Computer Solutions

Ai Weiwei piece as it appeared in the paper, got a bit truncated as it went on the front page at the last minute, full text below, + pics mr Ai sent over.

In related news, here is another piece on China’s art market.

Leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s activism has finally provoked Chinese authorities to act against him. The authorities have begun staking out his studio with plainclothes police, visited his ageing mother, and deleted his popular blog on Sina.com. He has also called for a boycott of the internet on July 1 in China.
Ai Weiwei was recently involved in two separate incidents with plain clothes police. In the first incident unknown persons visited his mother’s house, when Ai Weiwei asked them for identification they refused to provide any, nor would they leave, leading him to call the local police. Subsequently there was an incident in the police station leading him to kick a door to leave. In a second incident, Ai Weiwei said: “two days later an undercover guy was following me, I asked him -why are you following me? Another came, and I kicked his car door to get him to report, but he wouldn’t. So I went to the police station to make a complaint. There are people here everyday (posted outside his studio).”
Ai Weiwei said he plans to complete his investigation listing the names of students killed in the earthquake, and continue to comment on June 4. “But I was in the US during June 4,” Ai said.
Ai Weiwei has been running a continuous online campaign documenting school children deaths in the Sichuan earthquake of May last year. But he believes it was nervousness among the authorities in the run up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4 that led to the state suppression of his online work, and the beginning of the overt surveillance operation. Another sensitive date, the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, occurs this October, which China observers believe will lead to widespread suppression of dissenters during the period.
Ai has since launched another blog (blog.aiweiwei.com), and will republish his investigations into the Sichuan earthquake, in which disproportionate numbers of school children died, allegedly due to local officials siphoning money away from school building costs, leading the buildings to collapse in the quake while other nearby buildings remained standing. “But I don’t know how long it will last before it is blocked, but the server is in the US, so the content will remain,” Ai Weiwei said.
Following this harassment Ai Weiwei has been very vocal on the internet, especially on fanfou.com, the Chinese version of twitter. On June 23 his account was deleted.
A typical comment from Ai Weiwei posted on fanfou.com during the period was: “In sixty years we have never seen the vote, there is no education for all, there is no universal health insurance, there is no open news, there is no freedom of speech, no freedom of information, no freedom of residence, there is no independence of the judiciary, there is no supervision, no independent trade unions, there is no national army, there is no constitutional protection..” (In Chinese language 140 characters allows for far more content when compared to English.)

During the period around June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese authorities blocked numerous websites such as twitter.com, flickr.com, ning.com and hotmail.com. Ai Weiwei joined fanfou.com and twitter.com just after his blog was deleted, causing some users to question his identity. To prove his identity Ai Weiwei posted three pictures of himself, in one photo he is leaping naked covering his genitals with a stuffed llama. The llamas have become a figure of protest in China. The llamas represent ‘grass mud horses (cao ni ma),’ a comic reference to a coarse phrase in the Chinese language, who struggle against ‘river crabs (he xie)’ – a reference to the Communist Party’s harmonious society campaigns. Ai Weiwei said: “I am still on twitter, but I now only have time to use fanfou.com, the Chinese twitter, which has a tool to show my updates on twitter.” Fanfou.com and numerous other local sites, such as China’s facebook clone xiaonei.com were closed to ‘undergo maintenance’ in the days leading to June 4.
As the July 1 anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CCP) approaches, and also the launch date for the controversial Green Dam filtering software, which is supposed to be installed on all PCs, Ai Weiwei announced his call for a boycott of the internet in China. Numerous activists have picked up his call for a boycott. Google.com has also been criticized by authorities for “spreading pornography,” leading to online speculation google and google services will be blocked in China during the upcoming sensitive period of the July 1 CCP anniversary and October 1 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Despite repeated calls to Sina.com’s press department in Beijing and corporate headquarters in Shanghai no person would comment on the issue of the deletion of Ai Weiwei’s blog.