Age of Ambition (50 page)

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Nobody was challenging the restraints on Chinese culture more conspicuously than Ai Weiwei, and the state finally settled on its strategy for silencing him. In November, five months after his release, the government ordered him to pay $2.4 million for “unpaid taxes and fines” related to three architectural projects: a photo gallery he'd designed in Beijing, and a pair of apartments for paying clients in England and Singapore. Ai Weiwei suspected that those projects had drawn the most official attention because they involved offshore clients and accounts. But instead of accepting the bill, Ai Weiwei challenged it; under the law, if he paid a deposit of $800,000 (one-third of his bill), within fifteen days, he could contest it in court. When news of his plan began to circulate, help poured in: people folded hundred-yuan notes into paper planes and lofted them over the wall and into the studio courtyard. They wrapped cash around apples and oranges and delivered them to his doorstep. They wired him money. “Don't hurry to repay it,” one donor wrote. “You can return it when there is a new currency”—a bill, someday, with no portrait of Mao on its face.

The artist was awed by the response. “A young girl walked in with a backpack full of money and said, ‘Where do you want this?'” he told me. “‘It was the savings for a car, and now I can't buy the car. It's yours.'” He added, “That people would raise their voices and act, to give money to a person the state said is a ‘criminal'? This is an unthinkable situation.” His accountant posted a running tally of donations. The list of givers was eclectic—I recognized the name of a father whose son had fallen ill from drinking tainted milk—and by the end of the first week, supporters had donated even more money than the artist needed for a deposit. After the subject of his donations became the most trending topic on Weibo, his account was shut down. My phone buzzed with a new order for Chinese journalists:

Delete all online references to the case of Ai Weiwei borrowing money to pay his taxes. Interactive pages must promptly remove messages that seize on this occasion to attack the Party, the government, and the legal system.

The Party tabloid,
Global Times
, suggested that paper planes sailing over the studio wall might constitute “illegal fund-raising,” and it delivered a warning: “For 30 years Ai Weiweis have emerged and fallen. But China has kept rising despite their pessimistic predictions. The real social trend is that they will be eliminated.” While he awaited a day in court, Ai grew antsy. In winter, the trees outside his house were bare, and the police cameras bulged from lampposts. Ai Weiwei threw stones at them, and the police hauled him in for “attacking a security camera,” as officers put it. One of his fans circulated an expression of mock concern: “Was the camera badly injured? Did it need a checkup? Perhaps, a CT scan?”

A few days later we were at his dining room table. Winter sun poured in from the south. Danni, the deaf and ancient cocker spaniel, listed around the room like a drunk. Ai's wife, Lu Qing, came down the stairs into the dining room and headed toward the door. She was unaccustomed to the spotlight; the previous year had brought interrogations and the unfamiliar sensation of speaking on behalf of her husband while he was detained. Her name was on the studio's legal papers, so she had been swept up into the tax case. From the table, Ai Weiwei watched his wife wrap a bright red scarf around her shoulders and bundle up against the cold. She was on her way to submit more paperwork to the court. She clutched a manila folder to her chest and opened the front door a crack. She paused. “You okay?” Ai Weiwei asked her. She nodded, gave a tight smile, and slipped out.

I asked him if he had cheated on his taxes. Frankly, it wouldn't have surprised me—in China, people joke that tax evasion is the national sport. Government researchers estimated in 2011 that tax fraud cost the state
Â¥
1 trillion—about $157 billion—and they found that the largest culprits were, in fact, state-owned enterprises. Several times a day I received spam text messages offering to sell me fake invoices for business expenses I could use to evade taxes. In answer to my question, Ai Weiwei said no. Ordinarily, in a situation like this, I would review the files in his case, but the police had confiscated the company's records, sealed the court proceedings to the public and the press, and when I called the court and the prosecutors, nobody would answer any questions. Even Ai's lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, had never been allowed to review original documents in the case. I asked the artist if he thought he might win. “No,” he said. “We're only winning by revealing the truth.”

