where is Ai Weiwei?”

“Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Xu Bing, Liu Xiaodong,” Ai lists off casually, as if he were taking attendance instead of denouncing China’s power art players.

See also Ai Weiwei’s take on “contemporary Chinese art”, as well as recent profiles of Ai and his former protege Zhao Zhao in Smithsonian Magazine and Spiegel, respectively, all via CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art, dissidents, United States
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How did you go from making River Elegy, a critical documentary about Chinese society and politics, to Christianity?

River Elegy‘s conclusion was that the solution for China was democracy and human rights. But it was only when I got to the West that I realized that the root of this was Christianity. It was the Bible. It creates something more important than rights given by a constitution or a government. It creates God-given rights—endowed by our creator. This made rights something permanent and not dependent on a leader.

Some Chinese Christians go further and reject much of traditional Chinese culture, saying it is incompatible with democracy and Christianity.

A lot of Chinese Christians seem to know more about Israel’s history, through the Old Testament, than they do about the 5,000 years of Chinese culture. I find this unreasonable. People say there was no revelation of God in China but I felt this was wrong. So I was trying [in the DVD series China’s Confession ] to find the hand of God in China, his footprint. How could there not be God’s footprint? You can’t say “Jesus has arrived, let’s execute Confucius and Laozi!” Instead, we have to think that they would have welcomed Jesus. They weren’t prophets but they were seekers too.

See also Johnson’s interviews with Chen Guangcheng, Bao Tong, Chang Ping, and Ran Yunfei.

Update: The video of River Elegy is available on YouTube (h/t @kinablog):

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Post tags: Christianity, dissent, dissidents, yuan zhiming
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The case has some echoes in China, which tolerates little political dissent from its artists, writers and musicians. The artist Ai Weiwei, for example, a hefty thorn in Beijing’s side, has frequent and unpleasant brushes with the law. Liu Xiaobo, the essayist, literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, remains in prison, as do other poets, writers and critics. Government censors are notorious for the erasing of objectionable political comments online and the blocking of offending blogs and Web sites.

Chinese musicians seem to have been dealt with less harshly, perhaps because they have rarely dared to openly taunt the Communist Party and the political system. China’s rock, punk, rap and hip hop artists don’t much go there, at least not brazenly and commercially; when they do offer a political message, they often drape their lyrics in word-play and oblique symbolisms.

A previous generation thrilled to the pointed and poignant music of Cui Jian, whom many consider the godfather of Chinese rock, but Young China still seems to be waiting for its Woody Guthrie, its Pete Seeger, its Bruce Springsteen. Still waiting for an Odetta, a Dylan, a Baez.

See also an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books with Jonathan Campbell, the author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Cui Jian, dissidents, Liu Xiaobo, music industry, Pussy Riot, rock music
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So what is it about Ai? What makes him, in Western eyes, the world’s “most powerful artist”? The answer lies in the West itself. Now obsessed with China, the West would surely invent Ai if he didn’t already exist. China may after all become the most powerful nation in the world. It must therefore have an artist of comparable consequence to hold up a mirror both to China’s failings and its potential. Ai (his name is pronounced eye way-way) is perfect for the part. Having spent his formative years as an artist in New York in the 1980s, when Warhol was a god and conceptual and performance art were dominant, he knows how to combine his life and art into a daring and politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China. He’ll use any medium or genre—sculpture, ready-mades, photography, performance, architecture, tweets and blogs—to deliver his pungent message.

Ai’s persona—which, as with Warhol’s, is inseparable from his art—draws power from the contradictory roles that artists perform in modern culture. The loftiest are those of martyr, preacher and conscience. Not only has Ai been harassed and jailed, he has also continually called the Chinese regime to account; he has made a list, for example, that includes the name of each of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because of shoddy schoolhouse construction. At the same time, he plays a decidedly unsaintly, Dada-inspired role—the bad boy provocateur who outrages stuffed shirts everywhere. (In one of his best-known photographs, he gives the White House the finger.) Not least, he is a kind of visionary showman. He cultivates the press, arouses comment and creates spectacles. His signature work, Sunflower Seeds—a work of hallucinatory intensity that was a sensation at the Tate Modern in London in 2010—consists of 100 million pieces of porcelain, each painted by one of 1,600 Chinese craftsmen to resemble a sunflower seed. As Andy would say, in high deadpan, “Wow.”

Ai’s work will be on display at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from early October through February 2013, his second show in the American capital this year. See also reviews in The New York Times and The Guardian of Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry, the documentary film by Alison Klayman that premiered in late July.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art, dissidents, Smithsonian, washington post
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