AI WEI WEI, the famous Chinese artist who recently exhibited to acclaim at the Tate Modern, was on Sunday again barred from leaving the country.
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China’s frantic campaign to crush the so-far nonexistent “jasmine revolution” has now swept up one of the country’s best-known artists. Ai Weiwei, a sculptor, filmmaker, architect and performance artist who helped design the “Bird’s Nest” stadium at the Beijing Olympics, was detained in the Beijing airport Sunday and had not been seen or heard from more than 24 hours later.
Ai had been pushing the boundaries of free expression in China. On his Twitter account, which has more than 70,000 followers, he was keeping track of the lawyers and dissident intellectuals who have been arrested in a far-reaching crackdown during the past two months. Now he is one of them.
According to a count by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group, 26 political suspects have been arrested in China since February, and the government has restricted the movements of 200 more.
Another 30 have, like Ai, simply disappeared. They include a China-born Australian spy novelist and six lawyers from Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai who often take on human rights cases.
In addition to the arrests, police have been swarming downtown locations in Chinese cities on Sunday afternoons, and new restrictions have been imposed on foreign journalists. All of this has been prompted by the thinnest of threats: calls on Web sites outside of China for “jasmine” protests, including “strolls” through city centers. There have been no protests, but the regime’s security forces have reacted as if the eruption of a Chinese version of the Tunisian or Egyptian uprisings is imminent.
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