He was right about not winning. In March 2012 the government denied his request for a hearing about his bill, so he tried another tack: he sued the Taxation Bureau, accusing it of mishandling witnesses and evidence. This time, to his astonishment, the court agreed to hear it. But when he tried to visit the court for the hearing, he received a call from the police: “If you try, you can never make it.” His wife and lawyer attended, but the courthouse was surrounded by hundreds of police in uniform and plain clothes who barred journalists and diplomats from approaching it. Hu Jia, an activist who tried to attend, was choked and punched by agents outside his home. The city diverted bus routes to bypass the courthouse. On the one-year anniversary of his arrest, with his phones tapped, his e-mail monitored, and his studio surrounded by surveillance cameras, Ai Weiwei decided to out-bug the police: he set up four webcams in his studio, including one on the ceiling of his bedroom, and he began broadcasting his life on the Web. He called it
Weiweicam.com
. The cops were flummoxed. After a few weeks, they ordered him to pull the plug. He could not conduct surveillance on himself. He joked about writing a book on tax law, probably a first for a contemporary artist. To him, knowledge of any kind was the most powerful art he could produce. “Their power is based on ignorance,” he said. “
We're not supposed to know
.”

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Ai Weiwei thought he would regain his passport one year after his release, but the anniversary, in June 2012, came and went. He was told he couldn't travel because he was suspected of three additional crimes: bigamy, the illegal exchange of foreign currency, and pornography. The pornography investigation, he was told, centered on a single photo: a nude that he had staged in his studio, of himself in a chair flanked by four women standing and staring into the camera. When his fans heard that he might be charged for it, they began posting nude photos of themselves in solidarity.

When I stopped by one morning that fall, he was morose. The court had ruled against his final appeal of the tax case, and he had returned the donations. The government had closed his production company, Fake Cultural Development Ltd., because it failed to update the annual registration. (That would have been difficult, because the police had seized the documents and stamps to do so.) “It's like you're playing chess with a person from outer space,” he said. “They play a way you can never imagine, and the game is designed so that they
must
be the winner. I'm forced to play with them, and no matter how smart I move, I will be the loser.”

I had never heard him so pessimistic. He had concluded that the system's greatest vulnerability was not that it didn't agree with his ideas, but that it rejected his very right to contest the Party's ideas at all—his bid for the faith of the public. “Every day I'm waiting to see, maybe an official will knock on the door and say, ‘Weiwei, let's sit down, let's have a talk. What's your point? Let me see how ridiculous you are.'”

His son was now three and a half, and I asked Ai how he planned to explain the family's situation to him. He was silent for a long time and his eyes reddened. Then he said that he nursed a strange fantasy about that problem: “I want my son to grow slower,” he said. “I don't want him to be mature too soon, to understand.” It was the first time I'd heard Ai vote for ignorance over knowledge. “The situation is not explainable. It's not rational. It doesn't really make sense to me. I cannot figure out why it has to be this way.” His mood seemed to startle him, and he changed the subject. For all his troubles, he sensed a broader change gathering around him. “I think almost every level of the society today realizes China is facing a great crisis in terms of trust, ideology, moral standards, and many, many other ways … It's not going to last. Without change in the basic political structure, China has come to the end. This so-called miracle is not going to last.” He said, “After ninety years of success, it is still an underground party. They can never really pronounce their ideas and they can never meet anybody who challenges them intellectually.”

Over the years that I'd known him, Ai Weiwei had become as much a symbol as a man; he was the most famous dissident China had ever known. There were books and movies and articles about him. But once the artist became a celebrity, the art world lost patience and seemed eager to find the next voice. (
The New Republic
ran a piece subtitled: “Ai Weiwei: Wonderful Dissident, Terrible Artist.”) The behavior that disturbed Ai the most was perhaps that of his fellow Chinese artists. “During my disappearance, almost none of them [asked], ‘Where is this person? What kind of crime has he committed?'”

