Susan Shirk Comments on Political Challenges to China Communist Rule
The Silver Lining in China's Crackdown
06/25/2011
The Epoch Times,
Vivian Yang
It has been more than two months since Chinese artist Ai Weiwei disappeared. The son of famous poet Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei is well known for his architecture, curating, photography, film, and social criticism.
After his collaboration with the architects Herzog and de Meuron on Beijing's Olympic stadium, his fame spread. Outspoken and liberal, Ai has long been an advocate for democracy. He stated that he had no interest in the 2008 Olympics and would not attend the opening ceremony: "an Olympics held without freedom and against the will of the people will be nonsense because no totalitarian regime canplay at being democracy. It is a pretend harmony and happiness."
In 2009, the first anniversary of China's Wenchuan earthquake, Ai made a documentary of children killed in the earthquake in an attempt to help keep alive the issue of why so many schools collapsed. The Chinese government intended to play down the shoddy school buildings and focused instead on how the People's Liberation Army saved lives. Determined to reveal the truth, Ai made public what the government wanted to hide. Besides his provocative arts, Ai also wrote extensively about his liberal political views on his blog and on Twitter.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS. She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
