Rogues Gallery: Ai Weiwei ...........

expatter

Once Again, Follow the Money

Readers would have noted that his earlier brief article had almost two dozen live links to the China Digital Times (Hong Kong) which, as I’m sure most readers know, is funded by the CIA (through the NED). And whether you like China or don’t, much of the Times’ content is a rather dirty piece of work.

For those of you who still feel like defending the downtrodden, try to keep in mind that China does not have NGOs in the US, spending huge amounts of money trying to stir up the Tea Party or the Black Panthers, or even crying for Bradley Manning’s release.

But the US, through the NED and other similar NGO fronts, spends a lot of money financing “dissenters” and does a great deal of work to try to stir up trouble, dissention, insurrection, sedition and worse.

The US did the same with Liu Xiaobo, financing a high life style and stoking his seditious rantings until he finally went too far and got himself tossed into prison. I suspect the same has happened again.

And then of course, the US can sanctimoniously crow about how China is being brutal by harassing an “innocent” dissenter.

If you’re a good Christian or a cocky American you might easily dismiss all this as just good clean fun. But it isn’t fun, it isn’t good, and in truth it is dirty as hell.

If I were China I wouldn’t be happy about the CIA financing unrest on my doorstep either.

This is a very dirty political game that is being played, and there is almost no way for China to deal with it in a way that won’t let the US claim yet another propaganda victory.

expatter

Maybe the US Should Mind its Own Business

I think it would be appropriate to remind readers (AND the US media) that we wouldn’t be having this discussion if not for the extensive foreign meddling in China’s internal affairs.

It is only because of the US-sponsored subversion that any of this has happened. If it were not for the US government, the NED, the CIA and its financing, we wouldn’t have had an issue with any of these “dissidents”.

It is only due to their CIA financing and NED encouragement that these people obtain public attention and eventually get themselves in trouble.

Nor would we have had US Ambassador Jon Huntsman sneaking around Wang Fujing like a weasel, looking to admire the handiwork of his “Jasmine Revolution”.

Nor would we have had the riots in Xinjiang that were organised by the NED-financed and guided by the World Uigur Congress of Rebiya Khadeer.

Nor would China have had the Olympic birthday gift of the externally-financed riots in Tibet the year prior.

expatter

Why is the Focus on China, Rather Than on the US – Where it Belongs?

This is typical school-yard bullying. I provoke and provoke until you retaliate in some way, then point all the fingers at you while I walk away with my halo intact.

Why aren’t we having a discussion about the US, about its pathological determination to interfere with and meddle in the internal affairs of so many other countries?

In all of this, why are we studiously ignoring the clear fact that the US, the great protector of freedoms and human rights, has instigated all of these troubles?

Why are we in fact blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator?

You won’t like this, but here we have a perfect example of American Exceptionalism and White Supremacy in action.

That’s the root of it; make no mistake.



Article is sourced from the 龙信明 Blog.

expatter

An interesting opinion  ............

And according to the author ...........

Yes, the author  ..............

AWW was a drop-out, overstay, pimp, bum, gambler, pavement artist  ........  

wowzers

Thanks for the tip on this Blog. Hadn't seen it before. Cheers.

Cool? As to the opinion piece posted. I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk more about that.

[ Last edited by wowzers at 2011-11-11 01:12 AM ]

ganzhuolin

This was posted before...somewhere... but it bears repeating...

Part 1

Detained: Ai Weiwei, Con Artist
Post Categories: Editorial Column

By Yoichi Shimatzu | 11:40 BeiJing Time,Monday, April 11, 2011

BEIJING - Anger is essential to the modern Chinese male character, which is so strikingly "un-Asian" compared with, say, a Japanese with his cool dispassion toward lethal risks or the Thai with his elegant aesthetic of combat as a dance to the death. On the streets of Beijing, it's not uncommon to see a burly bloke belly-bump a police officer while bellowing vulgarities. In most places, it's the cops who bully the civilians; only in China is it the other way around.

The recently detained artist Ai Weiwei is an exponent of the macho gesture, Beijing-style. His life work is a rendering of the rude shove, the slamming door, spit and cigarette butts on polished marble floors and tussles in the subway. The leitmotif of one of his art series is the middle figure superimposed over images of China's national monuments. Like the enraged man on the street, the artist brutalizes symbols of authority.

