Ai Weiwei : A Chinese Artist And Architect Who Over The Years

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Wolfgang van Goethe is quoted as saying: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”. If Goethe, who died in the early 1800s, could have looked forward a hundred and twenty years to Mao Zedong’s Communist China, he would have doubtless seen his words ring painfully true. Mao’s dynastic rule survived on elimination of any thought deemed contrary to his own. Those who dared to speak out were dealt with swiftly and severely. Yet some people did not believe they were free, and were willing to do risk everything to subvert Mao’s manufactured culture. “The Mao Button”, “Black Walls”, and “Dogshit Food” are short stories that criticize the

The film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) is a documentary directed by Alison Klayman. It follows contemporary Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, documenting how he stood up against the Chinese government and revealed the horrific actions the government commits. Ai Weiwei differs from other critics of the Chinese government because he uses aggressive words, while his fellow critics do not insult the government or the Communist Party. He uses several mediums to show how the government has acted including his blog and documentaries, showing what Chinese citizens go through on a daily basis.. Weiwei is incredibly brave for putting his life on the line to fight for a better country and a better world.

The Next piece is an image form Guo Xi who was a master from the Northern

Bob Fu conveys clearly the inexorable control that Communist leaders in China have over their people. For example, after Fu and his friends participated in the Tiananmen Square protests, Fu was coerced, day in day out, to write a confession of his purported misdeeds against China and her people as a “counterrevolutionary” (79-82, 85, 87).

“As one of the Red Guards in the middle school, I was given power through Mao to torture and humiliate our teachers, headmaster or anyone we didn’t like. I didn’t know it was wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing to continue the revolution, to fight and win the class struggle”- Zhao, Lin Qing. As a teenager Zhao was a Red Guard in Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution. When asked what her impression was a member of the Red Guards, Zhao answered with two words: “naïve and senseless”. She refused answering anything more about her experience. She said, “The memories are still too painful to recall.”

Even with her previous experiences at Beijing University and at Big Joy Farm, Wong still held some belief that the Chinese system wasn’t as bad as it was sometimes made out to be. This event proved to her that it was. “The enormity of the massacre hit home…Although it had been years since I was a Maoist, I still had harbored some small hope for China. Now even that was gone” (259). As a reporter Wong was able to view the progression of the protests in leading up to the massacre, and in viewing it understood that the Chinese people were much more independent than they had previously demonstrated over the past 50 years. She had continuously seen the Chinese people following what they were told between learning in school or with physical labor, yet this protest was one of the first large scale displays of the unacceptance of the regime by the people, and the government did not know what to do with it. But because of this, Wong was able to recognize that the people were not reliant on this way of life that they had previously been bound to, but truly could lead for themselves and take control. The massacre awakened Wong both to the reality that the government was not acting to benefit the people, and that the people were more than capable of acting for

Originally, Liang’s “parents were deeply involved in all the excitement of working to transform China into a great Socialist country” (4). Over a serious of unfortunate events, though, he became the child of a “Rightist’s cap” mother and a “Reactionary Capitalist stinking intellectuals” father (9, 51). Impacted by the shattering of his family and horrific bloodshed created by fighting, Liang Heng began to question the Cultural Revolution. He claimed that his “family had scarified so much… but it had given [them] nothing in return” (148). Liang Heng presents his shift in ideology to demonstrate that most Chinese were no longer in support of a Communist nation. His “troubles were common enough and anyone could see there was a discrepancy between the glorious words of the newspapers and [their] painful reality (232). Even Liang Heng’s father, after many years of devotion, found that he could no longer defend the Party’s policies after he experienced the ill-treatment of the peasants in the country

Throughout the poem, May includes historical figures, like Huang Xiang, to show Jontae that he will not be alone throughout his journey of discovering his identity. May refers to Huang Xiang, a poet who was exiled during the Tiananmen Square incident, who he describes as; “the poet… who was exiled for these” (33-34), while “these” represents the words and the education of the poet. The incorporation of the allusions from a historical point of view, influences the idea that Jontae should stay true to himself, regardless of what the rest of society thinks. The fact that Huang Xiang was exiled for plastering his poems around the Square, goes to prove May’s point regarding society’s overall view on education. May goes on to write “there will always be those who would rather see you pull a pin from a grenade than pull a pen from your backpack” (37-40). Huang Xiang is a prime example of what the speaker longs for Jontae to be like. Roger Garside, a British diplomat who served in Beijing during the crisis explained Xiang’s efforts as “an equally bold initiative on the organizational front: after pasting up his poems on Tiananmen Square…” (Garside, 2005). Xiang exemplifies a deviant of society, with his nonviolent protests, and his education involving poetry. May is determined to convince Jontae that he is not bound to the option of

