BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Monday warned foreign energy companies against exploration in the disputed South China Sea after U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp said it had discovered hydrocarbons in August off central Vietnam, in an area also claimed by China.
The potentially significant gas discovery was made off the coast of Danang city, bringing a territorial row over the resource-rich South China Sea back into focus.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei reiterated at a regular briefing that "China has indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and adjacent waters," referring to the South China Sea.
"We hope foreign companies do not get involved in disputed waters for oil and gas exploration and development. This position has been consistent," Hong said, when asked whether China plans to ask Exxon Mobil to withdraw from its oil and gas deal with Vietnam.
He did not elaborate, nor single out Exxon Mobil by name.
Exxon Mobil has a licence from the Vietnamese government to explore blocks 117, 118 and 119 off the Danang coast, falling within what Vietnam claims is its 200-mile exclusive economic zone under international maritime law, the Financial Times reported last week.
But the blocks also fall within China's vast claim to almost the entire South China Sea, also claimed in part by Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The sea and areas such as the Spratly Islands and other atolls are believed to have rich deposits of oil and gas and is also a rich fishing ground.
One of China's most popular newspapers, the Global Times, cautioned last week that nations involved in territorial disputes in the waters should "mentally prepare for the sounds of cannons" if they remain at loggerheads with Beijing.
LONDON (AFP) — A British government advisor accused China on Monday of being behind cyber attacks on other states, ahead of a major London conference designed to agree some global rules on cyberspace.
Pauline Neville-Jones, Prime Minister David Cameron's special representative to business on cyber security, told BBC radio there was a real threat posed by people trying to obtain Britain's national security secrets.
When the interviewer noted that China and Russia are often blamed for involvement in such attacks, Neville-Jones replied: "They certainly are. Some governments are more interested in this kind of activity.
"But there are a lot of private individuals who do this kind of 'hoovering' of other people's systems and then try and sell the stuff that they've managed to obtain to buyers... There are a lot of actors in this."
Pressed again on whether China and Russia were the biggest players, the former security minister said: "They are certainly some of them."
But Neville-Jones insisted she did not want to "point the finger", particularly ahead of the two-day London conference attended by representatives of China and Russia, as well as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She said: "What we want to try and do is to create a climate in which people feel that obeying the rules and actually behaving above board serves the national interest and that it is damaging in the end to try to play both sides.
"Because if you are a company that comes from a country like China, you can suffer if in the end people believe it is potentially threatening to employ your products."
In an article in The Times on Monday, Iain Lobban, director of the British intelligence agency GCHQ, warned of a "disturbing" rise in cyber attacks on government and industry systems.
The Government Communications Headquarters chief said the attacks included "one significant (but unsuccessful) attempt" to acquire sensitive information from the computer systems used by the Foreign Office earlier this year.
"The volume of e-crime and attacks on government and industry systems continue to be disturbing," he wrote.
This included attempts to steal British ideas and designs, he said, which "represents an attack on the UK's continued economic wellbeing".
Criminals were also using cyberspace to extort money and steal identities, Lobban said, to the extent that "we are witnessing the development of a global criminal market place".
By BROOK LARMER Pi San in his studio in Beijing with Ms. Puff, a popular (apolitical) creation.
The cellphone vibrated softly, insistently, echoing off the whitewashed walls of the artist’s studio.
It was a Sunday morning in early April, and Wang Bo — an Internet animator better known to his legions of online fans by his nickname, Pi San — ignored the call at first. He wanted no intrusions.
A compact 40-year-old with short-cropped hair and arched eyebrows that give him a look of permanent bemusement, Pi San is most famous for creating a mischievous cartoon character named Kuang Kuang, but he earns money by making animations for corporations, and he was on a deadline.
Pi San had bicycled to his studio in a defunct factory building on the outskirts of Beijing that morning, hoping to finish up some work in peace.
But the buzzing of the phone didn’t stop.
The moment Pi San picked up, the caller blurted out the news: State security agents had just detained Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous contemporary artist and a government critic. This mordant swipe at the educational system is one of Pi San’s first animations to feature his bubble-headed character, Kuang Kuang. On its first day on the Internet, in 2009, “Blow Up the School” was viewed three million times. Government officials were not amused; they slapped Pi with a fine for “inappropriate content.”Like many in Pi San’s Kuang Kuang series, this animation appeals to his generation’s nostalgia for childhood and its veiled frustration with a rigid system. Pi, whose company, Hutoon, produces more refined animations for corporate clients, says he returns to Kuang Kuang when “my emotions are running high.” Pi San’s darkest satire, this 2011 animation begins as a soothing “greeting card” for the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and morphs into a nightmare of social injustices. Each of the indignities suffered by the rabbits reflects actual abuses of power that have sparked outrage on the Internet. Only the ending is sheer fantasy: a violent uprising against the ruling tigers. By chance, the animation came out in late January, just as popular revolutions were sweeping across North Africa. Spurred by the detention of the artist and government critic Ai Weiwei in April, Pi San created this satirical animation as a tribute to Ai — and, more broadly, as an indictment of the corrosive effects of censorship on society, on language itself. A masterpiece of comic subterfuge, the animation refers to Ai not by name but mainly through the subject of one of his most famous solo exhibitions: the 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds he laid out across the floor of the Tate Modern in 2010. (The Chinese character for Kuang Kuang’s exasperated sigh, “ai,” 哎 also happens to be just a few brush strokes away from Ai’s surname 艾.)
Pi San spat out a profanity.
Over the previous six weeks, hundreds of bloggers — lawyers, activists, journalists — had vanished into police custody in one of the harshest assaults on social activism in decades.
Now they had Ai — fat, brilliant, bombastic and internationally renowned.
If Ai could be arrested, was any independent thinker in China safe?
Pi San had reason to be scared.
He and Ai were friends.
A few weeks earlier, over lunch, the two artists talked about collaborating on a satirical Internet animation. Though a bit wary of Ai’s Web activism, Pi San admired his daring solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin and London.
The most recent show had consisted of 100 million sunflower seeds made of porcelain, laid out across the floor of the Tate Modern, which visitors were invited to walk upon.
Some considered the seeds to be symbols of the downtrodden Chinese people.
Despite his fear, Pi San quickly posted the news about Ai’s detention on Sina Weibo, China’s closely monitored equivalent of Twitter and the fastest-growing Internet platform in the world.
An invisible censor deleted the message in seconds.
He then tried posting, without comment, a cartoon drawing of Ai, the better to evade China’s word-sensitive filtering software.
But the image disappeared, too — a sign that a human being, not computer software, had deleted the drawing.
Pi San told his Weibo followers: “Again I was ‘harmonized.’ It’s just a picture!”
Now the creative synapses started firing.
“I had to do something to lift the fear,” Pi San told me later.
“Others might write or protest; I make animations.”
He and a colleague worked feverishly through the night on a 54-second flash animation entitled “Crack Sunflower Seeds.”
The animation takes place in Kuang Kuang’s school, where a little girl is speaking over the loudspeakers. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a Chinese man selling sunflower seeds.”
Suddenly, a black cartoon hand yanks her off the set.
A succession of trembling announcers tries to tell the same story, but the black hand pulls them off too, each time more quickly than the last.
Finally, it is Kuang Kuang’s turn.
The boy hems and haws and, giving up, sighs in exasperation: “Ai.”
A word bubble appears with the Chinese character for the sigh 哎, virtually the same as Ai’s surname 艾. Kuang Kuang is hauled off, screaming.
In the next frame, the black hand sweeps away sunflower seeds arranged in the same “Ai.”
Then we hear a grating sound — teeth meeting porcelain — followed by an off-screen scream: “Damn it! Who sold us these fake sunflower seeds?”
Pi San finished the animation before dawn on April 4, less than 24 hours after Ai was detained.
“I hesitated for a second before posting it online,” he told me.
“But then I thought, If I don’t put it up, that would be like self-castration.”
With a few clicks, he sent “Crack Sunflower Seeds” into cyberspace, posting it onto China’s top video Web sites.
In just a few hours, a million or more netizens watched the animation online.
Then the video began disappearing from Chinese Web sites one by one, just like the announcers in his animation.
Pi San lashed out directly at the censors in a Weibo post: “You’re like the eunuch who gets worried before the emperor does!”
There was no response.
Even in his anger, Pi San was left wondering if the black hand would come for him.
No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software.
Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China.
“Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University.
“It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”
To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire.
This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China.
Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself.
“Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms.
“Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”
So pervasive is this irreverent subculture that the Chinese have a name for it: egao, meaning “evil works” or, more roughly, “mischievous mockery.”
In its simplest form, egao (pronounced “EUH-gow”) lampoons the powerful without being overtly rebellious.
President Hu Jintao’s favorite buzz word, “harmony,” which he deploys constantly when urging social stability, is hijacked to signify censorship itself, as in, “My blog’s been harmonized.”
June 4, the censored date of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, is rendered as May 35 — or “535.”
There are also more complex forms of egao, like Hu Ge’s 2010 film spoof, “Animal World,” in which a rare species of Internet users is “saved” from “compulsive thinking disorder,” i.e., the urge to think freely.
Satire is sometimes a safety valve that government might grudgingly permit.
Better a virtual laugh, after all, than a real protest.
But being laughed at, as Orwell found during his stint as a colonial police officer in Burma, can also be a ruler’s greatest fear.
And the Chinese government, which last year sentenced a woman to a year of hard labor for a sarcastic three-word tweet, appears to suffer from an acute case of humor deficiency.
Wen Yunchao at his apartment in Hong Kong.
“Jokes that mock the abuse of power do more than let off steam; they mobilize people’s emotions,” says Wen Yunchao, an outspoken blogger who often mounts sardonic Internet campaigns in defense of free speech.
“Every time a joke takes off,” Wen says, “it chips away at the so-called authority of an authoritarian regime.”
Satirical threads sweeping across the Internet can often seem like brush fires whose origins are lost in the conflagration.
But behind every outbreak are individuals probing the limits of self-expression, flirting, often perilously, with the blurry line between the permissible and the punishable.
Over the past several months I followed two individuals — the animator Pi San and the blogger Wen Yunchao — in an effort to understand the dynamics of “mischievous mockery” and the increasingly serious game of cat-and-mouse taking place along China’s digital front lines.
Pi San and Wen are perfect counterpoints — a northerner and a southerner who approach egao from different angles.
One specializes in visual images, the other mainly in words.
Pi San shudders at being considered an activist; he sees satire as an artistic way to vent personal frustration. Wen wears the activist label proudly; he views humor as a “weapon of the weak” to mobilize civil society. As the government crackdown intensified, each man was forced to adjust his calculations of danger and opportunity: How far could they go before they crossed the invisible line?
Wen learned the true power of Internet humor not from a joke but from a cry for help from a police interrogation room.
Early one morning in July 2009, Wen, who is 39, woke up in his apartment in the southern city of Guangzhou to find a startling message on his Twitter feed: “I have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS.” The jailhouse tweet was from Guo Baofeng, a young friend and fellow blogger, referring to a district in the coastal city Xiamen, some 300 miles away.
Minutes later came another tweet from Guo, also in English: “Pls help me, I grasped the phone during police sleep.”
Then there was nothing.
Wen knew how easily people could disappear into the labyrinths of China’s prison system.
Guo, who was then a 25-year-old English-language translator, had reposted a video in which the mother of a gang-raped murder victim accused local Xiamen authorities of a cover-up.
Now Wen wondered how far the police would go to muzzle the messenger.
The tweets from detention — and the silence that followed — unsettled Wen.
But what could he do?
Any direct protest would be shut down immediately, even if people could overcome their fear to participate. Then he noticed a phrase that was going viral on the Internet: “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!”
The line’s origins were a mystery, but the online masses latched onto it as a joking commentary on their Web-addicted generation — lost in cyberspace, unreachable by the outside world.
That very day, millions retweeted the phrase.
Wen, though, gave it a new twist.
He urged his tens of thousands of microblog followers to send postcards to the Mawei police station and post photos of them online, all with the same words: “Guo Baofeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!”
Nobody can know if the Internet campaign made a difference.
But instead of being lost in the prison system — four other bloggers arrested for reposting the same video were sentenced to one to two years in prison — Guo was released after 16 days.
For Wen, the incident crystallized his thinking.
“Humor can amplify the power of the social media,” he told me.
“If it hits a nerve, like a case of injustice or abuse, it can be contagious. It’s indirect — just a joke, right? — so people lose their fear of getting involved.”
Growing up as the oldest child in a poor family in rural Guangdong Province, Wen wasn’t always keen to get involved himself.
When army tanks crushed the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing, Wen, who was then a middle-school student prone to skipping class, applauded the crackdown.
“I agreed with the government that it was necessary to prevent chaos,” he recalls.
Wen’s most daring act in college — he was assigned to study machine welding at a technical institute in Harbin, a city in China’s icy far north — was to smuggle in Cantonese pornography and pop music to help him endure the long winters.
His Internet “awakening,” as he calls it, came years later, when he toiled at a power station near Guangzhou. One night after clocking out, Wen watched a television special beamed in from nearby Hong Kong that contradicted the official story of the 1989 massacre.
Finding a trove of information online to confirm its veracity — this was before the Great Firewall, erected in 2003, blocked such terms as “June 4” — he emerged with a new conviction: “The Internet will open the door of democracy.”
Hungry to learn more, Wen transformed himself over the next decade into an information machine, first as a journalist and then as a blogger.
Covering events for state-run newspapers and, later, for government television, he produced reports and commentaries that toed the official line.
On the Internet, though, he adopted a more freewheeling persona, writing a popular blog called Ramblings of a Drunkard under a pseudonym.
Soon, Wen moved full time online, working for the Chinese Internet company Netease and moonlighting as one of the country’s earliest citizen journalists.
His first article, typed into his cellphone, chronicled the 2007 street protests in Xiamen that succeeded in halting construction of a chemical plant.
The censors were never far behind, turning Wen’s life into a perpetual game of hide-and-seek.
First a few posts were blocked, then his entire blog, then the Chinese Internet portal he used.
An overseas Web server worked until the Great Firewall shut it out too.
Riding the next wave of technology, Wen began typing out 140-character blasts on Twitter and China’s fast-growing microblogging sites.
Weibo, a Twitter equivalent that barely existed two years ago, now has 200 million users, churning out some 40 million messages a day.
The government, hard-pressed to keep up, leans on Web companies to censor their own content in return for “self-discipline” points needed to renew licenses.
“No place is safe anymore,” Wen says.
“But whenever censorship grows, so do the opportunities for sarcasm and satire.”
Not long ago, Wen even dared to target China’s most unassailable icon: Mao Zedong.
The chairman has been dead for 35 years, but his massive portrait still presides over Tiananmen Square.
It is just one sign of what Wen calls the “awful influence” wielded by the founder of the People’s Republic. Ridiculing Mao is almost unthinkable in China today.
Even so, on the anniversary of Mao’s death in 2009, Wen urged his online followers to join a devious “de-Maoification” campaign.
Since “mao” is also the Chinese word for “hair,” he suggested posting before-and-after shots of shaved body parts — people literally “getting rid of mao.”
Wen is a beer-bellied man with a thick Abraham Lincoln-style beard.
Among the hundreds of images of shorn beards and hair-free legs that flashed across the Web that day was Wen’s own contribution: a photo of his rotund belly with its hair in a topiary of the “t” of the Twitter logo. Wen’s abdominal salute was funny, but it was also a manifesto for a more open China — and a dangerous move in his showdown with Chinese authorities.
When Pi San was a young boy — around the same age as his impish creation, Kuang Kuang — his parents used to smack his hand with a ruler every time they caught him drawing cartoons in the margins of his school books.
“I was a mediocre student,” says Pi San, whose family lived in a bleak copper-mining town in the hills of Shanxi Province.
“My parents thought my doodling doomed me to a life in the mine.”
Despite the punishment, Pi San kept drawing, even selling caricatures of Kung Fu heroes to his friends. Nearly two decades later, Pi San runs Hutoon, the animation company he founded in 2005.
Hutoon’s staff of 50 young designers fills most of a floor in “798,” a trendy district of art galleries, studios and cafes built on the remnants of a military electronics factory in northeastern Beijing.
The young men and women — most dressed in black, like their boss — huddle over banks of computers, the clicketyclack of keyboards resounding in the high-ceilinged industrial space.
When I first visited his fourth-floor studio in early March, Pi San seemed to move easily between his roles as entrepreneur and provocateur, a reflection of what he jokingly calls his multiple-personality disorder.
A few years ago, Hutoon produced an animated series for China Central Television — the government’s main propaganda arm — but Pi San chafed at the lack of creative freedom.
