Chapter 1The Poet's Son

Foreword

I spent the first part of my working life inside the machine that Ai Weiwei spent his working life confronting. I was a journalist in the Chinese state media, which is a phrase that requires immediate translation: I was a person paid to see certain things and not others, to write sentences whose boundaries had been drawn before I sat down at the keyboard, to practice a craft whose first and unspoken rule was that the practice itself must never be examined. I was good at it. That is not a confession I make with pride, but it is the fact from which this book proceeds, because you cannot understand why I needed to write about Ai Weiwei without understanding that I once lived, professionally and comfortably, on the other side of everything he stands for.

I left. The leaving is its own story and not this one, but it deposited me in Singapore with a strange double vision: I know how the system speaks because I spoke it, and I know what the system costs because I paid it, in the currency of all the sentences I calibrated and all the questions I filed away unasked. When I began writing about Chinese political and cultural figures from the outside, editors assumed my advantage was access. It was not. My advantage was recognition. I could read an official denunciation and hear the committee meeting behind it. I could read the phrase "economic crimes" and know, in my body, what it was for.

Ai Weiwei was the subject I circled longest before approaching. He seemed, from a distance, too visible to need a biography: the beard, the middle finger, the sunflower seeds, the man who had somehow made himself the most famous Chinese artist in the world by being the one the Chinese state most wished would disappear. Fame of that kind is a kind of hiding. The persona is so legible that no one checks whether they have actually read the person. I suspected there was someone underneath the spectacle, and I suspected (this was the personal part, the part I did not say aloud for some time) that the someone underneath had an answer to a question I had never settled for myself: what does a person owe to a system that fed them, formed them, and lied to them, all at once, from birth?

The research took me where research on a subject like this must take you: into the public record, which in Ai Weiwei's case is vast and contradictory and split between two languages that describe two different men. There are the published memoirs and the interviews, the court documents of the tax case, the press archives of the detention and the campaign that followed it, the enormous sediment of a life conducted deliberately in public. And there is the official record, the one I was once trained to help write, in which the same man appears as a criminal, a tax evader, a tool of foreign forces. Reading the two records against each other was the real work of these three years. I had expected the official version to be crude. It was not crude. It was careful, patient, professionally made, and that was the discovery that unsettled me most, because I recognized the workmanship.

What I had not expected was the father. I began this book believing it was about an artist and the state, and it is, but the longer I read, the more the story kept collapsing back into a single image: a poet in the Xinjiang desert, cleaning latrines while his small son watched. Everything Ai Weiwei has made (the broken urn, the list of the children's names, the eighty-one days rebuilt in miniature so the world could see inside the room) is a reply to that image, an account being settled across half a century. I grew up inside a system that taught me its punishments were history, regrettable and finished. The through-line of this life says otherwise. The techniques applied to the son in 2011 were the techniques applied to the father in 1957. The machine does not repent. It refines.

Why is Ai Weiwei worth a book? Not because he won; the book you are holding is not the story of a victory, and he would be the first to say the schools of Sichuan are still rubble. He is worth a book because he is the clearest available answer to the question of what one person can refuse. I spent years watching talented people, myself included, decide that refusal was impossible, that calibration was maturity, that survival was the only realism. Here is a man who tested the proposition and reported the results, at a cost he has never fully disclosed and never entirely stopped paying. I wrote this book to find out what the refusal was made of. I found that it was made in a desert, by a child, out of materials the state itself supplied.

I no longer write for the machine. This book is, among other things, some of the sentences I did not write then, finally set down in the right order.

— Wei Tao, Singapore

Chapter 1 · The Poet's Son

In the summer of 1957, in a hospital in Beijing whose name history has not troubled itself to preserve, a boy was born to the most celebrated poet in the People's Republic of China. The poet's name was Ai Qing. The boy's name would be Ai Weiwei. The poet had little more than a year left as a free man.

