On Ai Weiwei’s “Beautiful life”
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5jnaYl199o
The missing Chinese artist and human right activist Ai Weiwei made this documentary “beautiful life” about another human right activist—Feng Zhenghu, who has publicly denounced Chinese government’s wrongdoing in 1989 and was since denied to entering China –his home country – for 8 times. And at the 8th time, when he was forced (in his own words, kidnapped) to go back to Japan, he decided to fight. And so he stayed in Narita airport for 80 days, refusing to go into Japan custom and demand going back to China and finally suceeded. Ai documented the whole event and made the “beautiful life”.
What really interests me about this video is not the “fighting government” part, but rather how calm and reasonable Feng was in the whole event. His demand was simple: as a Chinese citizen, he has every right to go back to China. And his demand was also down to earth: government should be willing to communicate with the people rather than still in a mindset of “govern” the people.
Compared with many other activists calling for “democracy” “freedom of speech”, I find his approach more pragmatic and feasible. And I believe the ultimate change Chinese people want to see can only be achieved with accumulation of many smaller changes (I don’t want to see another bloodshed revolution that would reduce the country back 30 years). Therefore maybe instead of shouting for those sensitive words that has little effect and easily get themselves into trouble with the Chinese CIA agents, the activists should adopt a more pragmatic approach, target on a more substantive topic, like homeless people protection, migrant workers’ kids education, etc. and use their talents and energy on these real things to make small changes, and the final big change everyone anticipate would come. After all, as the last dictator of Taiwan Mr. Jiang Jingguo said, “There’s no party that can rule forever.”

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