Surprisingly, his recent arrest at Beijing's airport while trying to board an overseas flight did not stem from his controversial art, radical political views or an assault complaint but was related to a drab and dreary case of financial irregularities involving his new Shanghai studio. Though to his ardent supporters the charges may look like a set-up by the police, Shanghai is rife with commercial scams related to land and zoning codes. Details of the case are by law kept from media release until conviction, and Ai Weiwei himself has never provided answers to the charges, choosing instead to make counter-accusations of political persecution.

Shanghai Gang

Ai Weiwei's alleged violation of property regulations, like  the myriad of other less-publicized cases in Shanghai, has its origins in those heady days when the municipality was led by municipal party chief Chen Liangyu, who has since been arrested for embezzlement and property fraud. Chen wooed anyone in the cultural field who had connections with the West in the drive to win approval for the city's bid for a World Expo. Often Chen took personal charge by inviting a guest to a private dinner, such as one this author sat in on, to promise that a successful effort to bring over cultural heavyweights from the U.S. and Europe would be rewarded generously.

In 2000, Ai Weiwei, who had studied at Parsons School of Design and familiar figure in New York's avant garde art scene, was invited to curate a group show in Shanghai. His radical anti-authoritarian opinions were received with enthusiasm by Chen's cultural circle, which included neo-conservative critics of the Cultural Revolution, who in an earlier era would have been deemed capitalist roaders. The city gates were flung open, and the artist got his pick of real estate.

A series of property scandals, triggered by mass evictions of long-time residents, eventually led to the arrest of Chen and his associates. Land titles transferred under hi0s regime have since been reviewed, and hundreds of prosecution cases filed. Ai Weiwei's new studio, which was among the questionable properties was torn down like many other illegal structures. There's nothing extraordinary about this sort of corruption, except for its politicized defense by Ai Weiwei and his foreign sponsors, including the American ambassador to China.

As the Shanghai case illustrates, Ai Weiwei is not only an artist, architect, filmmaker, curator, social critic and dissenter, he is also a low-end property developer with an apparently sloppy ledger book, rife with shady accounting practices. To some he's a great artistic talent, but as a businessman he's known for skirting the rules. His loosely administered property dealings have long raised eyebrows among academic artists and municipal officials in Beijing.

Now, as the hidden associations with Shanghai's boss, who abused political power to evict thousands of residents from their homes, come out, the truth is blowing apart Ai Weiwei's phony "anti-corruption" crusade. No wonder he keeps his fat mouth shut about the sordid details.

Readymade Rebel

Whatever his claims of political persecution, the fact is that Chinese authorities have shown nearly infinite latitude toward this artistic maverick and social rebel. Their muted acceptance of his barrage of insults illustrates how, at the gut level, the Chinese are more democratic than their ultra-polite and class-conscious peers in Japan, Thailand and India.

Across the entire continent, there is no artist who can come close to Ai Weiwei in outrageousness, as expressed in 2000 with a group exhibition that he co-curated titled "F--k Off". His publicity materials used all four letters. There are cities in America and Europe where you couldn't get away with printing the offensive word on posters and flyers. Just imagine the reaction to such an arts event in Karachi or Riyadh. So freedom of expression in China is a lot safer than in many other parts of the world.

Despite his hatred of authority, Ai Weiwei is no inner-city plebe or impoverished peasant but one of the princelings born to privilege. In his youth, he experienced hardship and poverty not as a commoner but as the son of a once high-ranking cultural official. His father Jiang Zhenghan, a poet who took the pen name Ai Qing, was purged from the Communist Party in 1957 during the anti-rightist movement and exiled to the hinterlands of Xinjiang Province.

Ai Weiwei's memories of banishment are captured in his installation, "Sunflower Seeds" at London's Tate Museum. Piled across the floor of the .turbine room are 100 million porcelain seeds, each handmade in China. Art critics have interpreted the tear-shaped pebbles as an analogy of mass production, exploitation of sweatshop labor, the persistence of individualism in a collective society and the pointlessness of China's national objectives. The artist stated in simpler terms: "In China, when we grew up, we had nothing . . . but for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we'd have would be the sunflower seeds in everybody's pockets."

Under his original conception - later canceled by curators due to the health risks of ceramic dust - museum-goers were encouraged to walk over the fragile seeds, crushing them. Such is the fate of the multitude doomed never to sprout, grow and blossom, these who in their millions end up as empty husks strewn over train platforms and under the tables of beer swillers.

That bleak outlook, sadly, is Ai Weiwei's view of human existence as sterile, stunted and futile. These are not the fields of yellow blossoms humming with bees in the Xinjiang sunlight, which he saw as a boy in western China, nor the bouquets of Van Gogh cut off from their roots yet pulsating with energy.

Part 1