"Let us forget every instance of persecution," Ai Weiwei continues. "every instance of humiliation; every massacre and every cover-up, every lie, every death. Forget every moment of suffering;  then forget every moment of forgetting...Forget those soldiers who fired on civilians, those students whose bodies were crushed by the treads of tanks, the whistle and screams of bullets and blood on the streets and alleyways; a city and square without tears.  Forget the interminable lies, the rulers hoping everyone has forgotten. Forget their cowardice, their evil ineptitude...Only when they have been forgotten can we exist. For the sake of existing, let us forget." 

The irony in Ai Weiwei's text is that it could easily apply to many events that have taken place in the West.  It is easy to forget now that France developed its own self-imposed amnesia concerning its role in the atrocities committed during the 1954-1962 Algerian War for Independence.  Japan has still not come to terms with its role in the 1937 Rape of Nanking. And President Barack Obama is now struggling over whether to overlook the violations of human rights and the rules of war,  not to mention US federal law, that may have been committed by the CIA, or outsourced to mercenaries, under orders from the Bush administration in its self-styled global war on terror, awkwardly known as the GWOT.  We all have moments that we would rather forget.
The questions which Ai Weiwei deals with in his now suppressed blog are: is it better to put the past behind us and move forward, even if it means failing to acknowledge the evil that was done?  Or do these wounds need to be opened and cleansed once and for all?

We wrestle with these questions with varying degrees of personal honesty, and the fact is that American and European media have had nearly as much difficulty dealing with these issues as the Chinese. Of course the situation in China is far more dramatic and the personal cost of speaking out is far higher.  A journalist in the US or Europe only risks losing his job and possibly wrecking his career. In China the penalty for "subversion" can be a life sentence in prison or worse.  Nevertheless, the failure of American news media to directly confront the issues of torture and the government officials responsible for the deceptions that got us into Iraq is one of the factors underlying the current crisis in American journalism.

 But Ai Weiwei clearly doesn't care about the US or Europe.  His real concerns are China and his personal integrity.  "Every time I sit down to write," he says, "I still hesitate: should I do it? What will the consequences be? I retain a simple premise in mind: my blog is an extension of my thinking-why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity?  And this so-called Communist ideology is totally against humanity. Many generations of people over decades in this nation have been hurt by this: many are dead, many have disappeared and many have been damaged, whether conscious of this reality or not. So my position is not just one person's strange idea-these are our lives, and we live in this part of the world. People in London are not going to take a position-they have other concerns. So for me this is not a ‘responsibility'; it is part of life. If you live self-punishment or self-imposed ignorance or lack of self-awareness, it genuinely diminishes your existence. Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward." 

  A debt of gratitude for communicating the ideas of Ai Weiwei and other leading Chinese intellectuals to the outside world is owed to the China Digital Times, published by the China Internet Project, which is based at the Journalism School at the University of California at Berkeley.   The advisory board of CDT, as it calls itself, includes Orville Schell, former dead of the journalism school, John Battelle, one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, and Howard Rheingold, one of the major innovators in building web communities.  As China emerges as a world presence with an inevitable influence over global society, it will become increasingly necessary to understand China's internal philosophy. CDT continues to be an invaluable guide for anyone who doesnt actually read or write Chinese.

The most positive thing that one can say about China these days is that it is in flux.  The double irony in Ai Weiwei's candor is that the fact that he is still allowed to speak out despite fierce criticisms of the system is a hopeful sign that a more secure China is gradually exposing itself to change. 

In one of his blogs, Ai Weiwei recounts that a German student threw a shoe at  Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, while he was giving a speech at Cambridge University last January.  The incident triggered an angry backlash from Chinese students on the Internet.  Ai Weiwei, who was also in London, and was on his way to Heathrow airport, asked his taxi driver to stop outside the Houses of Parliament, where a crowd of tourists were taking photos. He asked the tourists to take photos while he threw his shoes at Parliament three times. A London police constable watched indifferently. "They were like, who cares?" Ai Weiwei writes. "I thought that this student who threw his shoe at Wen Jiabao was so brave, and they made such a big fuss in China. All those patriotic youth said  how can this guy do this?  But, you know it is very normal. Wen Jiabao is a political leader. Our political leaders hold a position where they should be criticized."

 At least some members of the Communist Party's Central Committee must secretly see the  truth in what Ai Weiwei is trying to get at. Twenty years ago he would have been locked up.  Today, at least for the moment, he is a symbol of  change and what hopefully looks like a growing maturity and self confidence in Beijing. .

Although the 20^th anniversary of Tienanmen passed virtually unnoticed in China, it remains a critical watershed in Chinese history.   The events leading up to the disastrous massacre of students and workers is described in searing detail from the student's point of view by Ma Jian in his epic novel, Beijing Coma, which is now on sale in most bookstores in the West, and may one day win China another Nobel Prize for literature.  One of China's greatest living writers, Ma Jian lives today in London, having been banned from ever publishing in China again. 

Almost as important a book is "Prisoner of the State," the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, who was the Chinese Communist Party's General Secretary leading up to the Tiananmen massacre.  Zhao Ziyang, one of the principle architects of China's transition to a market economy which created China's current economic boom,  describes from inside the Party's Central Committee the events that led to the bloody catastrophe.  Although Zhao Ziyang's book is sold in Hong Kong, it is not allowed to be sold in China.  Nevertheless a Chinese text in Microsoft Word is circulating on the Internet and has been downloaded all over China.  Zhao Ziyang's account is the tragic story of a government that evolves from revolution to gerontocracy, and in which conservative old men, once heroes of China's struggle for independence, unwittingly find themselves becoming counter revolutionaries against China's modernization. Zhao Ziyang was stripped of his power and cast aside because he refused to order the People's Liberation Army to open fire on its own people.  His defiant act led to his being forced  to spend the last 15 years of his life under house arrest. 

Despite the calamity that Tiananmen represented, Zhao Ziyang's account of the thought processes that China's leaders underwent is extraordinarily humane and even-handed. The book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand China.   China's leaders clearly want to remain in power, which means preventing any future revolutions.  They are gradually learning, however,  that in a country that contains a fifth of the world's population and is desperate to modernize, change is inevitable.

 In dealing with the complex riddle that is China today, Ai Weiwei probably says it best in his explanation of his vision of art: "The act of changing the understanding and perspective of an object, or reworking an established concept, disrupts its stability and makes it questionable," he writes.  "To have layers of color and images above the previous ones calls into question both the identity and the authenticity of the object.  It makes both conditions non-absolute. You cover something so that it is no longer visible, but it is still there underneath, and what appears on the surface is not supposed to be there, but it is there." 

China Digital times is on line at  chinadigitaltimes.net

To access the profile directly, click here

Ai Weiwei's Twitter account (in Chinese) is at http://twitter.com/aiww

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