There is, I’m afraid, little reason for optimism in the evolution of Ai Weiwei’s standoff with his state. In the past week, Ai has returned with a full-throated howl to Twitter, despite being told upon his release from jail that he is barred from making political statements. He has also spoken to reporters about the conditions of his eighty-one days in custody, an experience that sprawled across two secret locations, and included more than fifty sessions of interrogation. In interviews with the Times and the Wall Street Journal, he confirmed the outlines of an experience that his friends have described in recent months. According to various accounts, after being detained and fitted with a black hood, he was driven to a secluded location where he was watched twenty-four hours a day by shifts of two uniformed military police sergeants, who stayed less than three feet from his side, sometimes inches away, while he slept, showered, and used the bathroom. They reportedly required that he sleep with his hands in view, on top of his blanket. “It is designed as a kind of mental torture, and it works well,” Ai told the Times.
In a detailed interview with one of Ai’s associates, Reuters makes the clearest case yet that, while Ai was eventually charged with tax evasion, authorities were intensely interested in his political activities:
Important as that is to get on record, the details are unsurprising, except for one snippet:
What is interesting about that passage is what it suggests about the men in the capillaries of China’s security system, an area so rarely illuminated. One often wonders how agents of force in the name of the state see their roles: Do they, for instance, picture themselves as the defenders of China’s fragile economic rise from the likes of rabble-rousers willing to risk national stability for some fanciful notions of individual rights? Or, rather, do they see their role in a darker light, as nothing but the muscles of an ailing patient, lashing out against the dying of the light?
It’s convenient to imagine one of the two. But from the sound of it, in this case they see themselves as something else and discomfiting: the members of a long national tradition, without beginning or end.