This memoir of Ma Bo’s sent shock waves throughout China when it was published and was even first banned by the Communist Government. This passionate story paints a clear picture for what the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was really like. Many Chinese living today can attest to similar if not identical ordeals as expressed in Ma Bo’s story. The toils of being a young Red Guard in inner China were experienced by many if not millions. The horrors and atrocities were wide spread throughout the country, not just in Inner Mongolia. The experiences illustrated in Blood Red Sunset uniquely belong to Ma Bo’s entire generation of mislead Chinese. As expressed in the books dedication the Cultural Revolution

The apex of Wong’s book is how she displays the emotional overtones in reciting her account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. She tells of being holed up in a hotel across the street from the square and actually being able to see the violence between the protesting students and citizens, and the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. When she describes bodies falling from gunshot wounds, people being squashed by tanks, and the bullets ricocheting off their hotel walls, it produces multiple senses of horror, sorrow, and absolute terror. She further hammers this point across by displaying two images taken from the scene (245). The first is of a PLA platoon leader who was beaten, set afire, disemboweled, and to add further insult, positioned so that he would serve as an example of what the proletariats were capable of. The second, was of PLA soldiers examining the destruction of Tiananmen Square after they seized the square. Smoke and debris from the protestors are widely prevalent, and the image was even used in a propaganda brochure for the government.

Ai Weiwei is a famous international artist and a most outspoken regional critic in China. Ai express his opinions though social media, visual arts and performing arts. In order to stop Ai’s criticism，Chinese authorities have shut down Ai’s blog, beat him, and take him to secret detention centers.

Nonetheless, the popularization of the internet enables the Chinese to get in touch with the Western values. Thus, activism for human rights has appeared online. This essay will argue how online activism has influenced Chinese understandings of human rights; formed the attitude toward the authoritarian regime; and shaped the Chinese society. Two cases are selected namely 1) Shanxi black brick kiln slave scandal; 2) Lei Yang incident. At the same time, I will illustrate how the authority response to the two incidents which are positive and negative respectively. The positive is that the social welfare has been improved, while the negative is that the government tightened the cyber control.

During the Zhengfeng (1942-1944), the Chinese Communist Party strongly believed that artistic expressions lacked a unified cultural approach. As such, they used various methods to consolidate ideological unanimity among cadres around Maoism. In his “Talks at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao Zedong stresses the struggle on the cultural front as an indispensable

Now, many Chinese citizens are attempting to access these applications and searches without censorship by “connect[ing] to virtual private networks that provide them with communications channels to servers outside the Chinese mainland” (Bradsher 4). Though, many citizens have found loopholes in order to post their messages to these websites. For example, on Weibo (the Chinese version of twitter), if a user were to post using a specific keyword, the post would automatically be deleted, if not manually by a superior on the site if it slipped through the system. However, because the use of “abbreviations, neologisms, homophones, and homographs” by users, many political satirists, revolutionists, or regular citizens find themselves sliding through the cracks thus escaping the censoring governments reach (Wang and Mark 5). In addition, because the government also changes from time to time, a man named Yu Jia, a government critic stated that “Today's China is very different from Chairman Mao's China. I think then, it used to be like an iron slab, and there was only really one idea. It was completely impermeable. But now, it's more like a fishnet, and there are holes” (Jia, Han and Fu 4). This further proves the argument that legislation in regard to behavior online is too varied in

Ji-li Jiang during China’s cultural resolution. During this time, Ji-li was humiliated, bullied and witnessed people very close to her heart, suffered horrible atrocities. Both book’s share a fascinating story, where socialist governments inflict such grief and lack of freedom upon the people. In some ways, I can infer similarities of both these phenomenal-books within certain aspects of my own life. As well as, to the current social and governmental trends of the world and most of all I can relate both books together!