OpinionG'day China: What Ai Weiwei does and doesn't tell us about China today
/ By Fergus RyanChinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei has had a long and troubled history with the country's surveillance apparatus, but any improvement in his situation isn't a sign of softening Chinese politics. Indeed, for many lesser-known activists, conditions are getting much worse, writes Fergus Ryan.
When Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing this week after his first overseas trip in four years, his discovery of listening devices in his studio served as a rude welcome home present.
On Sunday, Ai Weiwei posted on Twitter and Instagram pictures and video of devices discovered behind electrical sockets during a renovation of his studio.
In one video someone sets off a cacophony of exploding firecrackers in a bin next to the bug. "Can you hear this?" the accompanying text reads.
"There's always a surprise," Ai says in one of the Instagram posts.
But this latest example of the Chinese police state's intrusive surveillance of the artist should hardly come as a complete surprise.
After all, Ai has long made the Chinese government's intensive surveillance of him the subject of his art.
When authorities installed CCTV cameras outside his studio, the artist defiantly hung lanterns from them.
In 2012, on the first anniversary of his arrest at Beijing airport, Ai installed web cameras at his home and broadcast a 24-hour live feed of himself, telling his exasperated overseers that he was simply assisting their surveillance efforts.
And in the revealing documentary Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, we see the artist turning the cameras back on the men sent to spy on him before trailing them in his car. The ashtray the spooks left behind is scooped up by Ai and later repurposed into a work of art.
Visitors to his show at the Royal Academy of the Arts can even find a less-than-life-size replica of the artist sitting on a toilet with two guards watching over him - a perfect reproduction of what his conditions were like when he was held in detention for 81 days without charge but never charged or convicted of a crime.
That China's police, public security and intelligence agencies cast a paranoid eye over many people they deem subversive is hardly surprising news, but finding evidence of it is still somewhat jarring.
"Even though I was quite sure that these technologies have existed and the authorities have been using them for some unspeakable purpose, it's just like (when) you know a snake exists but when you see it, you feel such a chill," the artist told CNN.
The real news is that Ai Weiwei has returned to Beijing at all. After being denied the right to travel for four years, the artist spent more than two months overseas reuniting with his son in Germany and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Anish Kapoor and Julian Assange in London.
That he is confident enough to return to the city he once called a "nightmare" reveals a great deal about how far his rehabilitation with the authorities has progressed.
The artist, known for his ability to avoid the country's political red lines, has had to tread especially carefully of late, toning down his commentary so much that it has earned the ire of overseas dissidents and human rights activists.
The artist took such a conciliatory tone towards the Chinese government while overseas that the fiercely nationalistic state-run Global Times newspaper saw fit to gloat.
"The West is unhappy that Ai isn't scolding the Chinese government," it said, leaving the artist with little room but to make the most enigmatic of responses.
Yet it would be a mistake for foreign observers to assume that the improvement in Ai's treatment is a sign of a more general softening in Chinese politics. He himself doesn't see his case as representative.
"My case does not reflect the general condition. In my view, there has been no difference or change in the condition for most people," he told me last night.
Indeed, for many lesser-known activists, conditions are getting much worse. Amnesty International claims that at least 246 people have been detained or interrogated since early July as part of a concerted effort to silence human rights lawyers and activists critical of the government.
Ai's own lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, one of China's most prominent human rights lawyers was charged with inciting ethnic hatred and "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" in May last year. He was refused bail in September after a Beijing court postponed his case for another three months.
Before Chinese president Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, there had been some hope among Chinese liberals and China watchers that he might bring about a modicum of political reform. But since coming to power, Xi has presided over one of the most severe crackdowns on Chinese civil society in decades.
While his predecessor Hu Jintao also arrested journalists and lawyers, China's new president Xi Jinping has intensified the campaign.
The free-speech free-for-all that briefly existed online under Hu has now been well and truly neutered. Once-tolerated critics of the government like human rights lawyers, feminists, religious leaders and social activists have been told to rein in their criticism and commentary - or else.
Public criticism and exposure and official misdeeds took place on Weibo - China's Twitter; now it is unfolding on the pages of the People's Daily as part of Xi's anti-corruption campaign, unprecedented in its fierceness.
A renewed paranoia over potentially subversive "Western ideas" that are supposedly being spread in order to topple the Communist Party has left academics dejected about the prospects for a genuinely liberal education in the country's schools and universities.
And now China's growing global clout means that placing bugs in your Beijing studio is only where it begins.
"They let me know that they know what I am doing," Ai told German media last month. Beijing's attitude may have "changed a little" but "the control will always be there".
"The fact of Ai's leaving and then returning to China does not mean he is free of state harassment at home or abroad," says Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.
"Beijing's efforts to silence those it perceives as problematic knows no national boundaries."
Fergus Ryan is a Beijing-based journalist. He tweets as @fryan.