Age of Ambition (30 page)

In the months after the surgery, Ai fully recovered, though he tired easily and had trouble summoning words. At the same time, he began to notice signs that the government was watching him more closely. His Gmail accounts were hacked and the settings altered to forward his messages to an unfamiliar address. His bank received official inquiries to review his finances. A pair of surveillance cameras appeared on utility poles outside his front gate, focused on the traffic going in and out—notwithstanding the redundancy of monitoring someone who already broadcast the minutiae of his life. When he tried to make DVDs of his documentaries, duplicating services worried that they would be punished for associating with him. “Not even the porno producers will do it,” Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a rock musician who works on Ai's media productions, told me.

Ai Weiwei had come to abhor the mode of oblique dissent in China. Traditionally, intellectuals were expected to couch their criticisms of the government in a way that preserved the appearance of unity. As one saying had it, they should “point at the mulberry bush to disparage the ash tree.” Ai Weiwei had lost patience with this. When a group of lesser-known artists who were protesting plans to demolish their studios in the name of development approached him for advice, he told them, “If you protest and fail to publish anything about it, you might as well have protested inside your own house.” Ai and the other artists staged a march down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, in the center of Beijing—an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street's proximity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked them peacefully after a few hundred yards, but their bravado drew attention far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent legal activist, told me, “For twenty years, I have thought that protesting on Chang'an Avenue was absolutely off-limits. He did it. And what could they do about it?”

In China, the subversive dynamics of the Internet age—the rebirth of irony, the search for community, the courage to complain—had stirred a hunger for a new kind of critical voice. The editor Hu Shuli and her journalists couldn't satisfy it; they had neither the independence nor the desire to channel popular outrage. Classic dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo were too earnest and elitist to speak for the broader public. Tang Jie and the nationalists alienated people with their ferocity, and Han Han was usually too glib to share a stage with his elders. But Ai Weiwei combined ironclad Red credentials with a populist flair; he spoke in a vernacular that mixed irony, imagination, and rage.

“There are people who say that he is doing some kind of performance art,” Chen Danqing, a Chinese painter and social critic, told me. “But I think he long ago surpassed that definition. He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see how far an individual's power can go.”

 

THIRTEEN

SEVEN SENTENCES

 

The technology that Liu Xiaobo called “God's gift to China” eventually led the police to his front door. For months, authorities had been monitoring his e-mail and online chats. By December 2008 he and his coauthors had collected the first three hundred signatures for the declaration they called Charter 08, and they were preparing to release it. Two days before they could, a team of officers assembled on the landing outside Liu's apartment.

When the authorities led him away, Liu did not resist. His wife, Liu Xia, was not told where he was going or why. Days passed. Liu's lawyer, Mo Shaoping, tried to find out who in the government had custody of his client, or where he had been taken, but the local agency that dealt with political dissidents—the General Affairs Office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau—was, like the Central Propaganda Department, a building that did not exist. It had no listed address and no known phone number. When the lawyer resorted to showing up, in person, at the front door, the staff refused to acknowledge that it was the office he was seeking. Mo was at a loss for what else to do, so he reverted to an older technology: he typed out his request for information, addressed it to the secret office, and slid it into the mailbox.

When Charter 08 was finally released, a few days after Liu's arrest, it turned out that the statement called for gradual, not abrupt change; the authors had modulated their message on purpose. They wanted to reach beyond marginal intellectuals in order to appeal to ordinary men and women who would recoil from the prospect of full-scale instability but might see something of their own struggles in a call for reform. “The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional,” Liu and his coauthors had written, and they proposed nineteen reforms, such as independent courts and elections for higher office. On paper, their calls for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law bore similarities to the government's own language: the national constitution contained assurances such as Article 35, which guaranteed “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.” In practice, however, the constitution had no legal authority over the Party, so it was largely meaningless. When the Party praised “democracy,” it meant “democratic centralism,” the concept of debate within its own ranks, and unquestioning adherence to final decisions.

Four months passed without any word of Liu's whereabouts. Then, on June 23, 2009, authorities informed his wife that her husband would be prosecuted for “incitement to subvert state power.” His trial would begin two days before Christmas. “Incitement to subvert state power” was a crime with Chinese characteristics. Other authoritarian governments generally preferred to jail dissidents for more concrete reasons; in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky was imprisoned for being a spy. (He was not.) In Myanmar, the former junta kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for years for, in their words, “her own safety.” But the Chinese government saw no need for those contrivances, and it indicted Liu Xiaobo on the basis of precisely seven sentences from his writings—words that, prosecutors charged, contained “rumor and slander” against the “people's democratic dictatorship.” In the case of one of his offending articles, the title alone became a count in the indictment: he had titled an essay, “Change a Regime by Changing a Society.”

What the Party did not say was that it considered Liu a special kind of threat. His contacts overseas and his embrace of the Internet merged two of the Party's most neuralgic issues: the threat of a foreign-backed “color revolution” and the organizing potential of the Web. The previous year, President Hu Jintao told the Politburo, “Whether we can cope with the Internet” will determine “the stability of the state.”

