181. Ai Weiwei: China, Censorship, and Dissidence Through Art

34:46Okay. Ai Weiwei, Rory, quick break, and then back for more. Spring break isn't what it used to be. It's better. This spring, stay three nights and get a$50 Best Western gift card. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. Feeding the fam isn't easy, but we got you with Denny's Slam and Meal Deals starting at$5.99. Full meals for everyone, like a Grand Slam burrito for Grandpa and a Super Slam for Super Mom. Get to Denny's now. Ballot at participating locations for dine-in or denny's.com. Limited time offer. Additional restrictions may apply at some locations.

35:21Fox News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When news breaks, we don't just report it. We go beyond the headlines to get the full story. Get live coverage, in-depth analysis and perspectives from the voices you trust, all in one place. Whether you're at home or on the go, stay connected to the stories shaping our world. Stream Fox News on Fox One. Download today.

35:54Tell us a little bit about the detention. What happened? You only have one hour, right? And men always have a perspective of time and space. Detention simply should come to me because I've been too wild. And with my ideology of what I'm writing, I can easily be punished as death sentence during Cultural Revolution 100 times. according, that's quote of their words, is the way you're dead, you can be really killed 100 times if just 10, 20 years earlier. Yes, I, detention comes to me, which I can predict, but at the same time, I kind of feel satisfied because I always jealous my father, he was sentenced for six years in his 20s.

36:58I think anybody fighting for aesthetics or ideology, being sentenced early, is really something I can be proud of. So I think I never reached that point. I think 80 years later, I cannot predict I will be kidnapped by state and put in this secret detention for 81 days. So the story is pretty simple. They just want to, I think, mainly scare me. Were you scared? I'm not scared, but I'm, you know, I thought it was some kind of black humor because why you have to put a black hole for me and send me to some unknown location and not to let me get in touch with my family and give me like a very intensive interrogation.

37:52ask all kinds of funny questions. I'm not scared, but I feel sorry for my son. He's only two years old. So I feel one interrogator tells me, wait, wait, when you serve your sentence could be 10 to 13 years, when you come out, your son will never recognize you. That even may not be true, but it's scary to me. I feel deeply sorry I did something which is very irresponsible to someone else. That time your passport is taken off you, eventually you get your passport back and you start to travel again. And what I've been really interested, you've got a book out at the moment on censorship. And I said in the introduction, I get the sense that you think we in the West sit here and we look at China and we think this is a repressive country.

38:47They have no free speech. They don't believe in human rights. But your experience of the West seems to have led you to conclude that actually there's not that much difference. I'm really interested in how you make that argument. Well, I started early when the US invaded Iraq. That time I was in New York. I was in part of this anti-war coverage. I take my photos and the demonstration. I realized the one demonstrate has less people than the police. Police on the two sides of the street, for the bypasser, you cannot even see demonstrators. You only see police there. So you can see this is typical police state.

39:34You would allow people to demonstrate, but their voice can never be really covered. or even those ACT UP, those gay spray demonstrations can never be heard. They have to find a strategy to run it on highway, to stop the highway, then journalists would report the incident. So this is very established, the capitalism society, media, and the education and it's all being controlled so well and to tell you what is wrong, what is right, which is not so different from the Chinese society, except it seems, yes, you can have some voice, but your voice can never really be heard. There's a very interesting moment with Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he moves from Russia to America.

40:34He criticized America. He had been a dissident criticizing the Soviet Union. And then in a favorite speech, he criticized America. But it's very difficult to hear because we want to say, come on, these two things are not the same. You know, nobody detained you for 81 days in America. Nobody put your father in exile. You know how long Julian Songz has been in British jail? I visited the jail. I visited the court. I visited the embassy when he was hiding. I know exactly the whole case. He was pulled out by a British agent from the embassy. That is already a pretty strange image. Everybody will remember he was carried out.

41:15Then he was being put there. With all those heavy public pressure, he can end up his life in there. So then now you ask what kind of crime he really made. You know, so-called this WikiLeaks platform. platform today everybody has a you know it's not that he's just a little bit early trying to expose but without that even the file relate to this uh this island jeffrey epstein yeah yeah yeah you know come on we all know what's going on but the file is still not open you know the only possibility like a week leaks can open it that guy even can't commit suicide in jail can't believe it and they said the camera is not working.

