Author: S. Prasannarajan
Publication: India Today
Date: June 13, 2011
URL: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/net-techniques-a-major-way-of-liberating-humans-from-old-values/1/140280.html
Introduction: Today it's Ai Weiwei, and his ordeal is the other story China
doesn't want to tell the world. In the People's Republic of eternal bliss,
only the enemy of the state asks questions.
Every age has a face that brings out the power
and poignancy of the alternative. A face that leads us to the paranoia of
the state that is sustained by lies. When Stalinist Russia was at its dehumanising
worst, there was an Osip Mandelstam to sing the truth about the dictator.
Later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would become the unwanted storyteller of the
Soviet empire. In 1989, when Eastern Europe erupted to declare freedom from
the jackboots of communism, Vaclav Havel and other romantics became the finest
examples of "living in truth".
Today it's Ai Weiwei, and his ordeal is the
other story China doesn't want to tell the world. Artist, architect, blogger
and, in the bogeyman-obsessed Chinese view, anarchist, Ai vanished from Beijing
international airport on April 3. Today, he is just another prisoner in Beijing.
Before his arrest, Ai was a multimedia saboteur. When he was not making subversive
installations or photographing the streets, he was writing the most popular
blog which the authorities banished from the Internet in 2009. In his conversation
with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist way back in 2006, excerpts from which
were published in the Sunday Times, London, the artist said: "The techniques
of the Internet have become a major way of liberating humans from old values
and systems, something that has never been possible until today…
This is the beginning. Maybe something crazier will happen. But, really, we
see the sunshine coming. It was clouded for maybe 100 years…
We had better not enjoy the moment but create the moment."
Ai created the moment, with words and images
that frightened the pinstriped mandarins of Zhongnanhai, who still can't accept
the reality of the happiness in the marketplace being challenged by questions.
China, a country with global aspiration but with a third world mindset, dreads
questions. In the People's Republic of Eternal Bliss, only the enemy of the
state asks questions, as Liu Xiaobo did. Liu's crime was that he co-authored
Charter 08, which was inspired by Charter 77, the Czech dissidents' manifesto
for freedom that set the tone for the so-called Velvet Revolution. "The
era of emperors and overlords is on the way out.
The time is arriving everywhere for citizens
to be masters of the state," it declared. The overlords answered by sending
Liu to jail. When he won the Nobel Prize for Peace last year, the Chinese
took the "blasphemy" as a western assault on their sovereignty.
"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal," Beijing then said. Today the criminal
is Ai, and it is as though the mighty Middle Kingdom is so fragile that it
can collapse under the weight of his crazy words and images. Still, Ai's story
and the lesser known stories of other "counterrevolutionaries" lie
outside the familiar narrative of "the wonder that is China". China
soars, and it evokes only awe and inspiration. The panegyrists of the Chinese
model of development are unlikely to be distracted by the art and tragedy
of an Ai Weiwei. Even when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, they didn't
get distracted. In one of the world's most savage empires, only prisoners
like Ai wait for the sunshine.