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时代杂志年度人物 Runner-Up:艾胖胖(图)zz
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时代杂志年度人物 Runner-Up:艾胖胖(图)zz# WaterWorld - 未名水世界
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时代杂志年度人物 Runner-Up:艾胖胖(图)zz
具体的文章在这里
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101
For 81 days last spring and summer, Ai Weiwei was China's most famous
missing person. Detained in Beijing while attempting to catch a flight to
Hong Kong on April 3, Ai, an artistic consultant for the iconic Bird's Nest
stadium, was held almost entirely incommunicado and interrogated some 50
times while friends and supporters around the world petitioned for his
release. On Nov. 1, Ai, who says the case against him is politically
motivated, was hit with a $2.4 million bill for back taxes and penalties.
Two weeks later, he paid a $1.3 million bond with loans from Chinese
supporters who contributed online and in person and even tossed cash over
the walls of his studio in northeast Beijing.
The son of a revolutionary poet, Ai, 54, has grown more outspoken in recent
years, expressing his anger at abuses of power and organizing online
campaigns, including a volunteer investigation into the deaths of children
in schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. His detention
came amid a broad crackdown on activists by the Chinese government meant to
stamp out a call for Arab Spring–inspired pro-democracy protests as well as
continuing unrest in the Tibetan regions, where 12 people have set
themselves on fire since March to protest Chinese policies.
Ai, who speaks excellent if not quite flawless English, sat down on Dec. 12
with TIME's Hannah Beech and Austin Ramzy — and a calico cat, one of nearly
two dozen cats and dogs at his studio — to discuss his detention, the
poetry of Twitter and whether China is immune to the global forces of
protest and revolution.
In 1981 you left China with no plans to return, but you came back. Why?
Before, I had seen my father and other people criticized or struggled
against, but I was not directly involved. Then you see your generation being
crushed. You see that this power has no intention of telling the truth. On
the one hand it is ruthless, but on the other hand it is so weak.
When you are 20-something years old, you realize the only way to protect
your dignity is to leave rather than to be damaged by this big machine. You
see in your generation people who are destroyed. So I decided I had to leave.
After 12 years in New York, I was 36. I heard a lot about how China was
different. My father was ill. I wanted to go back to China and pay my last
respects.
You returned in 1993. How is today's China different from the one you left?
I think two things have changed China. To survive, China had to open up to
the West. It could not survive otherwise. This was after many millions have
died of hunger in a country that was like North Korea is today. Once we
became part of global competition, we had to agree to some rules. It's
painful, but we had to. Otherwise there was no way to survive. But
domestically it's still the same machine. There's no judicial process or
transparency.
The other is the Internet. They realized that it was also important to
surviving. It's also related to survival. But to use it, they had to open up
. They could not completely censor the information and the knowledge
available there. These two things completely changed the character of this
nation.
In recent years, you have merged the Internet with political activism. How
did that happen?
I got involved with architecture. To work in architecture you are so much
involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very
complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how
it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it
works.
Because of my work in architecture, Sina [a Chinese Internet company] asked
me to blog. I told them I don't have a computer. I don't know how to type.
They said, "Don't worry, it's easy. We can help you set it up." At the
beginning, I started to post my early artworks. I only wrote a few articles.
Even though writing is the most admirable skill, I had no chance to become
a writer because of my educational background. I hadn't really studied it
except for Chairman Mao's sentences. So I just started to type. My first
blog post was one sentence, something like "To express yourself needs a
reason, but expressing yourself is the reason."
Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of
writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never
had before. It was like a bullet out of the gun. (See pictures of Ai Weiwei'
s art.)
Your work online became more political, particularly after you launched your
investigation into the shoddily constructed schools that collapsed in the
Sichuan earthquake.
They shut off my blog because every day we were posting investigations. I
said it was O.K. if the government didn't want to tell the truth, but
citizens should bear the responsibility to act. That is very powerful. We
showed the people how we got those [student] names, what were the
difficulties [the volunteers] encountered, how many times we had been
arrested, how we searched — all the details.
I was very sad the moment they shut it off, because there was nothing we
could do. And then some guy said, "I opened a miniblog for you." It was just
one sentence — 140 characters. Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real
and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,
000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it,
sometimes 24 hours.
Your detention forced you into silence. What was it like?
First they make sure you know that nothing can protect you, no law can
protect you. They gave me the example of Liu Shaoqi [the Chinese head of
state who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and died in prison
in 1969]. The constitution could not protect him, and today not much has
changed. Then they said, "We want to dirty your name. We want to smash your
popularity. We want to tell people you're a liar and dishonest."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102133_2102331,00.html #ixzz1gXBV4O5A
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