Ai Weiwei / Ai Weiwei / Ai Weiwei...

#16

I can’t tell you much about Ai Weiwei except that he has been silent again this week. You may well know much more about his work than I do - and if you don’t you can always use Google… unless you happen to live in China, in which case... Ah but that’s the point; I don’t think you can successfully Google Ai Weiwei from inside China, can you?

Ai Weiwei was arrested in Beijing on Sunday 3^rd April and, in effect, has been made to disappear. The cops say he is ‘under investigation’ on suspicion of economic crimes. ‘Economic crimes’? If that’s what the sleuths are after, might I suggest that Beijing’s finest could usefully spend a month or six investigating bankers in the City of London before they get heavy with the man who brought ceramic sunflower seeds to the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern? Any connection between the arrest of Ai Weiwei and the Chinese leadership’s fear that popular uprisings in the Middle East could inspire imitators in China is, we are told, entirely coincidental.

One of the factors that helped run the USSR into the buffers was The Communist Party’s efforts to administer an intensely bureaucratic system without resort to photocopiers. It was not that the Politburo decreed Mr Xerox to be an enemy of The People, it was just that if copiers were widely available they could be subverted and used to propagate samizdat literature[1]. And if the people read the wrong stories by the wrong authors, well that would never do, would it? Technology moves on apace and today the paranoia of the Chinese authorities focuses on the internet. To plagiarise Winston Churchill - these are paranoid little men with much to be paranoid about. The denial of freedoms of expression and association is one of the principal ways in which they aim to keep their ruddy great lid on things.

But what Mr Hu Jintao (Gen. Sec. Communist Party of China) really needs is a Super-Injunction. Give him one of those and then the media couldn’t even report that Ai Weiwei had been arrested. In fact they couldn’t even report that they couldn’t report that Ai Weiwei had been arrested. How Mr Hu must look with envy at the protection which the British courts offer the rich, the powerful, the infamous and the paranoid.

This week the media in Britain have been highly exercised about human rights. Not, as you might hope, ‘human rights’ in the sense that might be of any use to Ai Weiwei, but rather ‘human rights’ regarding ‘privacy’ versus ‘freedom of speech’ where the sexual peccadilloes[2] of the rich/powerful/famous/good at games are concerned. Doesn’t it make you want to slip out to the shed and execute a quick haiku?

Declarations on the subject of Human Rights have seldom been better stated than they were in the eighteenth century. I have in mind the first eight words in the second paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” If you are a journalist or the editor of a half-decent newspaper you shouldn’t need a QC or a Supreme Court judge to decide on the balance between the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy. It’s not rocket science – although one may wish that, for the safety of humanity, rather more about ‘rocket science’ had, in fact, been kept secret.

Would that we could persuade the media to stop using the label ‘celebrity’ in these exposés and use ‘prostitute’ instead. To prostitute is “to put to unworthy or corrupt use for the sake of gain.”[3] I think that pretty much hits the spot for the folk and their activities that were Twittered about. Any genuine prostitutes who get mixed up with the tabloids should – if they have yet to achieve ‘celebrity’ status in their own right – be given the appellation ‘sex worker’. And then we might all know where we stand – or lie or bend over[4].

Until Ai Weiwei is released, whenever you hear mention of Max Mosley, or of wayward footballers or of super-injunctions or similar baloney, please feel at liberty to shout ‘FREE AI WEIWEI’ – or you could even risk ‘UP YOURS HU JINTAO’ – if you are of a more militant persuasion.

Me? I think I’ll go and lie down[5].

Next week: “A bloke goes into a pub with a parrot on his shoulder…”

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[1] Self-published, underground literature usually expressing views contrary to those endorsed by the state.

[2] Peccadillo n. a trifling fault, a small misdemeanour. Chambers Dictionary 9^th Edition 2003.

[3] Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11^th. Edition 2006

 - yes, I do have more than one Dictionary…

[4] I’m told that other positions are available.

[5] See above.