“Even CCTV’s cartoons are all about indoctrination, not entertainment,” he said.
Now he and his staff crank out animated Internet ads and videos for clients including rock stars and Fortune 500 firms like Motorola and Samsung.
In mid-April, I watched Pi San and his crew work on an episode of “Ms. Puff,” Hutoon’s most lucrative animation series.
Centered on a risqué but apolitical female character — censors notice Puff only when the strap on her camisole slips — the series is the first original animated content commissioned by Youku, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.
Two weeks earlier, Youku had been one of the first Web sites to delete his anti-censorship satire, “Crack Sunflower Seeds.”
This didn’t matter to Pi San.
Hutoon’s financial future depended on the success of “Ms. Puff.”
“You have to have a split personality to succeed in China,” he told me.
“With some animations, I make money. With others, I just make fun.”
That afternoon, though, the boss was preoccupied.
There was no news of Ai Weiwei, and Pi San’s thoughts about the future — that of his wife and their 7-year-old son — cycled between anger, fear and resignation.
Leaving Hutoon’s main studio, he led me to a back room filled with heaps of corrugated cardboard, which were the miniature sets used in the Kuang Kuang animations.
“This is where I come when my emotions are running high,” Pi San said, bending down to examine the eight-inch-tall room that loomed large in “Crack Sunflower Seeds.”
Nearby was a tiny school building featured in Pi San’s first Kuang Kuang satire in 2009, a mordant swipe at the education system called “Blow Up the School.”
An instant Internet sensation among Chinese youth, the animation generated a few million hits on its first day and so angered officials that they slapped him with a fine for “inappropriate content.”
As more irreverent Kuang Kuang videos appeared, Internet fan clubs formed in nearly every Chinese province, turning the bubbleheaded boy and his creator into minor cult figures.
None of Pi San’s work has evoked China’s social ills more provocatively than “Little Rabbit, Be Good,” made last January.
The four-minute “greeting card” to mark the Chinese Year of the Rabbit begins as a soothing bedtime story about bunny rabbits.
But as Kuang Kuang drifts off to sleep, the story morphs into a nightmare.
Ruled by tigers (the outgoing zodiac sign) who promise to “build a harmonious forest” — a pointed jab at Hu Jintao’s catchphrase — the rabbits suffer an endless series of abuses.
Babies die from drinking poisoned milk.
A protester fighting forced eviction gets crushed under a tiger’s car.
A reckless driver kills a rabbit in a hit-and-run and boasts about his high-level police protection.
The thinly disguised allegory is based on real-life events that sparked outrage on the Internet.
The ending, however, is sheer fantasy.
Instead of accepting their fate, the rabbits rise up in revolt, ripping their tiger overlords apart with their bare teeth in a catharsis of “South Park”-style violence.
The uprising ends with a warning: “Even rabbits bite when they are pushed.”
Pi San knew “Little Rabbit” might have crossed the line.
After consulting a fortuneteller — “I wanted to know if this would cause me trouble,” he said — he hedged his bets, uploading the video to a few small fan Web sites in the middle of the night.
“Little Rabbit” still received more than 70,000 hits within two hours, he says.
By the time censors deleted the versions proliferating across the Internet two days later, an estimated three to four million people had seen it.
Local media didn’t touch the story, but foreign journalists pressed him on the video’s political message.
His coy response: “I only made a fairy tale.”
Pi San’s dark satire landed just as popular revolutions fueled by social media in Tunisia and Egypt were beginning to topple dictators.
A few weeks later, Chinese bloggers who alluded online to the possibilities of a similar “jasmine” revolution in China would be detained.
“I was worried,” Pi San admitted.
“The line moves all the time, so we never know where we stand.”
Most Chinese Internet users don’t give the invisible line between acceptable satire and detainable offense a second thought.
They may know it exists, but their online activities — shopping, blogging, gaming, networking — remain safely within the confines of the Great Firewall.
But the boundary is of the utmost concern for a growing number of artists and activists.
“The government’s primary means of control is the fuzzy line,” says David Bandurski, a researcher at the China Media Project at Hong Kong University.
“No one ever knows exactly where the line is. The control apparatus is built on uncertainty and self-censorship, on creating this atmosphere of fear.”
Wen felt the line shift a year ago, after judges in Oslo awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo.
Few Chinese had ever heard of the man behind Charter 08, the human-rights declaration that, like Liu’s name, was banned inside the Great Firewall.
But the government was apoplectic.
Chinese officials smeared the “criminal” Liu in the press, pressured foreign countries to boycott the ceremony and blocked a raft of new words on the Internet, even “Norway” and “Nobel.”
When the banned words extended to the phrase “empty chair” — the most conspicuous sign of Liu’s absence at the Nobel ceremony — Wen hit on an idea.
If the words were not allowed, why not post photos of empty chairs as a tribute to Liu?
“Everyone has an empty chair,” Wen pleaded with his 40,000-plus followers on Twitter and Weibo.
“If we only watch, then one day [the empty chair] might appear by your family’s dining table as well.”
At his urging, bloggers posted dozens of seemingly innocuous pictures online, from an empty chair in a Van Gogh painting to a magazine ad for an Ikea lounger.
The censors eventually caught on to the joke, but not before Wen had turned a bit of microblog mischief into a human rights statement.
Three months later came the broad crackdown seeming to stem from Beijing’s paranoia about the possible domestic repercussions from the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
Wen was visiting Hong Kong when he received an e-mail warning from Chinese public-security agents: “Don’t come home. You’ll be arrested before you even see your wife and son.”
His was now the empty chair.
Wen decided to wait out the threats in Hong Kong, which is governed by different laws than the rest of China.
Wen’s absence may have spared him detention or prison, but now he was in limbo.
When I visited Wen in Hong Kong in April, he was living in a temporary apartment with a row of shirts drip-drying in the window.
Dinner consisted of a six-pack of beer followed by sausages fried up at 1 a.m.
At one point, he pulled out his BlackBerry.
“Gone, gone, gone,” Wen said, as he scrolled down a list of friends who had vanished, most likely into police custody.
Wen’s Twitter account was now swarming with the gadflies of the 50-Cent Party, which is the nickname for commentators who reportedly get paid 50 Chinese cents for every pro-government post.
He showed me the barrage of disparaging tweets he had received, along with two fake Twitter accounts the 50-Centers had set up to look like his.
More menacing were the text warnings from anonymous senders who seemed to know everything about him: his identification number, his travel itineraries, even details about his wife, his 10-year-old son and his parents.
Early in the evening, Wen scoffed at the intimidation attempts.
“The government has too much invested in the Internet financially to shut it down, so all it can do is resort to scare tactics,” he said.
But as the night wore on and the beer cans piled up, he confided: “I’m worried they might pick me up even here in Hong Kong. I’m even more frightened for my family.”
The following day, I joined Wen on an excursion to Lingnan University, along Hong Kong’s border with mainland China, where he was to give a talk about Internet activism.
On the train ride out, he spoke about his tenuous life in Hong Kong.
A local satellite television company had hired him to develop a show that would beam propaganda-free reports into China.
At night, Wen still tweeted prodigiously, launching jokes and spoofs over the Great Firewall, like a medieval catapulter outside the castle ramparts.
His wife and son would join him in Hong Kong months later, but Wen’s inability to return freely to his homeland left him depressed.
“I got angry the other day when a friend called me a liuwang, an exile,” he told me.
“It’s such a sad word. I never thought it would apply to me.”
At the university that evening, a table covered in red velvet had been set up on a small outdoor stage.
Wen was handed a microphone, but it proved unnecessary.
Fewer than a dozen students stopped to listen.
The train home skirted within a few hundred yards of the mainland Chinese border.
Hurtling through the darkness, Wen looked up from his BlackBerry and gazed out toward the border, the one line he may never cross again.
As a cocoon of heat and smog enveloped Beijing last June, Pi San began to wilt.
Two months had passed since Ai Weiwei was detained, and the artist’s fate and whereabouts were still unknown.
The police had also detained another close friend of Pi San’s, the rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, just days after a live performance in which the words “Free Ai Weiwei!” appeared on a giant screen above him.
The musician was released within a day, but Pi San was spooked.
He shelved an idea for another Kuang Kuang satire and began, for the first time, to consider seriously his friends’ advice to leave the country.
Then, on June 22, came a surprise: Ai reappeared at his home after 81 days in detention.
The artist provocateur, much thinner now, was uncharacteristically silent.
