Ai Weiwei: “We Want to Shame You”

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:

While he was held, the source said, Ai was asked whether he knew who the organisers of the “Jasmine” protests were. Ai denied all knowledge, the source said. Police officers discussed the contents of his blog and Twitter account, “line by line,” the source said.

He was told he could face 10 years in prison for “inciting subversion to state power”—a broad charge that China often uses to punish dissidents.

On the day he was released, police officers told him he “could still be sentenced to 10 years,” the source said, adding that Ai had to sign a contract stating that he would agree to the terms of his release before he could be released.

Police officers told Ai “you criticised the government, so we are going to let all society know that you’re an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you. We’ll not use politics to deal with you,” the source said.

The source said Ai told them “no one is going to believe you,” but officers told him “everyone will believe us, tax evasion is a very serious crime in many countries.”

Important as that is to get on record, the details are unsurprising, except for one snippet:

“What you’re doing is illegal,” Ai told police officers at one point, according to the source. “They said: ‘Do you know before [former president] Liu Shaoqi died, he was holding the constitution…. Talk about illegality, there’s no difference between the country that we are in now and the time of the Cultural Revolution.”

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.

Photograph by Ian Teh.