Dissent Magazine on Ai Weiwei

Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

from the friendly folks at Dissent magazine: (please note:  in deference to recent activity about copyright, I’m going to only post excerpts and links of magazine and newspaper articles.

The Purge of Ai Weiwei

WHY WAS Ai Weiwei allowed to say the things he did? Any journalist who interviewed him in the last several years would eventually ask him the question, and it was incredible how Ai could reformulate the same answer again and again. Here he is on CNN in 2009: “On the one hand, the prime minister would memorize my father’s poetry in front of the great public, but on the other hand, the police were, you know, following me. So it’s hard to say.” In other words, Ai did not know why, but he suggested that whether he was going to get away with it or not remained to be seen.