Though not formally charged with a crime, he was still under a form of house arrest “pending further investigation” into tax fraud.
Two days later, Pi San rode his electric bicycle to the blue door of Ai’s studio — “like a delivery boy,” he said.
High-spirited as ever, Ai marched back and forth across the small room, showing Pi San how he had lost so much weight.
The two friends talked for hours.
Given Ai’s house arrest, their plan to collaborate on a satirical animation would have to wait.
When Pi San was about to leave, Ai gave him a memento from his days in custody: a couple of stale biscuits, part of his “detention diet.”
Many artists and bloggers interpreted Ai’s release as merely a face-saving measure to help Premier Wen Jiabao avoid embarrassment when he traveled to Europe a few days later.
Dozens of other lawyers and Internet activists were still held in detention without formal charges, while the harassment of others continued unabated.
“I can’t say if anything has changed,” Pi San said, “but it was a big relief” to see Ai back in his home.
I dropped by Pi San’s studio again in July.
This time, I found his 7-year-old son, his head shaved for summer, sitting at his father’s wooden desk and playing a game on an iPad.
Pi San shuffled around in shorts and sandals, relaxed and happy.
His wife, a fellow painter whom he met at college, worked on accounting ledgers at a table nearby.
Business had never been better.
The first 10 episodes of “Ms. Puff” had pulled in an average of two million viewers, more than half of them women between 18 and 30.
The Youku series’s success raised ad rates, Hutoon’s largest source of revenue, and several other Web portals had approached Pi San with offers, eager to entice his young viewers to their sites too.
In his darkest moments, Pi San vowed never to make another satire again.
Shadowboxing with censors and security agents was too nerve-racking, and the risks to his family were too high.
Now, in the wake of Ai’s release, his fear was subsiding.
“I think the government still looks at what I do as just cartoons, child’s play,” he said, struggling to explain why other artists and bloggers were detained or forced into exile while he escaped unscathed.
It is a misconception Pi San is happy to embrace, even if, as he put it, “animated cartoons may be the most realistic way to capture the absurdity of our country.”
Not long ago, Pi San started gravitating, once again, to the back room filled with miniature cardboard sets. “I think I have a few moves left,” he said.
He has already mapped out three new Kuang Kuang episodes.
The theme of the next one?
Pi San flashed a little grin.
“It’s a game of hide-and-seek.”
By Mure Dickie in Tokyo Yoshihiko Noda: “We will appeal for China to abide by the rules”
Japan’s prime minister has called for closer co-operation among regional neighbours to persuade China’s increasingly assertive military to abide by common maritime rules.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Yoshihiko Noda, prime minister, said greater activity by China’s increasingly powerful forces in the East China and South China seas were creating “uncertainty” in Japan’s security environs.
Mr Noda’s comments reflect widespread concern in Japan about the approach taken by Chinese naval, air force and coastguard units in the East China Sea, where Tokyo and Beijing have overlapping territorial and economic claims.
There has also been repeated friction in the South China Sea between Beijing and other Asian nations including Vietnam, India and the Philippines.
“[We will] appeal in all kinds of meetings for China to abide by the rules,” Mr Noda said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“The important thing is to create an environment where China will make a positive contribution to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.”
The prime minister said he hoped there would be discussion of the issue at the East Asia Summit in Bali next month.
Mr Noda stressed that Japan wanted a “win-win” strategic partnership with China, but cited a “regrettable” lack of transparency in Beijing’s military development.
Officials in Tokyo have privately expressed concern about a growing number of incidents involving Chinese military and coast guard units in the East China Sea.
Japan said this month that its air force had scrambled fighters to intercept Chinese aircraft approaching its airspace more than three times as often between April and September period as during the same period in 2010.
More assertive Chinese activity has also raised hackles in nations neighbouring the South China Sea, which Beijing claims in its entirety.
Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines all claim parts of the sea.
Chinese vessels have tangled several times with Vietnamese ships this year, while in August, India spoke out in defence of freedom of navigation after a Chinese naval vessel challenged an Indian warship travelling between two Vietnamese ports.
While Japan has no territorial claims in the South China Sea, it sees it as a vital trading route and Mr Noda said Tokyo shared the worries of nations in the area.
“Because we have common concerns, we should do a good job of setting rules, with China involved in the discussions,” the prime minister said.
“Pushing for the rules to be followed should be something done in cooperation with all the countries in the area.”
However, Beijing’s leaders are likely to bristle at the idea of Japan taking a closer interest in South China Sea issues.
Human rights groups are demanding that Relativity Media stop shooting its new Chinese co-production "21 and Over," and will urge moviegoers to boycott the film, TheWrap has learned.
Human Rights Watch, a leading activist group, told TheWrap on Sunday that Relativity's relationship with Linyi, and specifically the local government's party secretary, is unacceptable.
“Picking Linyi as a film location is probably not a good idea, but signing a deal with a person who is directly responsible for one of most egregious and cruel abuses of a human rights defender in China is really beyond the pale,” said Nicholas Becquelin, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Asian division.
The film, the first under Relativity's new Chinese co-production venture, has shot a scene in Linyi, located in China's Shangdong province.
Linyi is home to Chen Guangcheng, a prominent civil rights activist who has been detained since 2005.
It is also home to local party secretary Zhang Shajun, the government official who is cited as Relativity's partner and who is also associated with the repression of Chen.
Relativity in August announced a groundbreaking relationship with China, cofinancing and coproducing movies.
The protest by human rights groups underscored the complications that may result from close business relationships with the Chinese government.
Relativity has declined to comment on the matter.
However, sources have confirmed that the production in the province has ended, so it remains to be seen what action Human Rights Watch can take.
Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer, has been subject to threats, beatings and other hostile acts, as have his relatives, his supporters, his lawyers and other connections.
Chinese activists, who have renewed their attention on Chen of late, have taken umbrage with Relativity not just because it entered a relationship with the government of Linyi, but because it made of point of lauding the city.
In a press release issued Oct. 27, Relativity quoted the party secretary of Linyi Zhang praising Relativity and "his good friend" CEO Ryan Kavanaugh.
The release said, “We are very much looking forward to shooting in China, especially in a place as amazing as Linyi.”
Becquelin said the conclusion of the production is irrelevant to the greater issue of Relativity’s “disturbing” relationship with Linyi.
“The press release makes clear that this is not solely a matter of shooting one day,” Becquelin said.
“It presents it as building a partnership with the Linyi government and an investment. Our concern is business association with the Linyi government, not a particular shoot.”
Human Rights Watch is not the only group getting involved. Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, wrote on the group's website that, "It is unconscionable for Relativity Media to make this film in Linyi. While Relativity Media is creating a 'wild epic misadventure,' about beer-drinking and debauchery, Chen Guangcheng is suffering unspeakable torment -- beaten, tortured, denied medical treatment and being slowly starved to death -- right under their noses.”
Bloggers on Chinese micro-blogging service Sina Weibo have also written about the subject, circulating contact information for Relativity executives. Charlie Custer, the editor-in-chief of ChinaGeeks, “a website about China,” posed a letter he penned to Relativity, which ended as follows:
“Because maybe it’s just my sense of humor, but holding an innocent blind man and his family in their house, beating and robbing well-intentioned net users trying to visit him, and then lying about it to the world does not sound like a great premise for a hilarious buddy comedy. And every day you’re in Linyi shooting '21 and Over,' you’re funding that, too, whether you want to be or not."
Relativity responded to Custer asking him to attribute them with a no comment.
It is unclear what any of these groups will ask for now that production has ended.
But it likely won't stop them from trying to stir the same kind of public sentiment that occurred after Hilary Swank and Jean Claude Van Damme attended the Oct. 5 birthday party of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
Chen’s case has been well-reported in the Western media, and he has become one of the most famous activists in all of China after the likes of Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and renowned artist Ai Weiwei.
Originally an advocate for the blind and disabled, Chen began to investigate the extreme tactics used to enforce China’s “one child policy,” including forced abortions and sterilizations.
As a result of his efforts to raise awareness of the issue, he was first placed under house arrest in 2005. Since then, he served four years in prison and was then placed under house arrest yet again.
This house arrest entails constant surveillance of both his activities and those of his close relatives.
Those who have attempted to visit Chen have been the victim of beatings and other forms of repression, as have lawyers attempting to represent him, Becquelin said.
Though Relativity may have been unaware of the situation in Linyi, this is indicative of the trouble Hollywood studios face in expanding into China.
