Ai Weiwei: the reasons behind his arrest?

By Malcolm Moore
Shanghai Correspondent, The Telegraph
11 May 2011
Ai Weiwei plays with his installation Sunflower Seeds, at its opening in the Tate Modern (REUTERS)

On a clear and bright day last November, a few hundred of Ai Weiwei’s fans gathered on the outskirts of Shanghai for a party. A flash mob, they came from all over China after Ai issued an invitation over the internet to mock the local government. They feasted on crabs at long trestle tables, sang protest songs and felt they had scored a point against the Communist party officials that had solicited Ai, as a famous artist, to build a new studio in Shanghai and then turned around and ordered him to knock it down when his activism burned too brightly.

It was a happy day, but there was a price to pay. A few days later, the police knocked on the door of Ai’s Beijing home. They told him he was “very close to going to jail”. The response was characteristic of an artist who has increasingly incorporated activism into his art. “I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I’m ready for it, because I believe the core value of an artist must be to express yourself freely and fight for the freedom of others.”


Unlike many of China’s other activists, who have never been heard of inside China because of the country’s pervasive censorship, Ai Weiwei is a celebrity. The son of a revered poet, Ai Qing, Ai comes from the Communist party’s equivalent of the aristocracy.

For years, he has been shielded by his fame and by his family connections. His father was standing next to Chairman Mao on the podium in Tiananmen Square when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, quoted Ai Qing’s poetry at a press conference four years ago when he was asked how China would make its people happy. “You may ask: what do you mean by being happy?” Wen said. “Let me quote a line from Ai Qing: ‘Go and ask the thawing land, go and ask the thawing river’.”

Since China emerged from isolation 30 years ago, there has been a continual and lasting thaw. But in the last few years, since the Beijing Olympics, the mood has become less optimistic. Encouraged and empowered by their success in delivering a smooth Olympic games, China’s security apparatus has steadily expanded. The budget for security is more than 50 per cent higher than it was during 2008, the year of the games, and has now even outstripped the budget of the People’s Liberation Army.

As China’s current leaders prepare to hand over power to their successors in 2012, the hardliners within the Communist party seem to have moved decisively to the forefront. Over the past few months, perhaps unnerved by popular revolts elsewhere, Chinese security officials have detained or threatened scores of activists, Christians and lawyers.

At times it has appeared to be a carousel of intimidation, with lawyers being dragged in, threatened and released only for others to take their place in the cells. Against this backdrop, Ai Weiwei is perhaps the party’s biggest scalp. While his protests have become steadily more electric over the past few years, few expected that any action would be taken against him.

There are echoes of history in his detention, however. His father, Ai Qing, said in 1946: "I believe that art and the revolution must go together; they can never be separated. We are political animals, and sometimes we write as political animals. If the revolution fails, the art will fail, but in as far as is possible the artist must be a revolutionary. As a revolutionary and as an artist he must represent his times.”

Partly because of his strong opinions, Ai Qing was exiled in 1958, when his son was just a year old, to the Gobi desert in the far west province of Xinjiang. In the madness of the Cultural Revolution, Ai Qing was forced to clean public toilets while his son worked in the fields. Only after Chairman Mao died was he rehabilitated. In a letter from 1978 that Ai’s elder sister recently released, the artist described those early days.

"We drifted on a small boat for 20 years," Ai wrote. "If I say the past time left me with some memorable things, it has no mystical and magnificent sky, no beautiful and moving fairy tales, no endless warmth of home, no colourful flower, no graceful music."

"What is deeply imprinted on my mind is: on the smoking dried land the slim and weak child carried heavy firewood; the zigzag footprints left in the cold wind and the blind nights; the sound of smashing furniture and people begging for mercy; the cat being hanged till it was dead and mudfish heads reaching out from the pond; the bullying and cursing in front of people. We were so young but we had to bear all the crimes," Ai wrote.

"If I can say I have some valuable things, those are my memories. Memories of the endless muddy road, the wild Gobi Desert without any sign of people. The bottomless memory poisoned our young souls like snakes, but we didn't die in it. On the contrary, I want a better life for myself to control my own destiny.”

For Ai, his detention is the price of his artistic endeavour and his determination to take action. “I do not believe in so-called intellectuals,” he wrote in 2009. “I disdain the fact that they only think rather than turning their thoughts into action.”

For the government, it is unclear why they have chosen to act now, after years of tolerating Ai’s dissent. While Chinese officials talk of wanting to use “soft power” to show China’s progress, the hardliners who appear to be in the ascendancy have perhaps underestimated the global power of Ai’s art.