We've all seen how the convention went Communist Party of China, sealed by the embarrassing physical removal from his high seat of Hu Jintao, head of state from 2002 to 2012, and by his limp towards the exit without first, however, staging a gesture of great political significance: he passed the hand to kind of farewell on the shoulder of Li Keqiang, the former prime minister ousted by the politburo and the only real alternative to Xi Jinping. It is known that already in 2012, when he left the presidency, Hu would have preferred Li to Xi as successor.
During the days of the congress the “New York Times” hosted an intervention by the dissident artist on the OpEd page Ai Weiwei. The Chinese artist is exhibiting (until November 27) in Venice in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Giudecca a sculpture of nine meters and weighing two and a half tons. An installation that only he could conceive and could create in three years of work for the solo show called "The Human Comedy".
Is called "candelabrum” and is made up of 2 pieces of black Murano-blown glass depicting human bones, skulls and surveillance cameras. The candelabrum, paradoxically, does not shed light but reflects and radiates what comes from the church windows. The installation is a real suspended ossuary, a memento mori, which wants to spur us to fight for freedom and against the widespread control (the television cameras) for which it is a harbinger of death (the bones, the skulls). A work that dramatically reflects the fragility of societies and of our own existence. But it is also an invocation to life and the struggle for freedom.
Carmelo Grasso, director of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, said that Ai Wewei's work "paradoxically enhances life through death".
The implicit reference to the situation in China appears evident in this extraordinary work and in this one-man show which brings together works on which the artist began working in 2008.
One campaign after another
Ai Weiwei's reflections, also of a historical and personal nature, on the experience of communism in China are at the basis of these works of the "Human Comedy". The reference to China's recent history seems more than timely given the return of a certain Maoism in the vision, values and action of the new Chinese ruling group. Precisely that Maoism that Ai Weiwei's father and the artist himself had known very well and suffered in their persons.
The Chinese artist begins his speech in the New York newspaper with a very precise thesis. This. The rule of the Communist Party of China has always been marked by uninterrupted action to shape the minds of Chinese people according to the needs of the state and the party, united in an inseparable bond.
The Great Leap Forward, the industrialization campaign that started in 1958 that brought about a devastating famine, was followed by the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, a huge political crusade that brought China to its knees. Then there are many more, some more harmful than others, all the campaigns were aimed at achieving some political, social or economic objective of the moment. The cumulative effect of these campaigns, says Ai Weiwei, represents the Communist Party's greatest achievement. Indeed, it has achieved a perfect symbiosis between a totalitarian government and a submissive and resigned population.
The zero Covid campaign
The Chinese government's "zero Covid" operation, which has been going on for three years, could be the worst of all its campaigns, says Ai Weiwei. It is an affront to science and common sense that recalls the villainy and farcical character of the Cultural Revolution. Officials and citizens all over China are making a fool of themselves for carrying it out. Entire cities are shut down even in the event of limited outbreaks, tests are conducted on fish and other food products, cars and even building materials.
This senseless policy has brought chaos and suffering to the Chinese population, who have been repeatedly segregated, punished for missing tests and humiliated in their freedom of movement. Many people have lost their jobs or closed their businesses. When Chengdu, a city of 21 million people, was shut down in September, residents were prohibited from leaving their apartments even in the event of an earthquake.
The various mass surveillance campaigns of the past have come and gone and absorbed, but this one will have lasting consequences due to the new and dangerous aspect of surveillance technology introduced nationwide to combat Covid. Citizens have started to be monitored and traced by the authorities to control their movements and activities in order to restrict and target them.
Government authorities used this tracking and surveillance system to prevent people from attending a protest in central China last June. Officials were later reprimanded, but the fact remains, in Ai Weiwei's view, that the government has a system in place that Mao Zedong could only have dreamed of. It is a data and algorithm based system to monitor and control the population.
