The Chinese are voting again. Having lost their chance to determine the outcome of Happy Girls, an audience-participation talent show that has mysteriously vanished from next year’s schedules, they are voting instead for Ai Weiwei, the artist and thorn in Beijing’s side.
Mr Ai was recently slapped with a tax bill of $2.4m, a financial summons that followed several months’ imprisonment earlier this year. But Chinese people in their thousands are offering to help the controversial artist pay. The BBC reports that, according to Liu Yanping, a volunteer at the artist’s studio in Beijing, nearly 20,000 people have donated a total of $790,000, and counting.
Most have done so by electronic transfer. Some – presumably technophobes – have simply lobbed money over the wall and into the artist’s compound. A few notes, folded into paper planes, have sailed over the wall too.
Last week, Mr Ai, whose release from prison was conditional on his not talking to the press, told the FT: “When Chinese people have no other way to express themselves, this is the way they feel they can vote to express their dissatisfaction.” That probably constituted talking to the press. In fact, he has done several recent interviews in defiance of the ban.
Whether Mr Ai will have the last laugh is not yet clear. The Global Times, an English-language tabloid owned by the People’s Daily, wrote: “This event has been interpreted by some foreign media as the Chinese people donating to Ai’s cause. The action has also been regarded as a special protest by the artist.” But it cautioned: “Since he’s borrowing from the public…. some experts have pointed out this could be an example of illegal fundraising.”
So China’s most famous artist, known for his humorous, provocative and occasionally puzzling art, may be damned if he pays his taxes and damned if he doesn’t. Now that’s just surreal.
11.09.2011
Ai Weiwei’s taxing conundrum | The World | International affairs blog from the FT – FT.com
4.04.2011
Ai Weiwei China's Best Known Artist Arrested in Beijing
Ai Weiwei, designer of the "Bird's Nest" Beijing's 2008 Olympic stadium, was detained today in Beijing as he attempted to board a flight to Hong Kong. His Beijing studio was also raided and his staff and family taken into custody. Ai had apparently been making plans to relocate his studio to Germany and has long experienced government pressure to silence his creative expression. I think this is a huge mistake by the Chinese government. If they want to avoid the fate of the Middle Eastern and North African governments that have seen their people rise up against autocracy they would be wise to not so blatantly harass the country's most revered artist.
2.23.2011
Quick Notes from Beijing - James Fallows | The Atlantic
By James FallowsThanks very much to the latest guest team for their ongoing dispatches. Herewith, on a sanity break from other duties, some quick notes on what I first notice compared with my latest stint here last summer:
1) Pollution in Beijing itself has been as bad as the very worst I remember from the olden era. The view below (11am China time, Feb 23) has been more or less unvarying for the past four days. PM2.5 readings[1] through that period have been steadily[2] in the "hazardous" or "beyond index" category. I don't recall a stretch this bad, this long, before. Offered less as complaint than as reality check.
2) Prices are higher for everything, especially food. By Western standards they are of course very low. But by Western standards people's incomes are also very low. I see why there is so much talk about the disruptive effects of inflation. (Letting the RMB go up faster would help, but that's a topic for some other time.)
3) Internet blockages and social media interference seem worse than I remember experiencing between 2006 and 2009, except in the tensest Tibet-riot periods. Even VPNs[3] sometimes don't work or are slow -- especially this past weekend when no one knew how serious the "Jasmine" demonstrations would become. To illustrate the difference this can make even if you're willing to shell out (as most Chinese citizens wouldn't be[4]) $60 a year for a VPN to get around Great Firewall restrictions, here is a download screen showing progress on a file I was trying to save, from a server in the US:
If you can't read the small print, it's estimating 1 hour and 31 minutes to finish downloading a 34MB file. As it happened, shortly thereafter the connection improved and the file eventually loaded in "only" about eight minutes. But extrapolate that as an efficiency tax on the system as a whole. As I have mentioned many times, the whole setup here is quite an amazing combination of laissez-faire/chaos and cumbersome over-control. As many other people have mentioned, this is accompanied at the moment by a big media campaign[5] pointing to the Middle East as an example of the kind of disorder China must avoid. The situation makes all the more startling the UN Security Council statement about Libya that China (along with other Permanent Members) approved yesterday:
>>The members of the Security Council underlined the need for the Government of Libya to respect the freedom of peaceful assembly and of expression, including freedom of the press. They called for the immediate lifting of restrictions on all forms of the media.<<Emphasis mine, to indicate freedoms specifically not respected in China when inconvenient for the government and notably limited right at the moment. Lack of self-awareness on the government's part? Deciding that looking hypocritical was the lesser evil, versus standing alongside Qaddafi? Can't be sure.