This is a story about what a state does to its artists, and what the children of those artists do in return. It begins not with the son but with the father, because in China (where filial obligation and political inheritance are wound so tightly together that separating them requires surgery) a man's life cannot be understood apart from the life of the man who made him. Ai Weiwei has spent sixty-eight years insisting that art and politics are the same thing, that beauty and confrontation are the same gesture, that the refusal to be silent is itself a form of creation. He learned this not in any art school but in the desert, watching his father clean latrines.

Ai Qing was born Jiang Haicheng in 1910 in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, to a family prosperous enough to send him to France. He went to Paris in 1929, at nineteen, ostensibly to study art. What he found instead was poetry. He read Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky. He wandered the streets that Baudelaire had wandered. He came to believe that the poet's duty was not ornament but witness, that language existed to name the suffering of the world, and that the suffering he was called to name was China's. He returned in 1932, was promptly arrested by the Kuomintang government for his leftist sympathies, and wrote his most famous poem, "Dayanhe, My Wet-Nurse," in a prison cell in Shanghai, signing it with a new pen name, Ai Qing, the birth name discarded the way one discards a skin that no longer fits. The poem mourned a peasant woman who had nursed him as an infant, a woman whose life of degradation and sorrow stood for everything the revolution had promised to redeem. It was published after his release and made him famous overnight.

The fame was of a particular Chinese kind: the kind that rises from the marriage of literary talent and political conviction, and that therefore carries within it the seed of its own destruction. Ai Qing was a poet of the left, which in the 1930s and 1940s meant a poet of the Communist cause. He traveled to Yan'an, Mao Zedong's revolutionary base in Shaanxi Province, in 1941. He met Mao. He was welcomed as a great literary voice of the revolution. He wrote poems about the Chinese landscape, about the war against Japan, about the suffering of the common people, about the light that would come when the revolution succeeded. The poems were good. Some of them were very good. "I love this land," he wrote. "Why do my eyes always brim with tears? Because I love this land so deeply."

It was Yan'an that should have warned him. In 1942, Mao delivered the "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art," a pair of speeches that would define the relationship between the Chinese state and Chinese artists for the next half century. Art, Mao declared, must serve the people. Art must serve the revolution. Art that did not serve the revolution was not art but sabotage. The writer Ding Ling, who had published a mild essay questioning gender relations in Yan'an, was criticized and sent for "reeducation." The writer Wang Shiwei, who had written that even Yan'an had inequality, was accused of being a Trotskyist and a secret agent. He would eventually be executed, hacked to death, his body thrown into a dry well. Ai Qing watched this. He drew the obvious conclusion, which was that survival required calibration: one could write with passion, but the passion had to flow in approved directions.

For a time, the calibration worked. The People's Republic was founded in 1949, and Ai Qing, then thirty-nine years old, became one of its literary ornaments. He held senior positions in the literary establishment of the new state. He traveled abroad as a cultural ambassador. He met Pablo Neruda and was photographed with him, two poets of the left beaming at each other across a table in what appears to be Chile. His poems were published in state-approved editions. His name appeared on lists of the great writers of new China. He had a wife, Gao Ying, more than twenty years his junior. They lived in Beijing. Life, by the standards of the Chinese literary establishment, was good.

Weiwei was born on August 28, 1957, the eldest of Gao Ying's children with Ai Qing. He was given a name whose characters meant "not yet" repeated (wei, wei). By Ai Weiwei's own account, his father chose the character by closing his eyes, opening a dictionary at random, and putting his finger on the page: it landed on wei, "not yet," and the poet accepted the verdict of chance. The child himself would not have an opinion about his name for some years, because he was about to be taken to a place where names mattered very little.

The catastrophe came with the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In 1956, Mao invited Chinese intellectuals to voice their criticisms of the Communist Party. "Let a hundred flowers bloom," he said. "Let a hundred schools of thought contend." It was an invitation that would prove to be a trap of such elegant cruelty that scholars still debate whether Mao intended it as a trap from the beginning or simply responded to the resulting criticism with the fury of a man who had not expected to be taken at his word. The intellectuals bloomed. They criticized party bureaucracy, censorship, the cult of personality, the corruption of local officials. They said aloud what they had been saying privately for years. Ai Qing, characteristically, participated. He was not among the most outspoken (he had learned something in Yan'an about the risks of excessive candor), but he said enough.

