Age of Ambition (35 page)

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From the airport, the artist had been loaded into the back of a white van, flanked by officers who held his arms. A black hood had been dropped over his head. When the van rolled to a stop, Ai was brought indoors and placed in a chair. The hood was pulled away. A well-muscled man with short hair was standing over him. Ai braced for a beating. Instead, the guards emptied his pockets, removed his belt, and handcuffed his right hand to the arm of the chair. He waited in the chair for eight hours. Then, two interrogators arrived. One opened a laptop. The other lit a cigarette. The smoker was a middle-aged man in a pin-striped sport coat with elbow patches. Ai would come to know him as Mr. Li. Over the next two hours, Mr. Li asked Ai Weiwei about his contacts overseas, the sources of his income, and the political messages contained in his artwork. He reviewed years' worth of Ai's blog posts and tweets, line by line. He asked him if the artist knew who was behind the calls for a Jasmine Revolution. Ai asked to see a lawyer. “The law is not going to help you,” he was told. “Just obey the orders, and you can make it easier.”

For all his anxiety, Ai was also fascinated. After trying to describe the Party from so many different angles, he was now face-to-face with it. His questioners seemed to be struggling to understand the world Ai Weiwei inhabited: Mr. Li quizzed him about the mechanics of arranging a nude portrait. When they asked him about his finances, the artist said a single sculpture could sell for eighty thousand dollars, and the interrogator did not initially believe him.

Mr. Li told him that this arrest had been a year in the making. “We had a very difficult decision: whether to arrest you or not. But we decided we had to.” He went on, “You made the Chinese government embarrassed, which is against national interests,” he told him, adding, “You became a part of the foreign strategy of ‘peaceful evolution.'” Ultimately, Li said, the state had to “smash you.” Li said the artist would likely be charged with “incitement to subvert state power,” the same charge that had been brought against the writer Liu Xiaobo.

In the days that followed, Ai was never alone. He was transferred to a military compound and placed in a narrow windowless room with padded walls, like a mental hospital. Two young guards in olive-green uniforms were never more than three feet from him; at times, they sat four inches from his face. They accompanied him to the toilet and the shower. When he paced in his cell, they paced with him. They ordered him to sleep with his hands in full view and to ask permission to touch his own face. Ai often wondered about these men around him. Did they picture themselves as defenders of China's quest for fortune? Did they see themselves as thwarting the selfish, ruinous acts of individuals like him? Or did they see themselves in a darker light, as the muscles of a body racked by fears of mortality?

The interrogation continued, but Ai was never physically abused. Fear gave away to exhaustion. His weight dropped. He took medicine for diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart condition, and the head injury. A doctor checked him constantly—sometimes every three hours. He began to lose track of time. He would forget why he was there. He felt as if he were stumbling around alone, “in a sandstorm,” as he put it.

After six weeks, Ai was abruptly given a clean white shirt and ordered to take a shower. He was about to see his wife. Rumors were circulating that Ai was being tortured, and the government was under pressure to refute them. The stagecraft enraged him. He said, “I don't want to see her, because you told me I have no chance to see a lawyer, and what can I tell her about what happened this past month and a half?” The offer was not negotiable. He was told what he could say: He was being investigated for “economic crimes,” and he was in good health. He was to say nothing more.

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Ai Weiwei's arrest attracted a level of international notoriety that his art never had. Overnight he became one of the world's most famous dissidents. Supporters demonstrated outside Chinese embassies. His portrait—the beard and hooded eyes and ham hock cheeks—was projected onto building facades and silkscreened onto T-shirts for sale in Europe and America. The British sculptor Anish Kapoor called for a worldwide protest and dedicated his latest work to Ai—a colossal purple installation inflated inside the Grand Palais in Paris and named
Leviathan
. In
The New York Times
, Salman Rushdie invoked the great battles between art and tyranny—Augustus and Ovid, Stalin and Mandelstam—and wrote, “Today the government of China has become the world's greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei.”

