The release of Ai Weiwei is an astonishment. Nobody—least of all, it’s safe to say, the leaders who signed off on his arrest two and a half months ago—predicted the scene of him waving wearily to a crush of reporters as he returned to his studio on a hot Beijing night, apologizing for being unable to comment further. He looked tired and small, but visibly unharmed. In Chinese judicial terms, his release on bail of a certain kind is “perhaps the very best outcome that could have been expected in the circumstances of this difficult case,” according to Jerry Cohen, the dean of Chinese law specialists. (I profiled Ai in The New Yorker last year. We have posted and published more on his work and his detention, including an answer to the question of why Ai Weiwei matters.)
Short of a sharp turn, Ai is unlikely to face further detention in this case, but he is hardly out of the woods. The first question will be what kind of life he returns to, whether he will be able to speak freely and travel abroad, and how much punishment still awaits him on charges of tax evasion. (The state news agency says he was released “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.” Ai’s company “was found to have evaded a huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents, police said.”)
The other big question—for activists, for the State Department—will be to pin down what role the outside world played in his release. One of the most enduring issues in activist and diplomatic circles is whether public pressure on the Chinese government helps or hurts those who have been arrested. This case will be studied for a long time because Ai’s detention became politically expensive on a scale rarely seen. Artists and museums around the world had called for his release—Anish Kapoor, one of the most vocal, remained cautious after news of the release, saying, “While I am thankful that he has been released, I do not think that artists should present their work in China until the situation has been resolved.” A petition had attracted more than a hundred and forty thousand signatures, as well as an attack by hackers, which the hosts of the petition suspected originated in China. My early sense is that, to oversimplify it for the moment, the public pressure was effective, but the outcome must also be read in terms of Chinese diplomatic calculations. Ai was released a few days before Cui Tiankai, the vice foreign minister, heads to Hawaii to meet with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, and Wen Jiabao is preparing to go to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. (Angela Merkel applauded the news of Ai’s release, but also said it was only a “first step” in clearing up the case.)
The largest outstanding question is what will become of Ai’s far lesser-known friends and associates who disappeared when he did, without the benefit of an international campaign. Among them are Wen Tao, a former journalist who supported Ai’s work, and other people with connection to Ai’s office staff—Hu Mingfen, Liu Zhenggang, and Zhang Jinsong. To date, they remain unaccounted for.
But for the moment, Ai Weiwei’s return to (relative) freedom is news worth celebrating—not only for him and his family, but for the fact that official China has shown itself to be confident enough to keep this case in perspective and to defuse a confrontation in which nobody would have won.
Photograph by Ian Teh.
