Truth, No Matter the Power: Controversial Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei’s only fear is silence

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Totalitarian society creates a huge space that, as we know, is a wasteland. The great success of this system is that it makes the general public afraid of taking responsibility; afraid of taking a position or giving a definite answer; or even afraid of making mistakes. There is no revolution like the communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people, and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change. This has continued for generations—after just two or three generations deprived of continuity in education we inevitably become completely cut off from our own past.

For example, children in this society don’t even know their parents. I have had young people tell me that their grandparents have died, and when I ask who their grandparents were and what happened to them, they just say, “Oh I don’t really know, my father never said much about it.” And if I say, “Are you sad?” they simply shrug it off. In a real society, people would say, “Oh, I love my grandfather and grandmother.” These may just be ordinary people, yet ordinary people still transmit the emotion of who they are and where they have come from. A child receives this sense of self through the process of growing up. Personally I don’t know any of my grandparents. My family never talked about them because they themselves were in a critical condition. My parents did not talk about what the party did to them.

There is no continuity of experience through the generations. We talk about crimes against humanity: Is this not a crime against humanity? It’s not necessarily a question of killing people, but of torturing or mutating basic human emotions.

In this process, we dramatically found ourselves with this one-child policy and as a result no one knows where he or she has come from. And then suddenly we live through this radical, new, urban development: Everyone has had to move from their old neighborhoods and no one knows anyone else in their own apartment buildings. The population is in a constant state of enforced dislocation. And so let us hope that a totally new culture will come out of this.

Your father, Ai Qing, was an important poet and no stranger to political repression. He was first imprisoned by the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang in the 1930s. After liberation, he was targeted in the “anti-rightist” campaign of the late 1950s. Later, in the Cultural Revolution, he underwent “re-education through labor” in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, where you were brought up. In spite of these experiences, you remain an outspoken critic of the government. What gives you this confidence?

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