The misjudgment of the West
The West was wrong about China. He has long believed that capitalism, the emergence of a middle class and the internet would bring China closer to the Western canon. But these ideas cannot even begin to take root in China because the Communist Party has never allowed the formation of the intellectual ground necessary for them to germinate. And it never will. The historical conditions for this to happen do not even exist.
“Chinese minds have never been truly free, they have always been enslaved,” writes Ai Weiwei. For most of the past two thousand years, China has become a monolithic, centralized state where an ethic of submission between the ruler and the ruled has prevailed. This relationship has never been questioned. No change of this state of affairs is possible; the humble Chinese people are expected to just obey. And this is what has happened, is happening and will happen.
Mao's action
When the Communist Party took power in 1949, hope was born, unfortunately ephemeral, for a new phase in China's history. Ai Qing, Wewei's father, one of China's leading poets at the time, had enthusiastically joined the Party. But Mao was able to skillfully turn China's ancient power dynamics in his favor, consecrating the party as the new undisputed absolute ruler. Like many intellectuals, Ai Weiwei's father soon came under attack during Mao's repeated political campaigns to purge those who dared to think independently. The spiritual, intellectual and cultural life of China faded away.
In 1957, the year Ai Weiwei was born, Mao launched the campaign against the right. His father was labeled a right-winger and, having become the target of furious public attacks, he and his family were forced into political confinement in a desolate place in the remote Xinjiang region. Some of his peers committed suicide.
A surrender mentality
During the Cultural Revolution Ai Qing suffered another frontal attack. He was paraded through the streets in a dunce cap and publicly pilloried. Weiwei recounts that one evening he returned home, exhausted, with his face blackened after a Red Guard, during a political rally, had poured ink from an inkwell on his head. No one had stood up for him. Shaken by that proof of impotence, resignation, submission and conformism of the Chinese people, Ai Weiwei's father decided to accept his fate and go on. It was a surrender. The Chinese people still live with this capitulation mentality today.
Ai Weiwei's direct experience
In 2011 Ai Weiwei clashed with Chinese authorities after criticizing the government. The police threatened him to "make him come to a bad end" and to publicize the absurd accusations they had made against him, such as tax evasion, to discredit him. Ai Weiwei then challenged the police stating that the Chinese people would never believe their lies. “90% will believe it,” the interrogating officer told him. In China, where all the "truth" comes from the party, it is very unlikely that it could be otherwise and, writes Ai Weiwei, "that officer was right".
Three years later, at an art exhibition in Shanghai, pressure from the local government led to the abrupt removal of his name from the list of exhibitors. None of the Chinese artists exhibiting their work, many of whom knew the dissident artist well, came forward to defend him.
In the last decade, things have only gotten worse. The authorities have stifled the remaining vestiges of independent thinking, annihilated Chinese civil society and embalmed the worlds of academia, media, culture and business.
The mirage of wealth
Millions of Chinese are proud of the growing wealth and strength of modern China. But this feeling of well-being is a mirage supported by external material gains, constant propaganda about the decline of the West and the suppression of intellectual freedom.
China is morally decaying under the influence of the party. In 2011, Ai Weiwei reports, a two-year-old girl was hit by two vehicles in southern China and left injured and bleeding on the road. Eighteen people passed by doing nothing, some even swerving to avoid her. The girl then died. Don't think, don't get involved, go beyond that is the prevailing feeling
Freedom is based on courage and risk-taking. But the vast majority of the Chinese population feel that resistance, even on a philosophical level, is impossible and that personal survival depends on conformity. People have reduced themselves to a neurotic servility. Everyone is lining up like sheep for coronavirus testing or raiding food before sudden closures.
Freedom and subjectivity can never be completely suppressed. And no country, however strong it may appear, can truly thrive without diversity of opinion. "But there is no hope - concludes Ai Weiwei - for a fundamental change in my country as long as the Communist Party is in power".
°°°Source: Ai Weiwei, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China's People, The New York Times, October 20, 2022