In the summer of 1957, the same summer that Weiwei was born, Mao reversed course. The Hundred Flowers Campaign became the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Those who had spoken were now enemies of the people. More than half a million intellectuals (the number is disputed, but the scale is not) were labeled "rightists" and subjected to punishments ranging from public humiliation to imprisonment to death. The label was, in the vocabulary of Maoist China, something between a criminal conviction and a curse. A rightist was not merely wrong. A rightist was a class enemy, a saboteur of socialism, a person whose very existence was an offense against the people.

Ai Qing was denounced in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and formally labeled a rightist by 1958. He was stripped of his positions. His works were banned. His name was removed from the approved lists. He was, in the formulation of the time, "sent down": dispatched from Beijing to a series of increasingly remote and punitive locations. The most celebrated poet of the revolution had written one poem too many, or said one thing too loudly, or simply been too visible in a political landscape where visibility had become indistinguishable from vulnerability.

The family went with him. Gao Ying gathered the children, including the infant Weiwei, and followed her husband into internal exile. This was not required; she could have divorced him, as many wives of rightists did, severing the political contamination before it spread to the next generation. She chose not to, a decision whose courage would shape her son's understanding of loyalty and defiance in equal measure.

Their first stop was a state farm in Heilongjiang Province, in China's frozen northeast, near the Siberian border. Ai Qing was put to work as a laborer. The poet who had been photographed with Neruda was now digging ditches and hauling grain. But Heilongjiang was only a way station. In 1961, when Weiwei was four, the family was transferred again, this time to a place that would become the landscape of his childhood and the geography of his nightmares.

They were sent to Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is China's far west, a vast territory of deserts and mountains bordering Central Asia. It is home to the Uyghur people, a Turkic Muslim population that has never been fully reconciled to Chinese rule. In the 1960s, it was also one of the places where the Chinese government sent people it wished to forget. The specific location was Shihezi, a city (if it could be called a city) at the edge of the desert, a settlement built by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary agricultural organization that combined the functions of a farming cooperative and a labor camp. Winter temperatures fell far below zero. The wind blew sand into everything: food, clothing, eyes, dreams. The landscape was flat and empty and merciless, the kind of terrain that reduces human endeavor to its most elemental components: shelter, warmth, food, survival.

It was in Xinjiang, though not at first, that the deepest humiliation arrived. In 1967, with the Cultural Revolution at full force, the family was transferred from Shihezi to a remote regimental outpost on the edge of the desert, and there Ai Qing (the man who had written "I love this land so deeply," who had held senior positions in the national literary establishment, who had met Mao himself) was assigned to clean the public latrines.

The assignment was not accidental. In the taxonomy of revolutionary punishment, there were gradations of humiliation designed to match the perceived severity of the offense. Manual labor was for ordinary rightists. Cleaning latrines was for those whose fall was meant to be instructive: a performance of degradation staged for the benefit of onlookers. The great poet, the man of refined sensibility and international reputation, was to be seen with his hands in filth. The lesson was not subtle: this is what happens to a man who uses words in ways the state does not approve.

Weiwei was about ten when this began; he would go with his father when he cleaned those latrines. He was growing up in the shadow of his father's humiliation, watching a man he loved reduced to the most degrading work the state could devise. The image of the poet cleaning latrines would become the foundational image of his life: the scene to which everything else refers. Decades later, when Ai Weiwei broke a Han dynasty urn and photographed himself doing it, when he gave the Chinese government the finger in front of Tiananmen Square, when he counted the dead children of the Sichuan earthquake and published their names, he was performing a confrontation with power whose origins lay in a latrine in the Xinjiang desert. He was answering a question that had been asked when he was too young to understand it: What do you do when the state takes your father and makes him clean toilets? What do you owe, in return, to a system that treats human dignity as a commodity to be granted or revoked at the pleasure of the party?

The answer would take him decades to formulate, and it would cost him more than he could have imagined. But the question was planted in Xinjiang, in the desert, in the first years of a consciousness that was being formed not by education or ideology but by the spectacle of a father's abasement.

Ai Qing did not break. This is perhaps the most important thing to say about the poet, and it is the thing his son would later both admire and interrogate. He did not recant. He did not denounce himself with the theatrical self-abasement that many rightists adopted as a survival strategy. He did not write the poems of gratitude to Mao that some of his former colleagues produced, poems whose servility was surpassed only by their technical incompetence. He simply endured. He cleaned the latrines. He submitted to the routine of the labor camp. He said little. He wrote nothing, or nothing that survived. The poet became silent, which was, in its way, the ultimate protest and the ultimate defeat simultaneously.

Gao Ying endured alongside him. She worked in the fields. She raised the children. She maintained the household in conditions that made the word "household" a euphemism for a room in a communal barracks. She did not complain, or if she did, the complaints have not been recorded. What has been recorded is the fact of her presence: she was there, in the desert, with her husband and her children, because she had chosen to be there. In a system that incentivized betrayal (that rewarded wives who divorced their rightist husbands and children who denounced their rightist parents), her loyalty was itself an act of dissent.

The child absorbed all of this. Children do not understand politics, but they understand humiliation. They understand when their father is being treated as less than a man. They understand the difference between the way other fathers are spoken to and the way their father is spoken to. They understand contempt, because contempt is communicated not through language but through gesture, through tone, through the spatial arrangements of power: who stands and who kneels, who gives orders and who receives them, who walks freely and who walks with the heavy gait of a man carrying an invisible weight.

What Weiwei understood, before he had the vocabulary to express it, was that his father had done nothing wrong. The conviction was not intellectual (a child does not reason about justice) but somatic, lodged in the body the way trauma lodges in the body, below the level of articulation. The state had punished his father for being a poet. The punishment was unjust. The injustice was the foundational fact of his existence. Everything else (the art, the architecture, the activism, the confrontation, the exile) would be a response to that fact, an attempt to settle an account that had been opened before he was old enough to remember.

There is a photograph of Ai Qing from the Xinjiang period that has been widely reproduced. In it, the poet stands in what appears to be a field or a courtyard, wearing the padded cotton clothing of a laborer. His face is weathered, his expression neither defiant nor defeated but simply present: the face of a man who has accommodated himself to circumstances he cannot change. There is nothing in the photograph to indicate that this man once met Pablo Neruda, once had his poems recited in Beijing's finest literary salons, once stood in the inner circle of the revolution's cultural establishment. He looks like what he has been made to look like: a peasant. The transformation is complete, and it is the completeness that is most terrible.

Ai Weiwei has said that his father never spoke about poetry during the years in Xinjiang. The silence was protective: speaking of poetry would have been an admission of the identity he had been forced to shed, and an invitation for further punishment. But silence has consequences for children that the silent parent cannot foresee. The boy grew up knowing that his father had been someone important, someone whose words had mattered, but the evidence of that importance was absent. There were no books of poems in the house. There were no literary discussions. There was only the labor, the desert, the latrines, and the wordless knowledge that something precious had been taken and could not be named.

Decades later, detained in a windowless room for eighty-one days, Ai Weiwei would find himself thinking about his father with an intensity he had never experienced while the old man was alive. "The only thing that came to me," he said, "was that I felt sorry I'd never asked my father about his feelings in life. How did he think about his revolutionary life? Or why did he stop writing poetry for twenty years? What did he think of Mao Zedong and all those leaders? The Communist Party? I never asked anything. This is probably the biggest regret I have." And then the realization: "This person really influenced me so much." The influence was not literary. It was moral: the influence of a man who had been stripped of every form of public dignity and had responded not with bitterness or theatrical defiance but with a quiet, intractable refusal to be less than he was.

This is the inheritance that Ai Weiwei would carry out of the desert and into the world: the understanding that art is dangerous because the state treats it as dangerous, that the artist's freedom is always conditional, and that the condition can be revoked without notice, without appeal, and without mercy. It is an inheritance that would make him, in time, the most confrontational artist of his generation, not because he chose confrontation but because confrontation had chosen him, had been chosen for him, in a latrine in Xinjiang before he was old enough to know what confrontation meant.

But that is the story of the son. The story of the father is not yet finished.

Ai Qing had been, before his fall, one of the architects of modern Chinese poetry. His importance is difficult to convey to a Western audience unfamiliar with the landscape of twentieth-century Chinese literature, but the analogy, if one must be drawn, is to a figure like Pablo Neruda or Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet whose work was inseparable from the political and cultural identity of his nation, whose poems were not merely read but absorbed into the collective consciousness, whose name was synonymous with an entire way of understanding what poetry was for. In Chinese literary history, Ai Qing occupies a position roughly equivalent to the position Whitman occupies in American literary history: he is the poet who made the language new, who broke the old forms and insisted that poetry could speak in the voice of the people without condescending to them.

His early work, written in the 1930s and 1940s, drew on French symbolism and Russian futurism but was unmistakably Chinese in its imagery and concerns. He wrote about rivers, about farmland, about the particular quality of light that falls on the North China Plain in winter. He wrote about war (the war against Japan, the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists) not as an abstraction but as an experience of bodies and hunger and mud. He wrote about the poor, not with the romanticizing tenderness that sometimes afflicts poets of the left but with a precision that honored the specificity of their suffering. His verse was free, unrhymed, built on long cadenced lines that owed more to Whitman and Mayakovsky than to the classical Chinese tradition. He was, in every sense, a modernist: a poet who believed that new times required new forms, that the old meters and the old metaphors were as exhausted as the old political order they had served.

The irony is that it was precisely this modernism that made him vulnerable. Mao's Yan'an talks had established that art must be accessible to the masses, that literary experiment for its own sake was a bourgeois indulgence, that the poet's job was not to innovate but to communicate. Ai Qing's poetry communicated (it was widely read and genuinely popular), but it communicated on its own terms rather than the party's. There was always, in his best work, a stubbornness of vision that resisted the reduction of poetry to propaganda. He wrote about China's suffering, but he insisted on the complexity of the suffering, and complexity was precisely what the party did not want. The party wanted clarity: heroes and villains, progress and reaction, the bright future and the dark past. Ai Qing offered ambiguity, which in the political vocabulary of the time was another word for treachery.

The labeling of Ai Qing as a rightist was therefore not an accident or a misunderstanding but the logical consequence of a system that could not tolerate the independent exercise of literary judgment. The poet had not opposed the revolution. He had not criticized Mao. He had simply insisted, in his poems and in his public statements, on the poet's right to see what was there rather than what was supposed to be there. In a state that demanded the subordination of perception to ideology, this insistence was indistinguishable from rebellion.

And so the poet was sent to clean latrines, and the poet's son was sent with him, and in the desert of Xinjiang, in the first years of a life that would become one of the most consequential artistic lives of the twenty-first century, a boy learned that the state would destroy what it could not control, and that what it most wished to control was the act of seeing clearly.

The lesson was not wasted.

The city of Shihezi, where the Ai family was sent, deserves a brief description, because the place shaped the child as surely as the father's humiliation did. It was a settlement of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, known as the Bingtuan, an organization unique to China and almost impossible to explain to anyone who has not encountered it. The Bingtuan was founded in 1954 to "reclaim" the deserts of Xinjiang, that is, to settle them with Han Chinese, to establish agricultural production in territory that the Uyghur population had inhabited for centuries, and to create a permanent military-agricultural presence on China's most restive frontier. It was part army, part farm collective, part colonial enterprise, and part prison system. Its settlements were laid out on a grid, like military camps, surrounded by irrigation canals dug by the labor of the settlers themselves, many of whom had not chosen to be there.

The buildings were low and utilitarian, made of mud brick and concrete. The streets were unpaved. The wind was constant: a dry, cutting wind that carried the desert sand into every structure, every garment, every meal. The temperature ranged from brutal summer heat to winter cold that killed livestock. The water was scarce and often brackish. The food was monotonous: cornmeal, cabbage, occasionally meat. The medical facilities were rudimentary. The schools, such as they were, taught the standard curriculum of Maoist education: political study, basic literacy, revolutionary songs.

Into this environment came Ai Qing, one of the great literary minds of modern China, and his family. They were assigned quarters in a communal building. The quarters were small (a single room, or perhaps two) and shared with other families of the politically disgraced. The walls were thin. Privacy was nonexistent. The communal latrines of such settlements (the kind Ai Qing would later be assigned to clean at the family's next, still more remote station) were open-pit facilities, crude even by the standards of the time, shared by dozens of families. The work of cleaning them involved hauling waste by hand. The smell, in summer, was overpowering.

Weiwei grew up in this. He played in the dusty streets with the children of other exiles and settlers. He attended the local school. He learned to read, though there was almost nothing to read: the family's books had been confiscated or left behind in Beijing, and the only available literature was Maoist propaganda. He learned to write, practicing his characters on whatever paper could be found. He learned the songs of the revolution, which praised the very system that had destroyed his father. He learned, as all children of the politically disgraced learned, the particular social skill of navigating a world in which his family's status was simultaneously public knowledge and something that could not be openly discussed.

The other children knew. In the settlements of the Bingtuan, everyone knew everyone's story, and the children of rightists occupied a specific position in the social hierarchy: not at the very bottom, which was reserved for the children of active counterrevolutionaries and criminals, but low enough that the knowledge of their parents' disgrace was always present, always available as a weapon. Weiwei would later speak of this with a matter-of-factness that belied its emotional weight: the casual cruelties of children who have been taught that some families are good and other families are bad, the way a political label attaches itself not to the person who earned it but to everyone connected to that person, the way shame transmits itself through families like a genetic trait.

And yet, the portrait of Weiwei's childhood that emerges from his own accounts and from the recollections of those who knew the family is not entirely bleak. Children are resilient, and the desert, for all its harshness, was a landscape of extraordinary visual power. The light in Xinjiang is different from the light anywhere else in China: clearer, sharper, more luminous, the light of altitude and aridity. The sky is enormous. The land stretches to the horizon in every direction, uninterrupted by trees or buildings, a canvas of brown and gold and blue that changes with the seasons and the time of day. Weiwei has spoken of the beauty of the desert with a genuineness that suggests the aesthetic awakening was real, however involuntary. The boy who would grow up to fill galleries with installations of staggering visual ambition first encountered the power of empty space in Xinjiang, where space was the only thing in abundance.

There is, too, the matter of the father's character. Ai Qing may have been silenced as a poet, but he had not been silenced as a man. Within the confines of the family, he remained what he had always been: intelligent, observant, possessed of a dry humor that survived the indignities of his situation. He spoke to his children as though they were capable of understanding the world, which is one of the great gifts a parent can give. He did not explain politics (explanation would have been dangerous), but he modeled a way of being in the world that was attentive, skeptical, and fundamentally unbroken. The child watched and learned. He learned that a man could be humiliated without being diminished, that external circumstances did not determine internal worth, that the state could take away a man's position and his freedom and his right to practice his art but could not take away the quality of his attention.

These are the lessons of the desert. They would take decades to flower, and when they did, they would flower in forms that Ai Qing could not have predicted and might not have approved. The poet's son would become not a poet but something the Chinese language did not yet have a word for: an artist whose medium was not paint or stone or words but confrontation itself, whose art was inseparable from the political act of refusing to be silent. But the seed was planted in Xinjiang, in the years when the boy watched his father carry waste and said nothing, and understood everything.

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, in the last year of his father's freedom. He would not see Beijing again until he was in his late teens. By then, the boy who had grown up in the desert would be a young man with a consuming hunger for everything the desert had denied him: beauty, knowledge, the world beyond the horizon. He would carry the desert with him for the rest of his life.

Everyone does. Everyone carries the landscape of their childhood into every room they enter, every work they make, every argument they have with the world. Ai Weiwei carries the desert.