4) Smiley curve. As mentioned in the magazine here[6] and on this site here[7], many "made in China" exports are actually mere repackaging of high-value components from Japan, Germany, Korea, the United States, or someplace else. China is a huge export power, but not as huge as it seems. Latest evidence in this McKinsey report[8] (free registration required). It said that if you separate the "real" Chinese content from what is counted as total Chinese exports, exports accounted for only about 1/5th of the recent increase in China's GDP -- rather than 1/3, as most reports would suggest, or nearly 2/3rds, as reported a few years ago. China still has a big trade surplus; it still relies too much on exports for growth; its economy is still out of balance with the rest of the world's. But the picture is a little different from the way it's usually portrayed. Here's the main McKinsey chart showing export-growth as a share of Chinese GDP increase:
Back to typing, and back to this week's guests.
2.12.2011
China's reaction: Build a wall | The Economist
Build a wallThe Year of the Rabbit starts badly
China's reaction
Feb 3rd 2011 | BEIJING | from PRINT EDITION
THE Chinese Communist Party’s Publicity Department (or Propaganda Department, a closer rendering of the Chinese) is adept at controlling news from abroad that might inflame sentiment at home. As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe 20 years ago, it kept all but the barest news out of the domestic media, jammed foreign broadcasts and ordered vigilance over fax machines.
In response to the unrest in Egypt, the department has apparently instructed the Chinese media to use only dispatches sent by the official news agency, Xinhua, and either to bury news of events there or play up aspects that show the costs of turmoil. Reporting the travails of stranded Chinese tourists, or the government’s noble attempts to rescue them, is fine, but sympathy with the protesters is taboo. The department’s instructions to the media are, as usual, a secret, but their effect is clear.
The party has also been busy trying to control the internet. Twitter has been blocked in China since 2009, but home-grown versions are hugely popular. Anyone trying to follow postings by users with an interest in Egypt, however, might struggle. Merely searching for the word “Egypt” in Sina Weibo, one of China’s leading Twitter-like services, produces a warning that “according to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results have not been displayed”. On Baidu, a big news portal, a prominent list of “hot search terms” includes “the return of compatriots stranded in Egypt”, but nothing else.
Chinese news reports have briefly mentioned the disruption of internet and mobile-phone services in Egypt. They have not, however, discussed China’s pioneering use of such techniques to impede the mobilisation of crowds. Use of the internet and mobile phones for international calls and text-messaging was cut off for months in the far-western region of Xinjiang after ethnic clashes there in 2009.
On February 1st the party’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, relegated Egyptian politics to five terse paragraphs on page three but published a full page of articles under the headline, “The Internet is Warming the Whole of Society”. The internet, one scholar was quoted as saying, is a “great promoter of social change”. The party knows that all too well.
from PRINT EDITION | Briefing
Its always interesting to watch the Chinese media react to events with significant geopolitical implications because of the overt control over the media exerted by Beijing. Revolutions rarely carry the historical significance of these past weeks events in Eygpt, and the moment has clearly not been lost on the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
I cannot say that I totally understand why the Chinese political leaders fear such news making it into the hands and minds of the Chinese people. Its not as if the people aren't well aware that they are in control of the status quo in China, of course they understand that if they wanted a new government it would almost certainly be theirs to take. If anything, IMHO, the party is the chosen vehicle of the people as the fast means of achieving prestige and respect as a culture/civilization on the global stage.