Inside China, the reactions were more complicated. At dinner a few days after Ai disappeared, an American dealer of Chinese art, who had deep roots in the capital, scolded me for writing about the arrest. “Now is the time to back off,” she said. She cited a Chinese legal provision that allowed police to hold a suspect for thirty days without charges, and she predicted that Ai would be released according to the letter of the law. “Stop embarrassing China,” she said. “Allow the thirty-day process to run its course.” Our hostess, a longtime foreign resident who had less confidence in Chinese courts, told the art dealer, “I've spent twenty years being an apologist for China, but there is no way to defend this. You're just fucking wrong.” Dinner did not last long.

The truth was that I struggled with the question of how much to write about Ai Weiwei—or, for that matter, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng or the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. How much did their ordeals really tell us about China? If the average news consumer in the West read (or watched or heard) no more than one China story a week, should it be about people with dramatic lives or typical lives? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn't much easier, because it depended on where you were looking.

The stereotype of Western journalists was that we paid too much attention to dissidents. It was, we were told, because we sympathized with their hopes for liberal democracy, because they spoke English and knew how to give a sound-bite. Indeed, the inherent drama of an individual standing up to the state was obviously seductive, and it helped explain why the most famous image from China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square. Whenever I wrote about human rights abuses, I knew to expect that often the most critical reactions came from other expatriates in China. I understood that: foreigners with no reason to probe could spend years in China without ever interviewing someone who had been tortured or locked up without trial, and to them, my focus was misplaced. Dissidents who were famous in New York or Paris were unknown to ordinary Chinese citizens, which suggested that the discussion of democracy and rights was at odds with the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

But those arguments wore thin with me. Popularity always struck me as an odd way to measure the importance of an idea in a country that censored ideas. (A team of Harvard researchers later discovered that news of Ai's arrest was one of the most heavily censored items of the year, which undermined the notion that people in China paid no attention to his arrest.)
Global Times
argued that Ai's worldview was not the “mainstream perception among Chinese society.” And in a sense, the paper was right: Ai Weiwei's lifestyle was emphatically outside the mainstream. But when it came to his ideas, this was less clear than it used to be: the collapse of the schools in the earthquake had captivated the attention of ordinary Chinese, not just the urban elite, and in seeking to dignify the deaths of some of China's most vulnerable people, Ai Weiwei was enacting an idea that many others supported. Even if it was a minority, ignoring the impact of a small group of impassioned people struck me as a misreading of Chinese history, in which small groups had often exerted large forces.

Understanding why Ai Weiwei was arrested—or why Gao Zhisheng was abused, or why Liu Xiaobo was in prison—was vital to understanding China. The degree to which it could accept a figure such as Ai Weiwei was a measure of how far China had or had not moved toward a modern, open society.

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As one month of detention stretched into two, the arrest of Ai Weiwei proved divisive in China's creative circles: Many were alarmed by his arrest because it indicated that nobody was too famous or well connected to be insulated. But many others had resented his criticisms of fellow intellectuals, and regarded his approach as vain and confrontational. In Beijing, people rolled their eyes at the international outcry. It became fashionable to whisper that Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo were messianic.

Even among those who were aghast, the arrest was clarifying; it allowed them to stake out the limits of what they imagined they could accomplish. When I saw the writer Han Han, he told me, “For Ai Weiwei's disappearance, we can do nothing.” We were in a strange venue for a political conversation: an auto racetrack in the suburbs of Shanghai. Gangly fashion models loped by dressed in fractional vinyl outfits: Volkswagen miniskirts, Kia crop tops. Han Han was wearing a silvery racing suit that advertised Volkswagen across his midsection, Red Bull along his cuffs, and Homark Aluminum Alloy Wheels on his right biceps. We were in the team tent, where the air carried the scent of oil and rubber and the sound of cars buzzing through turns like angry bees. Race car drivers strutted in and out, flicking open the tent flaps like the sultans in old movies.

