Ai Weiwei

Banned in China

In late December, a foreign correspondent in Beijing emailed me to say that a four-page article on China I’d written for a special New Year’s edition of *Newsweek* had been carefully torn from each of the 731 copies of the magazine on sale in China. In over forty years of writing about China, I have been subjected to many forms of pressure. But this has never happened. Surely everything in my article is well known in Beijing, especially to the tiny number of English-reading urban people who buy *Newsweek*. What had I said that attracted the attention of the official shredder?

January 9, 2012

China's Lawyers Under Siege

China’s activist lawyers and non-professional advocates have long been under a widespread, systematic official assault, which intensified earlier this year and silenced many formerly outspoken voices. A large number of lawyers have been attacked for representing not only those clients who oppose government suppression of religion, speech and association but also those who seek to challenge arbitrary residential evictions, environmental pollution, food and drug contamination, official corruption, discrimination against the sick or disabled or, as in Chen Guancheng’s last efforts, forced abortion and sterilization.

November 8, 2011

China's Political Prisoners: True Confessions?

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s ankle-deep heap of porcelain sunflower seeds bewitched recent visitors to London’s Tate Modern. But in early April Ai’s strong criticisms of the regime led to his disappearance somewhere in Beijing. On June 22, eighty-one days later, he reappeared at home. Not freed: reappeared, which can mean something closer house arrest. A lifeguard at my local pool in London announced to me that Ai had been freed, and I fear that is what the “Sinologists”—as the China specialists in the Foreign Office like to be called—may have told Prime Minister David Cameron before his meeting on June 27 in London with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. They may also have mentioned that, according to the government’s official press agency, Ai “confessed his crimes”—though it should be noted no formal charge was ever brought against him.

June 30, 2011

Did We Contribute to Ai Weiwei's Arrest?

Like many artists, Ai Weiwei enjoys provoking. It isn’t just his finger-to-the-Chinese-government images that he has become known for but also how he does it: his obsessive-compulsive documentation of himself in photos, blogs, tweets, and rants into a digital recorder. In a country obsessed with walls, he is a living challenge to the political system.

April 22, 2011