42:02Come on, we have six, eight cameras here. It must be strange for you because the West saw you as a Chinese dissident. They liked you criticizing China. Now you criticize the West, so they must get surprised or uncomfortable. Confused. Confused. It's so uncomfortable. Even yesterday, I criticized, I said something, the West has no moral position even to pose fingers to China because just look at a mirror of what you did in past years in relation to all the international events, in relation to Israel-Gaza events, in relation to almost every aspect. What is really being openly discussed? But if somebody like Julian Assange had done the equivalent in China, there is a fair chance he would be dead by now.

43:02And where are Uyghurs? What would you say was the West's Uyghurs? Would you say that's the Palestinians? In Xinjiang, the Uyghur. The Uyghur situation. I think the West about Uyghurs also is a problem. Because? Because you clearly put concentration camps to use a name. We know conceptually you use certain names, which has to clearly talk about something else. And the Uyghur has been re-educated in some areas, but not the Uyghur. That's for me, my father, as the Han dynasty, not Han, Han race people. We come much earlier than Uyghurs being re-educated in 1957. So the West concept about that is really not respectful because you're choosing topics rather than giving even hands about the situation.

44:02That means you don't have integrity in what you're talking about. That's why I keep criticizing the West. But the Uyghurs themselves, we've talked to the Uyghurs who are based in London, they talk about concentration camps. They say that's the reality of the life of the people that they've left behind. And I was with you. That could be true. But you cannot talk about Uyghurs, not talk about Gaza. Gaza has been the longest prison for decades. You know that clearly. Would you say that's an equivalent? It's more than equipment. It's a much harsh situation in Gaza. You know what happens, all the women and children being killed.

44:43We were not being killed in this kind of education. In Chinese words, they are being trained with some skills, with some propaganda education. For them, it's what they did to me. So are you now in China more? Are you spending more time in China now? No, only in 10 years I spent 21 days there. But you left Germany, and then you were in Britain a bit, and then in Portugal a bit. Give me a sense of these different countries. Oh, my activities. People always ask, are you in Germany? I spent six years in Germany, only my son studied there. So daily, at 6 o 'clock, I sent him to school, 3 o 'clock, I take him back.

45:24That's father's responsibility. He already totally forgot about that part. Now he's in Britain, and he's such a well-educated gentleman, 17 years old, and he refused to talk to me anymore. All the teenagers. You don't mean literally? Huh? You don't mean he literally refuses to talk to you? Oh, yes, literally. Why? Well, I think many parents would answer your question. They call it some kind of teenage rebellion. Yeah, but I never even heard about that before. You can be rebelling, but not in this kind of completely sense. But I feel happy, proud about him. I said, yes, you can go as far as you can.

46:08That means that's what I want. I don't want you just trying to pay some kind of fake respect to me. But just go as far as you can, you know. But you'd be very unhappy if he never spoke to you again. Not true. I think he loves me. I love him. You know, this is a blood situation. But he doesn't speak to me. I haven't speak to my father for 12 years when I was in the United States. I haven't much spoke to my mom for previous 10 years. But still, they're my family. Where do you think Chinese culture is going in the next 10, 20 years? Do you think people will begin to rediscover the past? They will show more respect for traditional classical culture?

46:53Or is that fading? What's happening with this? China has a lot of things to do to fill up the gap between 1900 to these 120 years. And they have been in such up and down, tremendous, unthinkable ideology switch from feudalism to communist, then it becomes post-state. You cannot call it communist, but you cannot call it capitalism. So it's really a new society. So they have a lot to learn and they have a lot to catch up. Can I just go back to the parallels between West and East on freedom of speech? As you said, Keir Starmer, our prime minister in China, and anybody in Britain can go out and can protest against him visiting.

47:43They can say that it's the wrong thing to do. Indeed, many politicians have said that it's the wrong thing to do. And he can defend himself against that criticism. Whereas you couldn't make the same case against, let's say that Xi Jinping came here, the Chinese state would make sure that there was very little public opposition to that of any kind. When he visited Cambridge, he gave a talk. There was one Western boy who threw a shoe to him, if you still remember that incident. Of course, that is quite shocking for Chinese, you saw the public official. But through a shoes to a state leader, it's not started from that boy, but a journalist through the shoes to Bush when he gave a talk.

48:38And that journalist was being put in jail for years. you know that so let's check on the facts so i'm a good journalist i i try to make myself balanced view and uh you know if you check on the british record there's over 1200 people been put in jail over so-called hate speech in just recent study you're sounding like elon musk now? Elon Musk? He always complains about hate speech. He always complains about hate speech. Well, I don't sound like anybody. I just, based on facts, there's 1 ,200 people in jail because based on the so-called hate speech. But do you think there is such a thing as hate speech?