The country is fertile ground for film productions thanks to its low production costs, varied tableaus and lax regulatory policies.
In fact, the government’s control over society facilitates productions, because it can prevent labor unrest and secure locations without risk of legal action.
Relativity announced its entrance into the Chinese film market back in August when it struck a deal with SkylLand Film and Television Cultural Development LTD, a China-based entertainment production company.
That same month, Chinese media conglomerate DMG put together a $300 million fillm fund to co-finance tentpoles for studios.
By DINNY MCMAHON And AARON BACK
BEIJING—Chinese and European officials sought to play down expectations about when and how China may deploy its vast financial resources to help bail out indebted countries in Europe. Klaus Regling, chief executive of Europe's rescue fund, in Beijing Friday.
A Chinese Vice Finance Minister said China must first see the details of a new European bailout fund before making any commitments. "We of course must wait until its structure is extremely clear," Zhu Guangyao told a press briefing.
"And moreover, this investment must be decided on after serious, technical discussions."
Klaus Regling, the chief executive of the European Financial Stability Facility, flew into Beijing on Friday on the first stop of a tour around Asia to drum up support for Europe.
He told reporters he doesn't expect "any precise outcome" from his visit to China and said "it's too early to say what kind of amounts might be envisioned."
Mr. Regling said his trip to Asia was about consulting with investors over the best way to structure the bailout.
European leaders on Thursday agreed to leverage the EFSF and increase its firepower through two mechanisms: a special fund and an insurance scheme for sovereign bonds.
Details on the new fund are scant, but European leaders are looking to partly fund the expansion with investments from cash-rich emerging economies such as China.
Mr. Zhu also said that more details are also needed on the insurance scheme.
"How much is this insurance? That's still not clear," he said.
Beijing has previously expressed a willingness to help Europe, albeit through the International Monetary Fund.
With China's massive foreign-exchange reserves of $3.2 trillion, few other countries have the financial firepower to make a significant contribution.
Analysts say that any new support for Europe by China will be conditional.
It will expect European economies to push ahead with tough domestic reforms and to be more sympathetic to Chinese interests.
There is also public debate in China about whether bailing out Europe is the proper use for China's reserves.
Mr. Regling dismissed suggestions that European leaders will be forced to offer concessions to China in return for investment.
"I am not here to discuss concessions," he said, noting that China already buys EFSF bonds and gets no special considerations.
Jin Liqun, chairman of sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp., made clear in London last month that CIC wouldn't offer handouts.
"The $3 trillion in reserves are the fruits of the hard work of the Chinese people," he said.
"We're willing to work with those European countries in distress for a better solution. But... we have to be accountable to the people."
CIC felt the wrath of public opinion after it stepped in to shore up Morgan Stanley and U.S. financial firm Blackstone Group LP during the global financial crisis, losing heavily as shares in both companies continued to sink.
"CIC came in and bailed out the U.S. banks in 2007 and got burnt," said Ashby Monk, co-director of the Oxford SWF Project, which tracks and researches sovereign wealth funds.
"China has a domestic constituency to worry about and can't be seen to be wasting money."
Still, if China decides to contribute to a bailout it's likely to be the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and not Mr. Jin's fund providing the cash.
Although CIC has more than $400 billion in assets under management, its funds are almost fully invested and it has been waiting for a capital injection for almost two years.
"European leaders should turn policy commitments into real action," said Mr. Zhu.
EU leaders should "take serious action to solve questions the market needs".
Mr. Zhu didn't go into details.
But last month CIC's Mr. Jin said "there are some things governments have to do to deserve the sincere support of the rest of the world," listing reining in spending, dismantling the welfare state, and reforming "sloth inducing" labor laws.
China clearly has an interest in supporting the economy of its biggest trading partner.
But with Europe coming cap in hand, analysts say that Beijing may feel it's entitled to more than just a slightly higher return on its capital.
Both SAFE and CIC have gone to great lengths to avoid alarming Western governments by presenting themselves as purely financial investors with no political agenda.
"The West sort of imposed [rules] on countries with sovereign wealth, like China, to force them to invest along commercial and not political lines," said Mr. Monk.
"It's ironic then that Europe may now be side-stepping that principle," he said.
Beijing has a long list of gripes with Europe including the EU's unwillingness to lift an embargo on selling arms to China, its refusal to treat China the same way as other major economies in trade disputes, the difficulties Chinese firms often encounter when trying to invest in Europe, and EU pressure to get China to appreciate the yuan more rapidly.
Analysts say that given the complexity of decision-making in the EU, China might struggle to get explicit concessions on any of these points if it decides to provide Europe with the cash it needs in a timely manner. Mr. Regling said there had been no discussion of concessions.
Many analysts say China is unlikely to be a white knight for Europe.
A parade of politicians from struggling European economies have gone to China over the past several years looking for support.
Beijing's response has typically been to say that it will continue buying European bonds, but it hasn't done so on any significant scale.
"We could see China investing, but it won't be a game changer for Europe," said Rachel Ziemba, a senior analyst at Roubini Global Economics.
"Though some capital might come from China, most will need to come from within Europe."
Exiled spiritual leader calls on Beijing to halt repressive policies that have led to spate of recent self-immolation protests
By David Batty Dalai Lama says China's treatment of Tibetans is 'illogical'.
The Dalai Lama has blamed China's "ruthless and illogical" policy towards Tibet for the recent deaths of monks who set themselves on fire in protest against Beijing's rule.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader also called on the Chinese government to change its repressive policies in Tibet, which include a crackdown on monasteries and the Tibetan language.
"For their own interest, not just the interest for certain sort of problem here and there, but for the whole country's sort of future, they have to act [with a] realistic sort of policy," said the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
At least nine Tibetan clerics or former clerics have self-immolated in south-western China over seven months in protest against Chinese rule.
Five of them have died of their injuries.
Earlier this month a nun became the most recent casualty and the first woman to die.
The Tibetan government-in-exile, which has accused China of an official policy of cracking down on religious institutions, called for the international community to urge Beijing to open a dialogue on its policies in Tibet and traditionally Tibetan regions of western China.
"Actually, the local leader must look what's the real causes of death," the Dalai Lama told reporters in Tokyo during his visit to victims of the tsunami that stuck Japan in March.
"It's their own sort of wrong policy, ruthless policy, illogical policy."
Beijing accuses the Dalai Lama and his supporters of encouraging the immolations.
The practice was unknown among clerics until two years ago, when one monk burnt himself to death in Sichuan province's Aba county, the predominantly Tibetan area in which most of the deaths have taken place.
Amnesty International has said the spate of self-immolations "indicates a new level of desperation" on the part of Tibetans.
Congressional investigators say two Earth observation satellites were hacked four times in recent years and the Chinese military is responsible.
By Elizabeth Montalbano
China's military was responsible for hacking two U.S. satellites on four separate occasions several years ago, activity that could pose major threats to these types of operations if more serious intrusions occur, according to a Congressional report.
Two satellites -- one controlled by NASA and the other by the space agency and the U.S. Geological Survey -- experienced interference several times between October 2007 and October 2008, according to a draft report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The report is scheduled to be available publicly next month.
Specifically, Landsat-7 -- an Earth observation satellite managed by both parties -- experienced 12 or more minutes of interference on Oct. 20, 2007.
The incident was only discovered when the same satellite had a similar disruption again on July 23, 2008, according to the draft report.
Terra EOS, another Earth observation satellite managed solely by NASA, experienced two or more minutes of interference on June 20,2008, and then nine or more minutes of interference again on Oct. 22, 2008.
Hackers gained access to the satellites through Svalbard Satellite Station, a ground control station in Spitsbergen, Norway.
While these incidents did not cause any major harm or damage, this type of intrusion could pose a major threat to a satellite with "more sensitive functions," according to the draft report.
"For example, access to a satellite's controls could allow an attacker to damage or destroy the satellite," according to the report.
"The attacker could also deny or degrade as well as forge or otherwise manipulate the satellite's transmission."
If a hacker gained a "high level of access," it also could access information or imagery from the satellite's sensors, or manipulate other terrestrial or space-based networks used by the satellite, according to the report.
A spokesperson said the commission's draft report could be modified before the final report is made available.
The incidents mentioned in the report are not the first time the commission has brought to light China's hacking of U.S. government operations.
A report by the commission released in November revealed an incident on April 8, 2010, when China Telecom diverted U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic through servers in China.