At Liu's trial that December, the prosecution needed just fourteen minutes to present its case. When it was Liu's turn to speak, he denied none of the charges. Instead, he read a statement in which he predicted that the ruling against him would not “pass the test of history”:

I look forward to the day when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect; a country where different values, ideas, beliefs, and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist; a country where expression of both majority and minority views will be secure, and, in particular, where political views that differ from those of the people in power will be fully respected and protected; a country where all political views will be spread out beneath the sun for citizens to choose among, and every citizen will be able to express views without the slightest of fears; a country where it will be impossible to suffer persecution for expressing a political view. I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes.

Midway through Liu's statement, the judge abruptly cut him off, saying the prosecution used only fourteen minutes and so the defense must do the same. (Chinese lawyers had never encountered this principle before.) Two days later, on Christmas Day 2009, the court sentenced Liu to eleven years in prison. This was lengthy by Chinese standards; local activists interpreted it as a deterrent to others, in the spirit of the old saying “Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

The severity of the sentence was surprising in part because the charter had produced very little public response. Censors had struck it down as soon as it appeared, and it had been poorly timed: Chinese people were still enjoying the afterglow of the Olympics; earlier that spring, the video by the philosophy student Tang Jie had tapped into Chinese sensitivity to Western criticism. Moreover, the financial crisis was expanding, and Chinese leaders' performance on the economy looked skillful compared with that of many Western leaders. Roland Soong, an author and translator, wrote, “Charter 08 was dead on arrival on account of George W. Bush.” The new members of the middle class, he predicted, “won't bet their apartments, cars, television sets, washing machines and hopes on a prayer.”

At first the government seemed to agree; it scarcely bothered to acknowledge Charter 08 in public. But in the months that followed, the charter began to attract signatures from intellectuals, farmers, teenagers, and former officials. Eventually the number reached twelve thousand—an infinitesimal minority in China's population, but symbolically significant: it was the largest coordinated campaign against one-party rule since 1949. It reflected a community of ordinary people unafraid to sign their names, people who had been living until then, as one of the signers wrote, “in a certain kind of separate and solitary state.” The Party could not stay silent. In October 2010 the state press denounced the charter as “totally obsolete,” written to “confuse people's thoughts” and bring about “violent revolution.” It called on people to remember the Century of Humiliation: “Adopting this kind of charter would reduce China to an appendage of the West; it would put an end to the progress of Chinese society and the happiness of the people.”

*   *   *

Two months after Liu's conviction, he appealed his sentence. The appeal was denied. When foreign reporters asked the Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu for information about the ruling, he objected to the question because, he said, “There are no dissidents in China.” Then he tried to lighten the mood: Chinese New Year was approaching, and at the end of the press conference he wished everyone a happy Year of the Tiger, and he held up a stuffed toy tiger. He urged the reporters to be “very careful when asking questions” or the “tiger here might not be very happy with you.”

Across town, at his studio, Ai Weiwei read that line—“There are no dissidents in China”—and it lingered with him. Ai's visitors were increasingly using it to describe him, but the word
dissident
struck him as too simple to encompass the new range of dissent that was taking root in China. In the West, it had the ring of defiant moral clarity in the face of repressive power, but in China, becoming a “dissident” was complicated in ways that outsiders often underestimated.

For one thing, China's government didn't provide a simple target; it had succeeded in improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people, even as it deprived them of political liberty. When the government encountered a critic, it often tried to make this argument in the most practical terms: Wen Kejian, a human rights activist who had also been a successful businessman, recalled being visited by police who tried to steer him away from politics by saying, “Look at your shabby car, already seven or eight years old. All your friends already have Benzes.” Wen heard them out but considered the police officers' argument as laughable as they considered his. Each side was trying to persuade the other, but they spoke different languages. It was the kind of conversation the Chinese call a “chicken talking to a duck.”
Cluck, cluck. Quack, quack.
Neither side understood a thing.

Beyond the obvious pressures from the security forces, becoming a dissident could torpedo your relationships with friends and patrons. In China, intellectuals were often suspicious of dissidents among them who had too many foreign admirers or who appeared less interested in achieving practical gains than in fueling the kind of overt political conflict shunned by classical Chinese thought. Ai Weiwei reveled in confrontation. Now that he was being followed by plainclothes state security agents, he started calling the cops on them, setting off a Marx Brothers muddle of overlapping police agencies: “an absurdist novel gone bad,” as he put it. He inverted the usual logic of art and politics: instead of enlisting art in the service of his protest, he enlisted the apparatus of authoritarianism into his art.

At times, he seemed congenitally incapable of cooperation. At one point, he was asked to create a piece that could fill a prominent site in Copenhagen usually occupied by Edvard Eriksen's statue of the Little Mermaid, which was being loaned to Shanghai. Instead of replacing it with a statue, Ai decided to install a live closed-circuit video of the mermaid in her temporary home in China. The Danes thought the oversize surveillance camera that he designed was unattractive. “That's our real life,” he said. “Everybody is under some kind of surveillance camera. It's not beautiful.”

Whenever a Chinese activist weighed the costs and benefits of dissent, there was always, in the background, the knowledge of what could happen if the government ran out of patience. You just had to recall the name Gao Zhisheng. In 2005, Gao was a lawyer and a rising star; he had been ranked as one of the country's ten best attorneys by the Ministry of Justice in 2001. The more he succeeded in court, the more pugnacious he became, and the more willing he was to take on sensitive cases for practitioners of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. He was jailed for criticizing the government's handling of the law, but he refused to stop, and in September 2007 he saw a group of men approaching him on the sidewalk, and he felt a sharp blow to the neck. A hood was pulled over his head.