49:22Well, that's a very vague word. I think hate speech should be the same crime as love speech, philosophically. What do you make of Donald Trump historically, culturally? What do you think of Donald Trump? What does he represent? I think it's truly a phenomenon. Someone being elected, then someone being dumped, then somebody being elected again. That, we call it a democratic practice, right? So… And what does he tell us about American culture or world culture? I think it's the best product of American culture. capitalism come to a clear, new ideology of making a deal, an art of a deal. So all he concentrated is about a deal.

50:12There's no ideology, no philosophy, but let's see what kind of deal comes out. And the corruption and the lies? Corruption? I'm not entitled to tell about corruption because I know very little about corruption, but I would say certainly it would be huge corruption because you heard his personal gaining of profit could be, I don't know, his number. It's hard to remember, three billion or something. But I don't know, you can call it corruption or it's just a political gaining. Of all the countries you've lived in, rank them in order of the country that you felt was closest to your sense of what a country should feel like?

50:59You've had China, you've had Britain, you've had Germany, you've had Portugal. Is there any one of those countries? Because you said at the start, you never really felt at home in China, you never really felt at home in the United States. Where have you felt most of them? Well, I'm a global, I don't know, not even citizen. Citizen means you have certain rights to be called a citizen. I'm just, I don't know, a creature which maybe most fit into my ideology would be the moon. The moon? Yeah. You're like Elon Musk again, right? He doesn't really interest in the moon. He's interested in some... Mars.

51:40Yeah, I think he should be sent into Mars. Okay. One-way ticket. Yes. Are you interested in the idea of the scholar gentleman, like your father, your grandfather? Do you think this is an important idea for life? I think it is absolutely most important idea for an individual can be proud of, is to be an independent thinker and to act on your belief. And explain a little bit more about the idea of this Chinese idea for people so they can understand. The Chinese idea about scholar writing is not just to help to build your inner strength, but also to serve the mass, to serve the people. So in old time, all the kin and scholars only have one goal, to serve the bigger purpose.

52:35You know, can be poet, can be writer, they all write calligraphy, they all have a deep understanding of past. and that has always been considered as the highest ritual. You said earlier you had a lot of respect for Mao, or there was a lot of respect for Mao. You clearly had respect for Deng Xiaoping. What's your assessment of President Xi? We are about the same generation. He's three years older than me. I don't even know him. His father and my father are close friends. And of course we are... Both punished? Huh? They're both punished? Yes, his father was also punished for a while. But that's in revolution.

53:17Being punished, being purged, or it's not exactly a bad thing because there are too many struggles in different movements. I cannot give personal adjustments about him, assessment, only because I'm not in the same position. As an individual artist, he is taking care of this big state. But from foreign policy, I would agree with him. Not him, but China's national policy in relation to the Middle East, in relation to world peace, in relation to nobody should or interfere other nations' business, not like the U.S., not like Britain. Russia and Ukraine? Huh? Russia and Ukraine? Russia and Ukraine, they also kept themselves as a neutral position.

54:18They are not really support Russian. They are associated with Russian because geopolitics,

54:28because U.S., also because of the West. With NATO, with U.S., there's no such war. So this is clear. Can I, we're moving back and forth, but I think my final question, I want to bring you back to the idea of the scholar and the gentleman. Thank you. So, for example, in the Tang Dynasty, often the officials would leave the imperial court and then they would return back to the countryside. Tell me a little bit about what this means in terms of people's lives, the meaning of their life, their spirituality. I thank you for mentioning those details because I think you are a profound scholar in terms of history.

55:10I only can, from my experience, when during Cultural Revolution, at the very end, Chen Ma Mao had the idea all the educated university students should go back to factory and farming. They said this is a much bigger world, and you can do so many things when you're there. At the beginning, people do not really understand, but I do understand. President Xi has been working in the very bottom. I grew up in the very bottom. So I think what teaches us the most is not school, but really about society, about people, about struggle from the bottom. My final question. I mentioned in the introduction that you've focused a lot in your work now on the theme of refugees.

56:03And as we said, you lived in Germany, and there was a point where Germany took in an awful lot of Syrian refugees. And you said this, Europeans should not have the privilege to feel any moral superiority. Asking for gratitude from those who are struggling makes me sick. And I just wondered what you think governments should be doing about the extraordinary refugee flows that are happening now. Yeah, this is a question with such a complex level. Now we are dealing with something like, let's say it's cancer. In the West, we always think that cancer, we have to cut it off, we have to use all kinds of treatment.

