ClickMe to see subversive art by WeiWei
UPDATE April 7: Jon Huntsman, US Ambassador to China — saluted Ai, jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and others who “challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times”.
“Ai Weiwei is under investigation on suspicion of economic crimes. It has nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression,” said the spokesman, the first Chinese official to comment on the 53-year-old’s case. Other countries have no right to interfere.” Hong Lei, Chinese Foreign Ministry
Washington Post by Keith B. Richburg, Sunday, April 3, 10:06 PM
BEIJING — Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio.
Ai is the most high-profile activist to have been detained in a government crackdown in which dozens of bloggers, human rights lawyers and writers have been swept up.
The arrests seem related to the government’s concern that activists in China want to launch a “jasmine revolution” similar to the popular uprisings roiling autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa.
Some of those detained have been accused of “inciting subversion of state power,” a catch-all term used to jail anyone critical of Communist Party rule. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, faced the same charge and received an 11-year prison sentence.
Since mid-February, when anonymous calls for “jasmine rallies” in China began circulating on the Internet, 26 people have been arrested, 30 have disappeared and are presumed held by security forces, and 200 have been placed under “soft detention,” meaning their movements are restricted, according to a count by the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders on Thursday.
But the arrest of Ai and the others appeared to mark what human rights groups and others called a new and more sinister phase in China’s ongoing, and typically cyclical, repression of dissidents. In the past, such sweeps of activists have preceded major events on the calendar — the 2008 Olympics, major Communist Party meetings or the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo last December — and have receded once the event ended.
The arrests of bloggers and writers, in particular, on subversion charges suggests a rollback of the limited open space recently allowed for free opinion on the Internet and particularly on popular Twitter-like microblogging sites.
“This is not a crackdown in the classic cycle of tightening and loosening,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Hong-Kong based China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “This is an effort by the government to redraw the lines of permissible expression in China, to restrict the most outspoken advocates of global values.”
Activists such as Ai — an active Twitter user — have been continually pushing the boundaries of what is allowed, while increased connectivity is giving ordinary Chinese people more access to uncensored information and viewpoints.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in its Thursday statement, said, “In the context of the democratic uprisings taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese government, fearful of its own people, is counting on getting away with staging one of the most repressive campaigns in more than a decade because of the international community’s preoccupation with events elsewhere.”
The outspoken Ai, 53, was the artistic director for the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, but he later turned critical of the Games. He has been arrested before: In 2009, in the western city of Chengdu, Ai was beaten so badly that he required surgery to have blood drained from his brain. Late last year, he was stopped at Beijing’s airport from flying to South Korea because authorities feared he might go to Oslo to attend the Nobel ceremony for Liu. Liu is in prison, and his wife, Liu Xia, is under house arrest.
Ai was prevented from having a solo exhibition of his work at a Beijing gallery this year, and in January authorities demolished his newly built Shanghai studio. In March, Ai announced that he was opening a studio in Berlin to escape the restraints on artistic freedom in China.
Police detained Ai on Sunday morning, and his assistants and attorneys said they were concerned that they have not had any communication with him since. After his arrest, police blocked off the streets to his studio and raided it, carting away laptops and the hard drive from the main computer, Ai’s workers said.
They said eight staff members and Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, were taken to the local police station for questioning. Even as night fell, Lu and two staffers were still being held, they said.
Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer, said he hoped Ai’s international fame would provide him some protection while in police custody.
Liu also said the arrest appears to be “related to the intense international situation, such as what happened in Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries.” But he said it was too early to say whether Ai’s Twitter posts and interview statements about jasmine rallies in China played a part.
On Feb. 24, amid an online campaign for Middle East-style jasmine rallies in major Chinese cities, Ai posted on his Twitter account: “I didn’t care about jasmine at first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful jasmine is often, which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most. What a jasmine!”
Twitter is blocked in China, except for those with a virtual-private-network line or an Internet connection from outside the country. Ai has 72,000 followers.
I find myself coming to your blog more and more often to the point where my visits are almost daily now!
Here is the basis for China’s charges against Ai Weiwei:
from a chinese cource.
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-04/10/content_22322879.htm
Ai Weiwei did not limit his talent of creating unpredictability to the arts.
…..
Though police authorities have not disclosed details, various claims of accusations against Ai surfaced on the Internet within hours of the investigation being announced.
The claims, which individuals posted online, accused the artist of dodging income taxes, plagiarizing, and monopolizing funds and resources in the art world, among other things.
None of the claims, however, have been independently investigated.
