Ai Wei^2: more comments

Economist: On the defensive
Project Syndicate: The Sunflower Revolutionary

It is tempting to dismiss the current crackdown as just the latest twist in the unending cycle of repression and liberalisation through which China has been spinning for over three decades. Popular uprisings abroad, like sensitive political anniversaries or big events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics at home, offer pretexts for a round-up of the usual suspects. They provide a stiff but effective reminder that in China’s political system—“a people’s democratic dictatorship”—it is the dictatorship bit that counts.

This bout of repression, however, may reflect more than the usual cycle. For a start, it is a huge overreaction. For all the online chatter, no one thinks China is on the brink of a jasmine revolution. Also, with a leadership transition coming next year, and China’s new rulers mostly already identified, it helps quash any notion that they might usher in an era of liberalisation.

Although the short-term risk of a copycat revolution in China is small, events elsewhere have demonstrated the long-term corrosive effect on repressive regimes of the internet, mobile telephones and social networks. Better, the party seems to have concluded, to crack down long and hard now than to wait and see. In George Orwell’s novel “1984”, an intellectual party hack paints a vision of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face—for ever”. China has updated that. Its vision seems to be of a computer screen with a message that the website you seek is unavailable; or perhaps of a mysterious encounter at immigration, and the interpolation of “other business” between check-in and flight.

Project Syndicate: The Sunflower Revolutionary

China’s people, Ai’s installation seems to imply, are like the millions of seeds spread across the Tate’s gargantuan entrance hall. No one cares whether they are humiliated or crushed under foot (as the seeds were allowed to be at the exhibition’s opening). Unfortunately, Ai has become one of the seeds, his freedom crushed by the heel of an inhuman state.

China’s relentless economic rise is bringing with it a decadence of civilization. The feast of new wealth is accompanied by a famine of morality. So when global leaders behave like conniving hucksters to do business with this new China’s rulers, they betray the values and principles that are the basis of democracy.

Ai used to argue that the Chinese regime’s despotism is boosted by shameless liars. He always understood that true art and politics can never march hand-in-hand. They must eventually confront each other on the field of a free conscience.