U.S. government activity affected in that incident included traffic going to and from U.S. .gov and .mil sites, including sites for the Senate, the four main armed services branches, the office of the Secretary of Defense, NASA, the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A woman looks at an art installation named ''Forever Bicycles'' by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei during a media preview of the ''Ai Weiwei Absent'' exhibition in Taipei October 28, 2011.
TAIPEI (Reuters) -- A museum in Taiwan will host dissident artist Ai Weiwei's first major exhibition in the overseas Chinese world from Saturday in a move that could upset Beijing.
Ai, famed for his work on the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing and whose 81-day detention this year caused an international outcry, remains under close watch in China.
He was released in late June after he was taken from the Beijing airport and held in two secret locations.
Aptly titled "Absent" due to China's ban on Ai traveling, the three-month exhibit at Taipei's Fine Arts Museum will have 21 works on show, including a photograph of a person's arm making an obscene gesture in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
"The title 'Absent' is, I think, an interesting reflection on this exhibition, on Taiwan, on his personal situation, his art and his contribution to the field," said Chang Fang-wei, acting director of the museum's exhibition department.
China and Taiwan have been ruled separately since defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island at the end of a civil war with the Communists in 1949, and China has never renounced the use of force to reunify the two.
But while China has seen little political liberalization in the last few decades, Taiwan has become proudly democratic, thumbing its nose at many of the restrictions mainland Chinese take for granted, such as pervasive censorship.
Also on show is a surveillance camera carved by Ai out of marble.
Ai told Reuters he was happy to have a chance to exhibit in Taiwan, even if he could not be there.
"This is the first time I'm having an exhibition of my art works in the wider Chinese world. I'm really happy that it can be exhibited in Taiwan, because recently it has not possible to have an exhibition in my own place of residence," he said by telephone.
"I have been notified that I won't be allowed to go -- that was the outcome of my application -- so right now I cannot attend. But my family members will attend," Ai added, without elaborating.
Ai's detention ignited an outcry from many Western governments about China's tightening grip on dissent that started in February, when dozens of rights activists and dissidents were detained and arrested.
The artist was the most internationally well-known of those detained, and his family has repeatedly said he was targeted by authorities for his outspoken criticism of censorship and Communist Party controls.
"Perhaps for Chinese viewers Taiwan is the only place to see an Ai Weiwei exhibition," said Qiao Yang, 40, a tourist from Shanghai who came to Taiwan specifically for the exhibition.
"In China, we have heard of this person but could rarely see his works."
Ai Weiwei, 'Williamsburg, Brooklyn,' 1983, inkjet on Fantac Innova ultra smooth gloss, printed on 20" X 24" paper, courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Chambers Fine Art. A self-portrait of the then-26-year-old artist in New York City.
Ai Weiwei photographed at J+R Music World in New York City
On the afternoon of April 3, Swiss dealer Urs Meile called the Beijing home and studio of Ai Weiwei, one of China's top contemporary artists who is best known for helping design the "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium three years ago.
Right away, Meile could tell something was wrong.
He and the artist have been friends for years and talk once a week, but this time Ai wouldn't say much at all and there was a strange strain in his voice.
"I'm flying to Hong Kong tonight," Ai told him, before mumbling, "It's so crazy, so crazy here."
The next morning, Meile got a frantic call from collector Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China who had planned to meet the artist upon arrival.
"You'll never believe it," Sigg told the dealer.
"Weiwei got arrested."
Nothing has shaken up the art world this year like the arrest and nearly three-month detention of Ai Weiwei (pronounced "Eye Way-Way"), the 54-year-old son of a poet whose irreverent photographs and conceptual sculptures—often made from porcelain, tea or temple wood—have earned him a coveted spot among China's pivotal, post-Mao generation of artists.
Major museums like New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Tate Modern collect Ai's work, and his pieces have sold at auction for as much as $657,000.
This year Ai pulled off something even rarer: He became more important than his art, thrust by his arrest into a global diplomatic firestorm few major artists have ever experienced.
After police detained him at the Beijing airport, information about his whereabouts and alleged misconduct were kept secret for weeks, stoking fears in the human-rights community that he had been jailed for his habit of openly criticizing his Communist government. (Authorities shut down Ai's popular blog two years earlier, ostensibly for similar reasons.)
Repression has only made him more famous.
Within days of his disappearance, artists and human-rights advocates were protesting outside Chinese embassies around the world.
The Tate Modern painted "Release Ai Weiwei" on the exterior of its building, and Anish Kapoor canceled a planned exhibit at Beijing's National Museum of China in a gesture of solidarity.
By the time Chinese authorities said they were investigating Ai for alleged tax evasion, over 140,000 people had signed Change.org's online petition seeking his release. Ai Weiwei, 'Coloured Vases,' 2010, 31 Han Dynasty vases and industrial paint, dimensions variable, unique edition, courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. FUN WITH URNS | The artist has been subverting everyday objects since early in his career. In 2010 he splashed ancient vases with industrial paint.
In a season when democratic uprisings swept from Syria to Sudan, here was an artist from another tightly controlled nation-state who seemed to stand for something greater than his asking prices, who turned everything he touched into a bid for self-expression, including the Internet.
To his more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, he was Teacher Ai, Uncle Ai—the "fat guy" with the trickster grin and Santa Claus paunch who could be counted upon to post truth-to-power tirades all day long.
On January 10, he wrote: "In an environment without public platform or protection for associations, the individual is the most powerful and most responsible."
On March 30, four days before his arrest, he wrote: "You have to act or the danger becomes stronger."
On June 22, Ai was released from his detention on the condition he pay roughly $2 million in allegedly owed back taxes.
He was also ordered not to travel, post to Twitter or talk to the media for a year.
He has already tested these waters a few times, notably publishing an angry editorial in Newsweek over the summer in which he described Beijing as a "constant nightmare."
Local authorities later made him sign a tougher gag order. Ai Weiwei, 'Kui Hua 2,' 2009, porcelain, 1.000 kg, dimensions vary with installation, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. For "Kui Hua 2" (2009), he hand-painted porcelain "seeds."
What happens when you become the modern-day, artistic equivalent of that young man who once stood before the tanks of Tiananmen Square?
For one thing, people take a closer look at your art.
And what the collectors and curiosity-seekers are discovering now is how remarkably different Ai's art is compared with that of his peers in Asia, or anywhere else.
Two decades ago, China's avant-garde was mainly painting neo-Pop portraits of the Chairman.
Ai spent those same years scavenging Beijing's back alleys and antique shops for Silk Road materials he could transfigure into art, like Marcel Duchamp once did with a urinal or Andy Warhol did with a soup can.
In one seminal trio of photographs from 1995, "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," Ai stands before a camera, eyes defiant, as he lets the urn slip through his fingers to shatter at his feet. (The Hans ruled when the Romans did.)
He has also slathered Stone Age vessels in soda-pop slogans and garish house paints, the visual embodiment of an ancient culture fumbling with its changing values.
"His attitude, more than any other work, makes him unique," says Roxana Marcoci, MoMA's photography curator.
"He's not only one of the strongest artists to come out of China—he's one of the world's best cultural thinkers."
His stay in jail and the ongoing police monitoring are taking a toll, though, friends say.
During his detention, guards stood inches away from him around the clock, even as he showered and slept. He was interrogated about his dissident activities at least 50 times, friends add.
Even now, officers in black uniforms visit his home daily, often lingering for hours.
When New York dealer Mary Boone visited in late summer, she said Ai had to call authorities whenever he wanted to step out.
Surveillance cameras remain trained on his front door.
"He still teases me, but he's quieter now," Boone says of the artist.
Moving forward, Belgian artist and longtime friend Wim Delvoye says Ai must find some way to create pieces that won't be overshadowed by Kafkaesque circumstances.
"It must be paralyzing," he says.
"What kind of work can you do with the entire world watching?"
On the other hand, Meile, the dealer who called him moments before his arrest, says the artist has spent over three decades embedding elements of his storied past into his artworks.
"His work is about China, but it's also about him—sometimes you just have to look for his clues."
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, a child of revolution and exile.
His thin, quick-witted father, Ai Qing, had studied art in Paris in the 1930s but had switched to poetry in the patriotic upsurge surrounding Mao Zedong's founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Ai Qing's poems earned him fame but also suspicion, and in 1958 he was tacitly accused of championing free speech, an anti-revolutionary offense.
