China Takes Dissident Artist Into Custody

Ai Weiwei in his Beijing studio on March 7.

Published: April 3, 2011

Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

A police officer, right, and a security guard outsidethe entrance to Ai Weiwei's studio in Beijing on Sunday.

Rights advocates say the detentions are an ominous sign that theCommunist Party’s six-week crackdown on rights lawyers, bloggers anddissidents is spreading to the upper reaches of Chinese society. Mr. Ai,53, the son of one of the country’s most beloved poets, is aninternationally renowned artist, a documentary filmmaker and anarchitect who helped design the Olympic stadium in Beijing known as theBird’s Nest.

Jennifer Ng, an assistant who accompanied Mr. Ai on Sunday morning, saidhe was taken away by uniformed officers as the two of them passedthrough customs at Beijing International Airport. Ms. Ng said she wastold to board the plane alone because Mr. Ai “had other business” toattend to. She said Mr. Ai was planning to spend a day in Hong Kongbefore flying to Taiwan for a meeting about a possible exhibition.

A man who answered the phone at the Beijing Public Security Bureau onSunday declined to answer questions about Mr. Ai’s whereabouts and hungup.

Shortly after Mr. Ai was seized, more than a dozen police officersraided the artist’s studio in the Caochangdi neighborhood, cut off powerto part of that area and led away nearly a dozen employees, a mix ofChinese citizens and foreigners who are part of Mr. Ai’s large staff. BySunday evening, the foreigners and several of the Chinese had beenreleased after being questioned, according to one of Mr. Ai’s employees,who was not in the studio when the public security agents arrived.

“It’s not clear what they are looking for, but we’re all reallyterrified,” said the employee, who asked not to be named for fear ofdrawing the attention of the police. She said the police had visited thestudio three times last week to check on the documents of non-Chineseemployees.

By singling out Mr. Ai, the authorities are expanding a campaign against dissent that has roiled China’sembattled community of liberal and reform-minded intellectuals. Inrecent weeks dozens of people have been detained, including some of thecountry’s best-known writers and rights advocates. At least 11 of themhave simply vanished into police custody. Two weeks ago, Liu Xianbin, aveteran dissident in Sichuan Province, was sentenced to 10 years on subversion charges.

Last week Yang Hengjun, a Chinese-Australian novelist and democracyadvocate whose blog postings are avidly followed on the mainland,disappeared in southern China as he tried to leave the country. Mr. Yangreappeared four days later,claiming he had been ill, but many friends interpreted his crypticexplanation as a roundabout acknowledgment that he had been detained bythe police.

Mr. Ai has run afoul of the authorities before. In 2009, he said he was beaten by officerswho crashed though the door of his hotel room in the middle of thenight while he was preparing to testify at the trial of a fellowdissident in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. A month later, whileattending an art exhibition in Munich, he was rushed to a hospital,where surgeons drained a pool of blood from his brain. Doctors said hewould have died without the emergency surgery.

Last November he was briefly confined to his home in Beijingby police officers, who he said were instructed to prevent him fromattending a party in Shanghai he had organized to commemorate thedestruction of a million-dollar art studio that had been built at thebehest of the local government. Although he never found out who orderedthe demolition, he said he suspected powerful figures in Shanghai whowere most likely angered by his freewheeling criticism of thegovernment.

Until now, Mr. Ai’s stature has given him wide latitude in levelingpublic critiques against corruption and the strictures of CommunistParty rule. Last year he created an Internet audio project in whichvolunteers read the names of nearly 5,000 children who were killedduring the earthquake in Sichuan Province in 2008. The project and ahaunting art installation in Germany composed of thousands of children’sbackpacks were aimed at drawing attention to substandard constructionthat some experts say led to the collapse of many schools.

The most recent wave of detentions was set off in February by ananonymous bulletin that originated on an American Web site, urgingChinese citizens to publicly demand political change. The protest calls,inspired by the unrest in the Arab world, were effectively quashed bythe authorities, who detained or questioned dozens of prominentreformers, lawyers as well as unknown bloggers who simply forwarded newsof the protests via Twitter. At the time, Mr. Ai sent out a messagethat sought to dissuade people from taking to the streets.

Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watchin Hong Kong, described the continuing crackdown as an attempt by thecountry’s public security apparatus to roll back the modest civilsociety advances that have taken root in recent years. “It’s an attemptto redefine the limits of what kind of criticism is tolerable,” he said.“The government is moving the goalposts and a lot of people are findingthemselves targeted.”

After his beating at the hands of the police in 2009, Mr. Ai said he hadno illusions about the consequences for those who refused to toe theline set down by the country’s leaders.

“They put you under house arrest, or they make you disappear,” he saidin an interview. “That’s all they can do. There’s no facing the issueand discussing it; it’s all a very simple treatment. Every dirty job hasto be done by the police. Then you become a police state, because theyhave to deal with every problem.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 4, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition.