Ai WeiWei, Chinese Pro-Democracy Dissident, Whereabouts Unknown In China

BEIJING -- One of China's most famous contemporary artists remained missing Monday, more than a day after he was blocked from leaving the country and police raided his home, his wife said.

The disappearance of artist Ai Weiwei comes as China carries out a massive crackdown on lawyers, writers and activists, arresting and detaining dozens since online calls for protests similar to those in the Middle East and North Africa began to circulate in February. No public protests have emerged.

Ai, an outspoken government critic, has been keeping an informal tally of those detentions on Twitter, where he has been an avid poster, frequently expressing outrage at injustice and drawing more than 70,000 followers. Ai, a star in international art circles, has been barred from going abroad before at least once before and was stopped while preparing to board a flight to Hong Kong on Sunday. Police later raided his Beijing home and studio.

"There is no news of him so far," said Ai's wife, Lu Qing. Lu said she was interrogated Sunday night by Beijing city police, who searched the couple's home and took away items, including documents, computers and hard drives.

"They asked me about Ai Weiwei's work and the articles he posted online," Lu told The Associated Press. "I told them that everything that Ai did was very public, and if they wanted to know his opinions and work they could just look at the Internet."

She said a group of office employees who were detained when Ai's studio was searched had been released.

Lu said police gave no hints as to where Ai was, why he was being detained or how long he would be held. She said Ai's mother, who is in her 80s, was very anxious about her son's fate.

A question faxed to police Monday asking about Ai's situation was not immediately answered. Under Chinese law, police are supposed to notify family members when detaining a suspect for longer than 24 hours, though authorities often ignore such strictures, especially in politically high-profile cases, as Ai's certainly would be.

Ai is the son of one of China's most famous modern poets, and that stature led many to believe he was protected from serious attack or formal arrest. He had been courted by the communist government as a cultural ambassador before his advocacy on behalf of social activists apparently made him a target of Chinese authorities.

An assistant, who did not want to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the incident, said Monday that there had been no word from Ai since he was escorted away by two officials while going through customs at the Beijing Capital International Airport early Sunday.

It was not clear why the 53-year-old artist and architectural designer was barred from leaving or who was now holding him.

Ai, an avant-garde artist, is perhaps China's best known artist internationally and recently exhibited at the Tate Modern gallery in London. He was stopped from boarding a flight to Seoul in December shortly after being invited to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, honoring jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion.

Ai said at the time that police blocked him at the boarding gate and showed him a handwritten note that said he could cause damage to national security by leaving.

Known for his distinctive scraggly beard and stocky frame, Ai was a consultant for the futuristic Bird's Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics before souring on the event. He was later beaten and detained while attempting to attend the trial of an advocate for victims of the devastating 2008 earthquake in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

Alison Klayman, an American filmmaker who has been working on a documentary about Ai for more than two years, said by telephone from New York that Beijing police visited Ai's studio three times in the past week, checking the passports and identification of Chinese and foreign assistants working there and some visiting architecture students from Europe.

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Associated Press writer Scott McDonald contributed to this report.

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Array

Comments

[butchcliff]

06:58 AM on 04/05/2011

Wouldn't expect China to admit that he's been thrown in jail, tortured & then disposed of',
would ya? Hope he's hiding somewhere.

[DAE]

12:29 AM on 04/05/2011

This has happened time and again in China. First there was the 100 Flowers campaign that encouraged criticism, followed by the anti-rightest movement. Then the Big Character Poster movement during the Cultural Revolution which was promoted and then suppressed. After the Cultural Revolution there was Democracy Wall during the Beijing Spring of 1979 which was abruptly stopped. The demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were tolerated for months before they were suppressed. This latest crack down is a result of the spread of unfettered comments on the Internet converging with the upheavals in the Arab World. So it is not as if its unexpected. Outspoken critics will be detained and counseled to cool it. Some of the more intransigent human rights activists and outspoken opponents of the political system will be sent to prison for a spell. This is done as a precautionary measure by politicians who don't fear the activists so much as hard-liners in the government. People in authority are trying to show their cajones. There is a major inner party fight brewing in the CCP within the new generation of leadership that will be promoted to the top ranks in 2012 and 2013. In the past whenever the Chinese political system is undergoing a major transition and the Party is under stress there is a crack down on dissent. Its similar to what happens in any political system although the symptoms may vary. In the US we usually go after the poor and minorities. In China dissidents.

[factsaboutchina]

12:19 AM on 04/05/2011

When you detain dissidents you show a lack of confidence in your system. If one has confidence in their form of government, they need not worry about those mucking rake. Hu Jin Tao is a coward.

[HanMeiRen]

08:04 AM on 04/05/2011

Of course the CCP does not have confidence in their form of government.

They have seen how Chinese people rose up in 1989 but failed to change their government even with the bloodshed of the Chinese people whom the CCP claims to serve; they have seen how Russian people rose up and toppled their communism; they have seen how the Romanian people rose up and toppled their communism and put their dictator under firing squad…and recently they have seen how the Tunisian people rose up; how the Egyptian people rose up….

The CCP is brutal and may be even evil as a governing system but they are not stupid. They have not only the recent world history to learn from but also the long domestic history of how China had been governed by the emperors.

The CCP will fight with their last bullet to maintain their supreme power.

[Amryxx]

11:49 PM on 04/04/2011

I wonder if China is too big to undergo the wave of protests and revolutions currently sweeping the Middle East.

[factsaboutchina]

12:17 AM on 04/05/2011

China will not.

One - A rising middle class concerned more about acquiring wealth.
Two - An apathetic youth.
Three - General stability within its society
Four - A police state apparatus that is more professional and well equipped than those of middle eastern states.
Five - Confucian thought runs deep in China. Confucian though can be boiled down to one word: Obedience

[loki]

11:48 PM on 04/04/2011

if he was in the states, he wouldn't be a Dissident, he would be an enemy combatant and swept away to most likely Gitmo with no information about it at all. Why? because its the Patriot law now days, and they can.
You can cry China and Communist all you want, but really, we are no different here. If our corporate gov doesnt like you, your destroyed in the media, socially, and privately. Then if that doesnt work they try to destroy you financially. And if that doesnt work, your called a child molester and arrested, then in the name of national security swept away to an undisclosed location for an undetermined period of time.
Nope, the Plutocracy States of America has learned from its decades fighting communism, and improved on everything they use to claim was bad about the communist system. The KGB of the old USSR is green with envy over the improvement the US has made to their system. And here we whine about China?

[thirstywriter]

11:10 PM on 04/04/2011

I'm not surprised. It's a symptom that the communist regime is about to lose its senses again. It killed three thousands innocent students in Beijing in the early Jun of 1989. It starved 40 millions of peasants to death from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. It executed millions of innocent people during the Cultural Revolution. No other regime, not even Hitler & Stalin's or pal pot's could match this evil communist regime in persecuting and murdering its people.

[kocean1]

08:53 PM on 04/04/2011

Bring back WeiWei...get the State department involved ?...Bring bring back WeiWei. I hope he's OK !

[joebiteme]

06:07 PM on 04/04/2011

he's missing what don't they understand

[HanMeiRen]

06:06 PM on 04/04/2011

Sigh.....a long sigh.

This is China we are talking about. If the people of China can take it so can we from the United States of America. After all it is their freedom not ours.

Best wishes to the Chinese people.

[Mrclouds]

05:32 PM on 04/04/2011

IF you want a democratic China one already exists it called Taiwan, the Chinese who want democracy are free to Move to Taiwan and Hong Kong otherwise they can be apart of the society and benefit from its economic boom.

[HanMeiRen]

06:18 PM on 04/04/2011

I agree with a lot of what you stated.

The only trouble is the Chinese people are NOT free to move to Taiwan or Hong Kong.

I would imagine a mass exodus if the human movement is uncontrolled.

Ah…what a sad state the Chinese are in…and most of them are not even aware of it.

[Mrclouds]

06:22 PM on 04/04/2011

Mass exodus ??? I've lived in China for 6 years on a work Visa and Majority about 87% support the government please stop watching fox news really actually it would be 2-3 years for them to move to Taiwan of Hong Kong not that long really and least from what I've been told by the Chinese work agencies.

[xtiangodloki]

10:12 PM on 04/04/2011

There are plenty of migrant Chinese who go to Hong Kong to find jobs. Once the travel agreements with Taiwan improves you can expect plenty of Taiwanese to prefer cheap labor from Mainland as well. On the other hand there are also plenty of wealthy people from Taiwan and Hong Kong who are coming back to the Mainland and have made it their second home.

People migrate from one place to another via often a simple cost/benefit analysis which may does not include political freedom at all. For immigrants, political freedom is very nice but tends to be icing on the cake. If you look at the numbers, Shanghai as a city hosts one the largest if not the largest amount of overseas Taiwanese and Japanese population. You figured the Japanese and especially Taiwanese would avoid China like a plague because of political differences. Clearly that is not the case.

[Anabelle Lee]

04:42 PM on 04/04/2011

Another example that Chinese law is now worth nothing written and the Party can change anything at any time they wish.

[loki]

11:51 PM on 04/04/2011

hmmm? Sounds like the US doesnt it.

[Sachin Narode]

04:00 PM on 04/04/2011

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ai-wei-wei/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=bigimage&utm_source=bigimage

[allperils]

02:59 PM on 04/04/2011

So?

I'd like to see the US launch a "NO FLY ZONE PLUS PLUS" over China.

Nice try...but China's leaders are doing a great job at managing the country.

In a recent report, the IMF ranked China 5th in the World for Fiscal Responsibility. The US was ranked 28th. Japan 31. Greece and Portugual dead last.

[bbnz]

03:32 PM on 04/04/2011

So does that mean you want us to adopt Communism?

[loki]

11:54 PM on 04/04/2011

there has to be something better and other than just a choice between Communism and our ivy greed capitalism. Neither one is a good system, and both abuse and rape the masses for the benefit of a very small few. Why do we have to choose between those two?

[Mrclouds]

02:41 PM on 04/04/2011

Most Chinese are pretty happy about the state they live in due to China's economic boom only a small amount oppose it and no I'm not an Agent for the CCP , and majority of the people who want Democracy in China have never been there or know very little about.

[allperils]

02:59 PM on 04/04/2011

Democracy is a word.

The shadow gov't that strangles the US is far from a democracy.

Now cut the b.s.

Straight from China.

[Mrclouds]

03:07 PM on 04/04/2011

What B.S are you talking about ? have you even been to China or understand the Politics there ? all I see today is moronic teenagers calling for the Freedom of Tibet and Chinese Democracy saying stop the genocide, the population of Tibet has grown twice the size and Under democracy there is Pure Corruption, In the US the Corrupt get treated like Royalty in China they get Justice, But I'm going to stop wasting my Breath it's like talking to a wall.

[loki]

12:02 AM on 04/05/2011

In a way I agree with allperils Democracy is a word only in the USA. The ivy greed capitalist are the real gov in the US, and we are far from a real democracy. In fact, democracy isnt even in the Constitution, but Republic is. And we are far from the Republic we were intended to be too. Democracy being used as our system of Gov can be traced back to campaigns in the late 1800s. It started as a PR campaign and worked. Its be used since then, but that still doesn't make us a Democracy.

And in case your wondering, yes, I have been to China. I'm half Chinese, and have family in China. China is not a bad place at all and even though they have problems they do very well. Here in the US we have problems much like those many Americans complain about China having. Its hypocritical really. China is different, but neither China or the USA has the market on human rights, Liberties, Freedoms, and more. In fact, they are very much the same in many ways. We just choose to ignore ior sugar coat it when it happens here.

[bbnz]

03:36 PM on 04/04/2011

I guess the 10,000 plus that were killed in Tiananmen Square would disagree but then again their voices have been silenced forever. If you open your mouth in China, Big Brother is watching so those who would like to protest live in a state of fear.

[Mrclouds]

03:40 PM on 04/04/2011

Your free to criticize china in your country ,but attacking China while your in it is two different things and every government has had a Tienanmen Square, besides Democracy brings corrupt and lacks discipline you can keep your Human rights and Democracy in your own country stop Imposing it on others.

[DAE]

05:12 PM on 04/04/2011

I was in Beijing at the time staying at a hotel a few blocks from where most of the action occurred. There were deaths on all sides, demonstrators, soldiers, bystanders and trouble-makers. There was no where near 10,000 killed. Best estimates are a few hundred. It was one of China's most tragic and traumatic events and obviously still reverberates to this day.

[Rador]

01:36 PM on 04/04/2011

They've injured him in the past, demolished his studio when it was just finished and harras him constantly. Every time, he gets more notoriety and a bigger following around the world. I have a feeling that this is a life that will be honored for many many years.

[Rador]

01:38 PM on 04/04/2011

harass