Ai Weiwei still in the news
Jun 24th, 2009 | By Chris | Category: Random Shanghai stuff...A long piece on Ai Weiwei and his call for an Internet strike. NB since yesterday Ai’s fanfou.com account was deleted. He used the fanfou account to update twitter…
Quote:
A general internet strike — no work, no games, no email or anything else online — for 24 hours on the date the government plans to require censorship software on all new computers, he says, will be a quiet act of rebellion. Not coincidentally, July 1 is the 88th anniversary of the Communist Party of China. Though he posted the idea, Ai wants to leave the meaning to those who participate.
“I gave almost no explanation about why I’m doing it,” Ai said. “I just give the structure and people will fill in their own meaning. I don’t want to be political first. I wanted to set up an act that everyone can easily accept, and then realize the power later.
“I want people to see their own power,” he said.
In an interview Tuesday in the sunny courtyard of his studio complex in Beijing, the renowned artist, party critic and iconoclast spoke about how he uses Twitter (at last count, he has 3,390 followers), its Chinese counterpart Fanfou and blogs as his favorite platforms to push the boundaries of free expression in China. He is relentless in posting, often using humor and poetry to make points. Though his words at times seem whimsical, he is just as often fierce.
