Hindu Vivek Kendra
A RESOURCE CENTER FOR THE PROMOTION OF HINDUTVA
   
 
 
«« Back
Land Without Sunshine

Land Without Sunshine

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.


Back                          Top

«« Back
 
 
 
  Search Articles
 
  Special Annoucements