In recent years, Han and Ai Weiwei had maintained a sympathetic but distant relationship. The artist had praised Han's work, and the writer, in his magazine, had published the radiological scan of Ai Weiwei's skull after his brain injury. But now Han chose his words carefully: “If the government thinks Ai is a big problem, it should say so; they have the power if they want to arrest him. It's okay if everybody knows what's happening. The reason they gave was ‘economic crimes.' Ai is an artist and he is famous, so if you want to say he committed ‘economic crimes,' you need to show us the evidence.” But Han Han would not be blogging about it. That was “useless,” he told me. “The system can automatically block the name.”

As we spoke, I was reminded how easy it was to overlook the distinctions between Chinese individuals who appeared, at first glance, to share ideas. A few days earlier, the London-based writer Ma Jian had speculated in an op-ed piece printed outside China that, with Ai Weiwei under arrest, the next targets would be Han Han and three other prominent critics. “The regime will not stop the persecution until the only voices to be heard are its own ‘official' artists,” Ma wrote. But lumping Han Han and Ai Weiwei together as liberals seeking political reform obscured deep differences. Han told me, “Ai's criticism is more direct, and he is more persistent on a single issue. For me, I criticize one thing, make them feel terrible, and if they ask me to stop talking about it, then I'll criticize something else. We have a hundred things to talk about.”

Divining how far any individual could go in Chinese creative life was akin to carving a line in the sand at low tide in the dark; the political terrain shifted constantly. Ground that was solid one minute could be swamped the next. Han Han maintained a fitful détente with the government, but he permitted few illusions about his willingness to stay on the safe side of lines he could see. He had never made a move to take his activism from the Web to the street, and he opposed the call for multiparty elections. “The Party will win anyway, because they are rich and they can bribe people,” he told me. “Let culture be more vibrant and the media be more open.” Outsiders often mistook his demand for openness with the outright demand for democracy, but the difference was essential.

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On June 22, his eighty-first day in custody, Ai Weiwei was informed that he was going to prison for ten years—or he could be released that afternoon, if he agreed to accept a charge of “tax evasion.” He was given a statement to sign. He asked for a lawyer, but the request was denied. “If you don't sign,” one of the interrogators told him, “we can never let you go, because we can't finish our job.” That moment was a revelation. “You're not really fighting a system,” he realized. “You're really dealing with these two persons, very low-ranking, who don't believe you are a criminal but just can't finish their job. And they are very frustrated, too.”

The most important term of his release was that he could not talk to foreigners or write on the Web for a year. He signed the statement. Then he was driven to a police station, where his wife was waiting for him. His case would continue, but for now he was free to go. He was astonished. Why had he been released? He could only guess. Was it diplomatic pressure? Premier Wen Jiabao was preparing to visit Britain and Germany, where people were going to protest Ai's arrest, but the only official explanation came from the state news service, which reported that Ai Weiwei's company had evaded “a huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents.” Ai was released on bond, it said, “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease.”

By the time he reached the studio, a crush of television cameras was waiting in the sweltering summer night. His skinny arms poked out of a worn blue T-shirt, and he clutched the waist of his trousers to hold them up. He had lost twenty-eight pounds, and the police still had his belt. Reporters closed in, and he pleaded for understanding. He was not allowed to talk. The mood in the air was strange; it was not clear if this was a victory or a defeat. Like Hu Shuli's departure from
Caijing
, Ai Weiwei's release thrust him into a costly kind of freedom. In the years since the Party had dedicated itself to a “harmonious society”—the vision of a nation without differences—I had watched as the voices within China grew more demanding, and the Party had risen to meet the challenge. The pursuit of truth, which had begun within the confines of institutions such as Hu Shuli's magazine, had expanded over the years to draw in individuals such as Ai Weiwei and Chen Guangcheng, who represented no institutions and were harder for the government to control. Then the pursuit had expanded further to encompass the opinions on the street, now amplified with the help of technology.