In particular, Ai was accused of stealing an art professor’s brainchild by flying 1001 ordinary Chinese as “living exhibits” to the 12th Documenta contemporary art show held in the German city of Kassel in 2007.
Dubbed “Fairytale”, the mass visit cost 3.1 million Euros. Yue Luping, an art professor with the Academy of Fine Arts of Xi’an, the alleged author of the innovation, was too poor to realize his plan. Yet he did not receive credit in Ai’s work.
“The plagiarism case is widely known among peers, but no one dared to bring it into the open because Ai, with his influence, was considered unchallengeable in art circles,” well-known Chinese novelist Wang Shuo said in a previous post on his blog.
Ai is not alone in China’s scandal-dogged arts scene, as a string of artists have been jailed for managing mafia-style gangs, gambling, and committing drug-related and economic crimes in recent years.
Zhang Junyi, a famous lyric writer, received a six-year prison sentence in 2003 for slander and bribery.
Zhang, whose works were repeatedly staged at spring festival evening parties and other entertainment programs on China Central Television channels, was found to have given director Zhao An cash and audio-video materials valued at 610,000 yuan, then equivalent to 73,000 U.S. dollars, between 1994 and 2000.
Zang Tianshuo, a pop singer, received a six-year jail term in 2009 after his conviction for inciting a group to violence, which resulted in a street battle that left one person dead and three injured.
Zang, a household name in China, was one of China’s first rock musicians. He has written many hit songs, such as “Friends,” and a number of movie and advertising tunes. He was voted the most popular mainland singer/songwriter at the 9th Chinese Music Awards in 2003.
Ai’s case is not unique in China, a country that has already built a modern legal system and handles large numbers of criminal cases daily, according to the Global Times, an affiliate newspaper of the People’s Daily.
Ai’s works, which include sculpture, photography, performance, and architecture, have gone on display in a number of foreign countries. Ai was also named a consultant to the design of the Beijing National Stadium, widely known as the Bird’s Nest, for the 2008 Olympic Games.
However, participants in Chinese artistic circles often evaluate Ai’s achievements as third rate. Some people said he was an “amateur artist”, and his works “just look like artistic items.” Many believed that Ai was far from reaching the level of reverence and respect given to his late father, Ai Qing.
The senior Ai was a French-educated leftist intellectual who went to jail for opposing the ruling Kuomintang Party in the 1930s. Ai wrote a number of well-received patriotic poems during the war before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Ai Qing’s best known poems include “I Love This Land” and “Da Yan River — My Wet-nurse.” He was awarded the title of “Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters” in France in 1985.
Media reports dubbed Ai Weiwei “Ai Qing’s rebellious son” for the junior Ai’s different take on arts and his somewhat offbeat lifestyle.
“He (the senior Ai) once told me that his generation of intellectuals went to France thinking about what they could do for China. I scorned the idea and said ‘I am not your generation,'” Ai Weiwei told Southern Weekly newspaper in an interview in 2009.
The interview, widely circulated on the Internet, disclosed details of Ai Weiwei’s 12 years of living in New York from 1983 when he left without finishing his studies at the elite Beijing Film Institute.
Ai said that he was deeply involved in East New York’s then crime-laden communities and was enchanted by going to rallies, protests and confrontations on various causes.
“I am addicted to being threatened. When the power pays attention to you, you feel like you are being recognized,” Ai told the paper.
Ai’s erratic behavior also confused many of his friends and acquaintances.
In his memoir, Feng Xiaogang, China’s famous movie director, recalled the dangerously exciting moments he shared with Ai in the States in the early 1990s, including purposely trying to cause a highway car crash.
“Ai filled my life with wildness, mounting the urge to break the system. If I was not cautious in nature, the consequence would be hard to imagine,” Feng said.
Ai began to become actively involved in public affairs in recent years.
Yu Gao, an artist, said in her blog that Ai helped organize a demonstration in the streets of Beijing on February 22, 2010 to protest the local government’ s alleged attempts to demolish artists’ galleries. She blamed Ai for having “too much political maturity” in the process.
“You took us to the street, but you just shot photos from the side. We could not tell if you were a participant, a worker, or a passerby photographer. Foreign media would say you were a leader who organized a democratic movement. But if police came you could easily run away. And today you asked someone to call us up one by one and say that if the police launch an investigation, never mention Ai Weiwei (had participated),” wrote Yu, who herself was a participant in the demonstration.
“Many people would become your cannon fodder,” she added.
Ai’s criticism of the government became increasingly open and magnified in the past two years due to his increasing exposure to the media. Up to date, authorities have not said that Ai’s radical comments run counter to the law.