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EDITORIAL: Paper
airplanes defy China’s might
It’s not Tiananmen in 1989 or the silent show by thousands of Falun Gong
supporters outside Zhongnanhai in April 1999, but the donations that have been
pouring into Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) studio for the past
week-and-a-half are a powerful demonstration against China’s rulers.
Ai’s fall from Beijing’s grace has been swift: From acclaimed collaborator on
the 2008 Olympics’ “Bird Nest Stadium” to his April 3 detention this year —
which lasted 81 days — a ban on speaking to the media or on microblogs and now a
crippling tax bill. Ai’s crime — beside the spurious tax evasion allegations —
was to think outside the box that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants to
keep people in.
However, Ai is not the first artist to fall foul of the party — 20th-century
history is littered with their corpses — as many as, if not more than, the
dissidents who were subjected to similar treatment in the former USSR. Like the
Soviet Union’s leadership before them — who had to deal with Boris Pasternak,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mstislav Rostropovich and so many others — Chinese
officials are finding out that not all artists are willing to play by the rules
if it means sacrificing their personal and artistic integrity.
Though not many people are able to be as brave as dissidents in speaking out
against the CCP’s capricious power, actions have been speaking louder than
words. Tens of thousands of people have been sending money to Ai to help him pay
his 15 million yuan (US$2.4 million) tax bill, which he was given just 15 days
to pay. The money is coming in through Internet, bank and postal transfers,
hand-delivered from places as far away as Hainan Island and in some cases in the
form of individual 100 yuan notes folded into paper airplanes and thrown over
the walls of his studio. As of yesterday, 6.7 million yuan had been donated,
which Ai says he will use toward the guarantee he needs to challenge the tax
bill, which is due on Tuesday and which he says he won’t pay.
The official media have decried this outpouring of support and “illegal
fundraising,” with the Global Times declaring that such a small number of
people, when compared with China’s total population, can’t replace mainstream
public opinion. However, the valiant band giving Ai their moral and monetary
support do count more than the silent majority that Beijing claims to represent.
Those paper airplanes made out of money may, in the end, mean more than the
billions the CCP spends on weaponry every year to shore up its creaking regime.
It was ironic that Ai was handed the specious tax bill the same day party
propaganda boss Li Changchun (李長春) published an article calling for the
comprehensive promotion of the culture-oriented guidelines adopted last month by
the CCP Central Committee. Those guidelines are aimed at promoting the
development of a cultural industry, maintaining “cultural security” and boosting
China’s “soft power” by improving Chinese citizens’ “sense of identity and
confidence in Chinese culture,” the communique issued after the committee
meeting said.
What Beijing clearly does not understand is that its cultural industry will
always be “soft” if it jails, silences or exiles people, such as Ai, and when
writers such as novelist Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村) admit they practice
self-censorship to get their works published.
The trouble is that the only kind of “art” the CCP feels comfortable with is pap
like the execrable ballets and plays The White-Haired Girl or The Red Detachment
of Women; audiences haven’t truly suffered unless they have had to watch a group
of women in military uniforms dance en pointe while clutching rifles.
The Chinese leadership’s show of power over artists and dissidents only
demonstrates their weakness, not their strength. The government keeps having to
extend its crackdowns on the media, the Internet and the burgeoning social
media. In the end, a paper airplane brigade may defeat the CCP’s might.
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