56:43But with Chinese medicine, we think we have to provide that to become a cancer. That's a living style. That's some kind of philosophy. And what you eat, what you're behaving. So preventing that is much more important than to just treat it. That's the Chinese medicine's philosophy. I totally agree. With the refugee situation, we have to look at the history of why so many people have to pull out themselves with their family, their language, their tradition, their religion, come to some place like Germany or Switzerland, which is completely very hard to settle. Even for me, not us, that kind of refugee, it's still very hard for me to settle.

57:34So we have to have compassion and to understand And they escaped the war and the famine and the whole cause of war and famine. We have to really question ourselves why we don't help them to stay at their home. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ita. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

57:58Well, Rory, I found that very, very interesting. Yeah. What did you think of that? It was not what I expected, because it strikes me that we were getting perilously close to lots of whataboutery. And I don't know. I mean, you know, so he's defined the whole time as dissident. And yet he seemed at pains at almost every stage of the conversation to be far more defensive of China at various stages in this history. Now whether that's age, whether it's the fact that he's just been there, whether it's the fact that he just reconnected with his mother who I think is in her 90s. She's 93 and she met her grandson.

58:41But he seemed a lot more romantic about China than I was expecting. Well, I think there's also the first experience. I was being a bit pompous about Solzhenitsyn, but there's this famous moment where Solzhenitsyn gives a speech at Harvard where he attacks the United States. This is during the Cold War and everyone goes ballistic because this guy's celebrated as an anti-Soviet dissident. Partly, I guess it's also the personal experience. It was clearly unbelievably difficult and tough for him living in America in the 80s, early 90s. He must have felt profoundly homesick. He could barely speak English.

59:13He's in a completely alien culture. He's right down there on the minimum wage, struggling to get by. He returns to China. How you weigh it up, and we didn't talk enough about his childhood, but if people want to pick up his autobiography. It's absolutely unbelievable. That's the earlier book, not the current one. No, much earlier book. But it is absolutely unbelievable. Essentially, he doesn't want to call it a concentration camp, but it's certainly a labor camp. A re-education camp, I think they actually called it. And it's right in the middle of the desert in one of the most arid remote places on Earth.

59:52It's basically a military base. His father, who had been at one point you know, the most famous poet in China, is stuck with his young son in a tiny little room. They can't heat it. His father's got, is wearing an old jacket that's just kind of burnt to pieces, trying to put enough money together for his tobacco. He's outside the dining hall every day. He has to watch his father beating a drum and saying, I'm a writer's traitor to the gun. And And then every evening, his father has to fully prostrate himself and lie down and be mocked. And people pour things on him and mock him. And one of his jobs was to clean the toilets.

1:00:32That's the point he made about it. So his father's life was extraordinary because he went from being the son of a relatively prosperous landlord, what we'd call a kind of country gentleman, to then absolutely nothing. And then Ai Weiwei has built himself out of that horror. You made a good analogy with Xi Jinping, or in people like Jun Chang, who's five years older. All these people who went through the 50s and the Cultural Revolution, it's almost impossible for anyone to imagine. You go from being wealthy and actually quite privileged in the Communist Party system, smashed right down to the bottom where you are on the edge of being killed and worked to death, and then you rise up again.

1:01:13Yeah. And it was interesting as well. I get the sense, and I read that book a while ago, his autobiography. I found his book on censorship a bit strange because maybe we're being whatabouterists here, but I think it is quite hard to say that you equate our freedom of speech with the freedom of speech in China. Just to go on the record, the situation in China in terms of censorship is 10 ,000 times worse. My Chinese friends are afraid to speak openly now in any way about the government. If you post the wrong thing on the internet, it's not like these hate speech things. I mean, it's very difficult to get this across to people.

1:01:54Maybe people need to go to China more and spend more time talking Chinese to Andover. Well, now that we're getting the visa-free arrangements. Right. Well, to understand the total difference, it is a police state. It's a totalitarian police state. Or to go to Hong Kong and think back. I was there at Andover. It's not that long ago, a quarter of a century. Hong Kong is a very different place. Right. I was born in Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party essentially is like a military organization. It runs like a military state. I have friends who've been journalists there for many years, simply can't get visas to go back in and report.

1:02:27But we don't need to prosecute that on the thing. I mean, I think there's a sort of bigger - But what's that about? I have many people in Britain who sound like him. I mean, that is what a lot of the people who support Jeremy Corbyn's party sound like when I talk to 17, 18 year olds. I mean, this water battery is not very surprising, right? You must be used to it from your use, people saying, how about this? How about that? How about that? No, but he doesn't. And if you go, look, and I get it. If you go through the things, like he would say, the guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush went to jail for nine months.

1:02:58Which we don't talk about. No, and all I can remember at the time was George W. Bush laughing it off and talking about his shoe size. So yeah, listen, he's got a point, But I found that maybe we were both indulging in a bit of water boundary. I don't know. No, I think you did what you needed to do, which was to register that you don't want to take this at face value. Yeah. Okay. But Julian Assange, I get it's a big cause for the left. I get that. But I think I made a fair point there. If that was Julian Assange in China leaking thousands of Chinese state secrets, he wouldn't have survived. Yeah.

1:03:33I also think that one of the things, I don't think this is not getting into it, but I guess his sympathies are quite Corbynista, if you hear him about Russia, Ukraine and NATO. It's simply not true that China's not supporting Russia and Ukraine. I mean, all the components for the Russian drones depend on Chinese secondary equipment. The oil revenue flying into Russia comes a lot from China. I mean, Russia would simply not be able to do what it's doing in Ukraine without China. And actually China has made a real choice to back Russia and Ukraine if they hadn't Russia in really weak position. But I guess the issue with interviewing an artist or a sports person is whether it really makes sense to try to interrogate them as a geopolitical commentator.

1:04:14The thing was though that right from the top, I having described him as an artist, an activist, he clearly, I think, sees himself as an activist every bit as much as an artist. Presumably, he's also irritated with the fact that for 20 years he's been used, he may feel, as an instrument for anti-Chinese attacks. Yeah. And he's a bit fed up with it. Yeah. So he's going to flip it around and enjoy tweaking the tail of the people. Can you really flip around the treatment of the Uyghurs in that way? You can't. But I think from his point of view, he's probably may have felt that he's been used for a long time to stick to beat the Chinese government.

1:04:48I just wonder whether as he gets older, he's exactly my age. He's 68. He's just been to see his mom in jail. I wonder whether, although he said he's never really felt at home anywhere, whether actually ultimately there is something about as you get towards the latter stages of your life, you are more drawn to your homeland. And I wonder if that's going on. And where you come from, I don't want to push this into our own personal lives, but he clearly did not have a comfortable time in the States, and he didn't have that comfortable time in Germany. I hesitate to raise the famous issue of Alistair going to Cambridge, but it's quite possible that there are experiences that you have in your life which make you think, actually, I'm not like these people, I'm something different.

1:05:25And actually, it gives you more desire to defend where you came from. I saw the thing about his son was very sad. Very sad. Very sad. It's really sad that he's... Very sad. I mean, here he is in London. His son's in Cambridge, and they're not speaking. Very sad and very difficult for him. I didn't really want to push on that, but I found that very sad. And very difficult for him. And to be fair to him, there is a wonderful honesty about that, to bring that up. Many of us would have veered away from that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, listen, he's a fascinating guy. And the other thing we didn't get into, because, I mean, And as well as being an artist, he's an extraordinarily prolific documentary maker.

1:06:02And some of them are really, really powerful. I also love his frankness. I thought he was incredibly funny about his time in New York. That was a wonderful sort of... And I really enjoyed his description of the... I mean, because when we talk about history, Nixon goes to China is absolutely a moment in history. And I thought he captured that really compelling way. My final one, if I was going to be allowed to be a little bit pretentious, I don't think... Go on, Rory, you can do it. I think people have done enough on how old-fashioned he is. He's basically deeply nostalgic in some ways towards the pre-revolution classical Chinese culture when he thinks about his grandfather, his description of his grandfather, and his literariness.

1:06:43Pen and paper. Pen and paper. No typewriters. All this sort of stuff. So I think he is somebody who's a sort of gentleman scholar. And if he thinks about himself, when he says, am I an artist? Am I a journalist? Am I an activist? I think what he really is, is a traditional Chinese gentleman. He's somebody who wants to be able to be utterly independent, retain an interest in public service, and do art, but the art is not the purpose of his life. It's part of a bigger package. Absolutely. Well, very good. I hope our listeners and viewers enjoy that. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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