I asked why he thought they had stayed silent.

“I think they're afraid,” he said flatly. “If I meet them, they always say they completely agree with me, but if you want them to make a public acknowledgment about their position, they will never do it.”

To some, Ai Weiwei imposed an unfair standard on others; he argued that, for an artist or writer or thinker to avoid confrontation, to avoid politics, was craven. When a London exhibit of Chinese art received positive reviews, he blasted it for failing to address “the country's most pressing contemporary issues.” He compared it to a “restaurant in Chinatown that sells all the standard dishes, such as kung pao chicken and sweet and sour pork.”

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The pressure on the creative class stirred conflicts far beyond the world of Ai Weiwei, battles over moral authority and trust that gradually turned personal. In January 2012 a blogger named Mai Tian wrote an essay called “Manmade Han Han,” in which he compared the dates and times of Han's blog posts with his car races and concluded that he couldn't have written them. The blogger alleged that Han was a fraud—a composite of ghostwriters, perhaps. In response, Han was dismissive; he offered three million dollars to anyone who could prove it. His fans pointed out mistakes in the accuser's time line, and he withdrew it, but all the talk of fraud captured the attention of an unusual figure named Fang Zhouzi.

Fang was a biochemist with a degree from Michigan State who had leaped to prominence by exposing quack science and academic corruption. In China, this was risky work: Fang was attacked by thugs carrying a hammer and pepper spray, and it turned out that they had been hired by a doctor whom he had accused of fabricating data. Fang's accusations were not always right. He had been sued for libel—winning three suits and losing four, by his count—but in the new culture of skepticism, he attracted a large following. When I met Fang, he told me that he was suspicious of believers of many kinds; over the years, he had criticized Evangelical Christianity and Falun Gong, and he saw a similarity in the depth of faith people placed in Han Han. “What I'm criticizing is that they're trying to make a false idol,” he told me. In Fang's telling, the very facts that made Han Han a star now sounded suspect: the sudden rise; the habit of writing fast and alone; the insistence that he preferred driving over writing. In an effort to put an end to the issue, Han Han eventually scanned and released roughly a thousand pages of handwritten writings, but Fang argued that they were copies, conspicuously short of “changes in plot and particulars,” and he speculated that Han's writing had been produced by his father, the frustrated novelist, or by writers working for the smooth-talking publisher I'd met.

The collision of Han Han and Fang Zhouzi, two of China's most influential commentators, caused a sensation; it generated fifteen million Weibo posts in two weeks. Some of Han Han's critics went so far as to ask the Taxation Bureau to investigate him; they questioned whether his car races had been fixed; they even accused him of overstating his height. The debate over his authenticity and merit divided Chinese intellectuals along such bitter lines that the novelist Murong Xuecun looked at the mud flying back and forth and observed, “Not since the Cultural Revolution have Chinese intellectuals expressed as much hatred toward each other.” Why had this issue, of all things, caused a fight so intense? Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet-era poet, once asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” In Murong's view, China's intellectuals were so beaten down that they were brawling on the floor over scraps. With so many thinkers “spending so much energy fighting over words and ink, we have forgotten to criticize government authority; we have forgotten to pay attention to social welfare. That should worry us.”

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I visited Han Han and asked him about the accusations. “It's hard to disprove something you never did,” he said, and he suggested that his accusers were unhinged. “They're like the people who insist Americans never landed on the moon,” he said. I asked if his father ever wrote a piece in the son's name, and he said no. “We have two different ways of writing.” His father cared about stories; Han Han cared only about moods. “It's not that my writing is so good—it's not perfect—but it is very distinctive,” he said, with a bit of race car bluster. Han Han framed the accusations against him in broader terms. “In this society, people don't trust each other, so they exploit this distrust to attack whomever they want.” Of Fang's legions of fans online, he said, “They only trust their computers.”