Ai Weiwei, 'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,' 1995, edition of three, black-and-white print, 3 X 180 X 162 CM, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. In 1995, he photographed himself dropping a Han Dynasty urn.
His sentence: Sixteen years of cleaning public toilets for a village of 200 people in the arid, northwestern province of Xinjiang near the Russian border.
Ai Qing was nearly 60 years old at the time.
His second wife, Gao Ying, joined him with their young son, and for years Ai Weiwei grew up watching his father seethe over the situation.
"Weiwei heard all his father's stories, and his disdain for the Party apparatus comes out of that complex history," says Christopher Phillips, a curator at New York's International Center of Photography who has known the artist for a decade.
Yet it was through his father that Ai also learned about Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh and a slew of Western artists whose works were never discussed during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, when Mao sought to purge the country of any elitist or foreign influences.
By the time Ai graduated high school, his father had been forgiven and recalled to Beijing.
Ai hung out in train stations and the local zoo, sketching and painting whatever he saw.
He also befriended a small group of young artists who began hanging their Cubist-style paintings on a fence near the Forbidden City complex.
They dubbed it the Democratic Wall.
On September 27, 1979, he and this loose collective known as the Stars Group (as opposed to Mao, China's late "Sun") mounted what became the country's first organized show of experimental art.
Authorities shut it down the following day. Composed of 17 stools from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), 167 X 180 X 157 CM, private collection, courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. THE NATURE OF THINGS | "Grapes" (2008)
Two years later, frustrated and ambitious, Ai, now 24, quit art school and moved to New York with $30 in his pocket.
He couldn't speak a word of English.
In a later interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, he said he told his classmates, "Maybe 10 years later, when I come back, you'll see another Picasso!"
This past summer, New York's Asia Society exhibited some of the 10,000 photos he took to document the heady decade that followed his move.
Ai initially took on housekeeping and carpentry jobs to afford his East Village apartment, which became a way station for young Chinese expats like "Farewell My Concubine" filmmaker Chen Kaige and artist Xu Bing, now vice president of China's Central Academy of Fine Arts.
His snapshots of friends commingle with images of tenant protests in Tompkins Square Park, Greenwich Village drag queens and surreptitious shots of museum artworks that Ai came to idolize, like Warhol's "Self-Portrait."
At some point during these years Ai's camera became his de facto sketchbook, says Stephanie Tung, a former junior curator at Beijing's Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, which originated the Asia Society show.
"Through his photos, we see how he sees the world," she says. Ai Weiwei, 'Coca Cola,' 1994, Han Dynasty urn (206 B.C.???8 A.D.), paint, Sigg Collection. For "Coca Cola" (1994), the artist emblazoned a Han Dynasty urn with a familiar logo.
In 1988, a young dealer, Ethan Cohen, gave Ai his first solo show in New York.
What Ai produced amounted to an elegant mix of everyday objects whose functions had been reworked into the absurd: a shovel handle attached to the neck of a violin, a pair of men's shoes cut in half, with their front halves reattached back to back.
Jerome Cohen, the dealer's father and a law professor at New York University, said he paid $500 for a coat hanger that Ai had bent into the profile of Duchamp.
"It's still hanging in my living room."
Looking back, Ai's political consciousness may have been honed in New York, but he didn't really find his artistic vein until after he moved back to Beijing in 1993 upon learning that his father was ill.
By then a group of younger artists like Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan were hanging out on the city's fringes and doing edgy art performances—running naked atop the Great Wall, say, or sitting naked in a public restroom, coated in fish guts and flies.
Ai and his photographer pal RongRong chronicled it all in a trio of 'zine-like books they published over several years.
Only a handful of collectors, like the Swiss ambassador, Uli Sigg, paid any attention.
In 1997, Sigg took Meile, the Swiss dealer, to meet several of these artists, including Ai.
Meile says he remembers walking down a narrow alley, or hutong, into a house Ai shared with his mother. His first thought upon looking around was, "Where's the art?"
In many of the other artists' homes and studios, he'd seen leaning piles of paintings whose technique blended Soviet Realism with Pop, but Ai had nothing to show for himself except a small, dim bedroom and a bookshelf containing rows of muddy-colored pottery.
Ai Weiwei, "Self-Portrait," 1987, ink jet on Fantac Innova Ultra Smooth gloss, printed on 20" X 24" paper, courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Chambers Fine Art.
A self-portrait (1987) from the artist's early years in New York City's East Village.
"Then he started talking," Meile says of the artist, "and I realized he was the only Chinese artist I'd met who could put the country's own traditions up against everything that had happened in the modern art world."
Ai told him he was fascinated by objects China seemed eager to shunt aside in the name of modernization, including the Ming-era chairs, tables and latticed shutters that went into the trash heap whenever a new luxury high-rise went up.
With these he began playing the misfit carpenter, reconfiguring 400-year-old tables into perpendicular shapes so they could appear to creep up walls or splaying their legs so they seemed to crouch like crabs. The pots and porcelain cups he amassed often ended up in shards; the glistening pearls he gathered into a pair of coffee-table-size bowls were brownish-yellow.
Rejects, all. (In another ironic riff, he named his architectural atelier FAKE Design.)
Philip Tinari, an art historian and incoming director of Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, once joined Ai to troll for materials in Jingdezhen, a city southwest of Shanghai renowned for its porcelain industry.
Along the roads, they spotted several dealers hawking refrigerator-size pieces of local trees, specifically their stumps and root systems.
Craftsmen often turn these gnarled masses into kitschy restaurant decor by carving their stumps into the shape of a peacock's head with the roots trailing out like feathers.
But Ai pounced on the goods like he was "saving" historic artifacts, Tinari says.
Months later, Ai arranged them like some "weird forest" in a German museum survey of his work.
Porcelain, 115 X 115 X 115 cm, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTIFICATION | "Porcelain Cube" (2009)
"China is his ready-made," Tinari says.
"The country has all these superskilled workers who spend their lives making reproductions of the same old art. What they need is an artist like Weiwei to come in and tweak."
His "Sunflower Seeds" project last fall involved hiring 1,600 workers in Jingdezhen to create and hand-paint 100 million life-size porcelain "seeds," which he scattered like a rocky shore across the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. (Visitors were allowed to walk on the piece until concerns were raised about the potential dangers of breathing in the dust churned up by the activity.)
Three years before that, he turned his own countrymen into a piece of performance art when he paid to send 1,001 Chinese participants, many hailing from rural provinces, to an art exhibition called "Documenta" in Kassel, Germany, the historic home of the Brothers Grimm.
He titled the project "Fairytale." Late Ming or early Qing Dynasty (ca. 1650), 70 X 186 X 115 cm, private collection, courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. "Table with Two Legs" (2005)
Delvoye, the Belgian artist, went to Kassel as well and marveled at how many Germans treated Ai like a celebrity, spotting him on the street and calling out "Weiwei!"
Delvoye expected Ai to revel in the attention, but whenever the pair hung out, he said their conversations more often steered toward societal and political problems Ai still perceived back home: "His anger is always bigger than his pleasure at being famous."
In the spring of 2008, a devastating earthquake in Sichuan in central China further ratcheted up Ai's political activism.
The disaster killed an estimated 70,000 people and left over 4 million without homes, according to official figures.
Yet the one thing Ai wanted to know—a reckoning of the children who died inside earthquake-stricken public schools—wasn't immediately forthcoming.
So, he marshaled the readers of his blog to pitch in and canvass the affected areas.
Eventually, he posted the names of more than 5,400 children; the government later divulged its own, slightly bigger tally.
Ai also leveraged these activities to make artworks—he papered the front wall of Munich's Haus der Kunst museum in tiny backpacks two years ago—but his stature within China's artistic elite seems to have suffered as a result.
Melissa Chiu, the Asia Society's director, says some began to question whether his political activism mattered more to him than his artistic practice.
"Those who knew him for a long time still appreciated the work, but some felt like he was sucking all the oxygen from the room," she adds. Ai amid "Rooted Upon" (2009), an installation of 100 pieces of trees
In 2009, Tinari turned up at a picnic Ai threw to protest Internet censorship and was surprised to find that he was one of the only art-world characters there; the rest of the crowd was human-rights lawyers and dissidents.
From there on out, events seemed to snowball: Ai's blog was shut down in May of that year; surveillance cameras turned up outside his studio door that June; he was struck on the head by police during an August trip to support a dissident on trial in Chengdu and had to have emergency surgery a few weeks later because the injury led to internal bleeding in his brain.
By the following November, Ai learned that his newly built studio and artist's residence in Shanghai would, for complicated development reasons, be torn down.
Ai's response?
He threw another party, this time serving up river crabs for roughly 100 people at the ill-fated studio. (River crabs are a Chinese euphemism for censorship.)
Franklin Sirmans, who heads the contemporary-art department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was among the partygoers who tried to make the best of the situation, but Ai's absence—he was forbidden to travel to Shanghai to play host—put a damper on the event.
"It felt really odd that he wasn't there," Sirmans says.
The studio was razed two months later.
When word spread a few months later that Ai had been detained by police, Chiu from the Asia Society says she wasn't exactly surprised.
She even says she had "mixed feelings" about his arrest in large part because she worried his activism would "overwhelm his art." Artists Cornelia Parker and Anish Kapoor and newspaper editor Nancy Durrant deliver a petition in May 2011 calling for Ai's release.
In fact, it all served to pique collectors' curiosity, especially during the weeks of his disappearance.
Ai's gallery in London, Lisson, went ahead with a long-planned show of his work in May and 6,000 people stopped in, triple the usual traffic, says curatorial director Greg Hilty.
The gallery said it even set a moratorium on sales of his work until after his release, in part because people were offering up such wildly varied amounts for pieces.
Over in Lucerne, Meile said strangers were emailing him as well, some with messages that read, "Please forward us a work by Ai Weiwei."
He didn't.
When the artist emerged from his detainment after 81 days, he was thinner but "not broken," Meile says. These days, Ai is trying to refocus his attention on pieces he already had in the works, like a set of ceramic river crabs.
He's also tracking his suite of bronze zodiac heads, his first major public sculptures.
The animal heads toured New York during his detainment; they're currently at the Taipei Museum of Art. And on August 5, he resurfaced suddenly on Twitter, posting, "What's up?"
Days later, a follower asked him arguably the biggest burning question in Chinese art today, specifically whether people there should "deal with everything by describing the actual facts or just live our lives satirically?"
His reply: "Either confront things clearly or leave quietly."
Larry Warsh, a major New York collector of Ai's work, who helped sponsor the zodiac sculptures, says he can't imagine Ai ever resettling anywhere else.
"In spite of everything, China is important to him," Warsh says.
"He wants it to change—and he wants to be the catalyst."
China’s 'netizens’ skip censorship and brave beatings to expose the torment of a blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng.
By Peter Foster Chen Guangcheng with his wife and child in 2005
The policeman’s hand slapped the woman’s face with an audible crack.
Standing only five feet tall in her trainers, barely the height of her assailant’s epaulettes, she took the blow without a cry.
This scene was witnessed by The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday in a small police station near a village in Shandong province, north-east China, that has become a magnet for activists of all stripes protesting against a dark corner of the Chinese state that operates beyond the law.
The woman who took the slap, 30-year-old Wang Xuezhen, is one of a stream of people who have marshalled themselves over the internet and travelled to Dongshigu village to support a man they believe is being persecuted, a blind lawyer named Chen Guangcheng.
Stumbling out of the police station and holding her stinging face, Miss Wang bitterly observed a truth about contemporary China: the country’s lawlessness begins with the law itself.
Then she turned on her mobile phone and asked a friend to post a message on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, relaying the news of the assault to the world.
Almost immediately, her supporters began passing on the message and posting their own messages of support.
By the evening the slap had been picked up by an Asian television channel.
"These animals, they lack all humanity, I hate them so much. I wish I could go and join your fight!” wrote one of her followers.
The power and speed of China’s social networks has alarmed the government, which announced plans on Wednesday to police the buzz of messages more tightly, in the name of maintaining what it calls “social stability”.
In the two years since it was launched, the Weibo platform has attracted more than 200 million Chinese, creating a chorus of commentary on the failings of an authoritarian state that often questions and contradicts the output of the tightly-controlled state media.
Even though the Weibo microblogs are carefully policed, with censors blocking and deleting content deemed seditious, the controls are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outpourings by the so-called “netizens” – a “Chinglish” coinage for online activists and contributors.
“Operation Free Chen Guangcheng” is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what frightens the Communist Party.
It began earlier this year when activists began suggesting online that people should go as “tourists” to visit the 39-year-old blind lawyer, who has been kept under illegal house arrest for more than a year.
What started as a trickle of visitors has become a steady flow, with more than 30 people arriving at the village last weekend alone, despite the almost certain prospect of being greeted by violence.
Mr Chen upset local Communist Party officials by exposing a gruesome programme of forced abortions and sterilisations as part of China’s one-child policy.
He has already served four years in prison on the trumped-up charge of “blocking the traffic”.
Since his release in September last year, he and his family have been locked into their home with steel shutters covering the windows.
To make sure no visitors could reach him, his phones and internet lines were cut and a 200-strong army of thugs was hired – by whom no one is quite sure – to patrol the perimeters of his village night and day.
Several of the activists trying to visit him have been beaten, but the flow of people has not stopped, with one activist saying that they are “like mosquitoes settling on the hide of an elephant”.
“It is like a relay race, if the 'netizens’ don’t keep coming then they will have won, they will have achieved their aims,” says Guo Feng, a 35-year-old self-employed man who had come from Luoyang in Henan province after reading about Mr Chen’s plight online.
Through the social networks, all sorts of people have been drawn to Dongshigu; a strange mixture of brave activists, principled citizen journalists and a few thrill-seekers.
One, a young man, who prefers not to be interviewed because he is “politically connected”, is driving an Audi saloon and wears designer jeans and visibly relishes the daily game of cat-and-mouse with the local secret police.
He is part of a five-man team that recently infiltrated the fringes of the village at night to set off a cannonade of fireworks into the night sky, sending a message “to tell Blind Chen the people care”.
He works with another “netizen” from Changchun who cannot be named.
A video of the fireworks was posted online, attracting 6,000 hits before it was taken down by the internet censors.
Ironically, Miss Wang and two others had paid a visit to the local police station to ask for protection from the thugs who – just like the officer who struck her and removed the Velcro patch with his police number on – operate above the law, but apparently with its tacit support.
Their request was met with scorn.
“You are citizens of China, of course you are free to visit the village,” said the senior officer, who would not give his name, but did wear his ID number, 076970.
“If there are problems we will protect you, but we cannot protect you against imaginary difficulties.”
It was then that Miss Wang started to argue, retorting that the last time she came to Dongshigu, on September 21, a bag was put over her head before she was beaten and robbed and yet the police offered her no protection and refused to investigate her case.
After firing a particularly strong insult at the officer, that slap suddenly rang out.
But what would be grounds for an assault charge in Britain was brushed off as just another unavoidable knock.
Earlier, tailed by a black saloon car that had also watched her eat lunch, Miss Wang had stopped to buy a hoard of novelty pens, pencils and pencil-sharpeners for Mr Chen’s six-year-old daughter Chen Kesi, who has only this month been released from her father’s “prison” and allowed to go to school.
Online, people had donated RMB5,000 (nearly £500) for the little girl, who has had thugs trail her to school on a regular basis.
“This is the way that the common people show their feelings for what is happening to Chen,” said Miss Wang.
At the gates to the local primary school, Miss Wang waited until the bell rang for the end of class, before trying to hand over the art materials for Chen Kesi and her classmates, but was rebuffed by men in leather jackets who said that “no child of that name attends this school”.
Seeing the activists at the gates, the children were shooed indoors.
Miss Wang was left to tie the bag of goodies, toss it into the courtyard of one of Mr Chen’s old brothers with a note asking him to pass them on.
The “netizens” were seeking justice for Mr Chen by a thousand cuts, explained Li Jianjun, a prominent investigative journalist who was sacked from China’s mainstream media for refusing to accept the censorship, and also witnessed Miss Wang being slapped.
He believes the activism is working, citing the decision to allow Mr Chen’s daughter to go to school and a recent editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper warning that the local government were mishandling the situation.
“The central government wanted to cover up Chen’s case, but so many 'netizens’ and citizen journalists came and told about what happening, that it was no longer possible,” he said.
“So then they turned to a different method – robbing and beating the 'netizens’ – but, unexpectedly, the people were not frightened. More came and more people are now talking about it. This is such a strong expression of public opposition, it is a great achievement.”
BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Monday warned foreign energy companies against exploration in the disputed South China Sea after U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp said it had discovered hydrocarbons in August off central Vietnam, in an area also claimed by China.
