The Beijing police department announced on Wednesday that Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has been released on ‘bail’ after nearly 3 months in detention. He was released from detention after pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion and for intentionally destroying accounting documents.

As an outspoken critic of the Chinese governments human rights record, his arrest in April was seen by many as an attempt to silence him during the widespread crackdown on dissidents called ‘the big chill’ – where human rights advocates, artists and other activists were being arbitrarily arrested within the Chinese mainland.

According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua who first published Mr. Ai’s release, the grounds for his bail were “his good attitude in confessing his crime as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.” It was also taken into consideration that Mr Ai had “repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded,” according to the police.

The high-profile detention has been the focal point of heated debate and criticism from international observers who pointed to China’s faltering effort in living up to international standards of human rights. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and British sculptor Anish Kapoor were among the prominent people who publicly protested the detention of Mr. Ai. “Without the wave of international support for Ai and the popular expressions of dismay and disgust about the circumstances of his disappearance and detention, it’s highly unlikely the Chinese government would have released him,” said Phelim Kine, an Asian researcher for Human Rights Watch, to the New York Times.

While the 54-year-old artist looked a little slimmer as he arrived back home, he ensured reporters that he was ok. “I am already home, released on bail, I can’t talk to media but I am well, thanks for all the media attention,” he said to the BBC over the phone.

The conditions of his release are complicated. According to his sister, his wife received a phone call on Wednesday night, asking her to come to the police station. Reportedly, the officers informed her then and there that Mr. Ai was free to go. The word ‘bail’ commonly refers to the short translation of the Chinese term ‘qubao houshen’ which entails “obtaining a guarantee pending trial. [...] prosecutors have decided to drop charges against a suspect on certain conditions, including good behavior, and to monitor him over a period of time during which charges could be reintroduced,” The New York Times explains. According to a scholar of the Chinese legal system, the method is sometimes used as a ‘face-saving’ technique to end controversial cases and allows negotiation of the suspects condition of freedom.

Jerome Cohen, adjunct senior fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the CNN that Mr. Ai’s bail conditions has lost him his freedom of speech for at least a year. “He will not soon again be on Twitter, Facebook, television, take part in fora, etc. He’s got to keep quiet and behave according to the criteria of the Chinese police for the foreseeable future. He’s not the only one. This has happened many times before.”

Observers have noted that it’s no coincidence that the dissident artist was released on the eve of Premier Wen Jiabao’s upcoming European tour since Mr. Ai enjoys great support in the Western world. “Beijing has been under enormous pressure to free the artist,” says the BBC’s correspondent Damian Grammaticas. Both the US state department and EU representatives have welcomed the news but highlighted the critical circumstances of his arrest as well as those of dissidents and commentators who are still being held at unknown locations.

Image Courtesy of  http://100aiweiwei.org

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Bob Dylan, the 1960s musical legend and icon of the anti-war movement in the era of the Vietnam War came under heavy fire by critics and human rights groups following his performance at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing at the beginning of April. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times lashed out at the 69-year-old folk-rock legend for having “broken creative new ground in selling out.” The fiery commentator expressed her deepest regret that legendary troubadour of the 60s freedom anthems had sunken below the level of other known sellouts “ – even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.”

Dylan built his extensive career on a foundation of so-called ‘protest songs’ such as The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Like a Rolling Stone with lyrics that voiced the counterculture of the 1960s and labelled him the poster boy for a disenchanted generation, the BBC explains. However, the musician was never comfortable with the label and has been quoted for saying “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it.”

Still, Dowd complained that the old-school touring pro had failed to live up to his own words as he let the Chinese government “pre-approve his set.” She also criticized Dylan for keeping his lips sealed on the artist Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, whose detention happened in the days running up to his first performance in the Chinese capital. Faced with the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade, the lack of reaction from the aging musician was a thorn in the columnist’s rosy image of Dylan’s 60s persona as he “didn’t offer a reprise of ‘Hurricane,’ his song about ‘the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.’ He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.”

A few days ago, the icon himself responded to the criticism in an open letter to fans and followers on his webpage. He insisted that he knew nothing of any censorship imposed on him from the Chinese government and that the list of the songs which was sent to the authorities did not make a difference. “If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.”

Bob Dylan dismissed the alleged ‘China controversy’, that he was refused permission to enter China last year, and also refuted the words of Mojo magazine that claimed the “concerts were attended mostly by expats and there were a lot of empty seats.” According to Dylan, the local press had heralded him as a sixties icon and the seats had in fact been nearly full with young, enthusiastic Chinese. He denies any suggestion of bad vibes. “Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”

The New York Times explained how he has continuously tried to distance himself from the spirit of the anti-war movement and how his memoirs stress that he “had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the ‘cultural mumbo jumbo’ imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.”

According to the BBC, the notoriously stubborn singer-songwriter regularly surprises fans by changing his set lists. He is known for his lengthy concert tours, known as the Never-Ending Tour, which sometimes has him playing 100 times each year.

In 1963, the 22-year-old Dylan walked out on his first nationwide television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

Image Credit: Heinrich Klaff

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On Sunday, the internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei sat down with his wife Lu Qing at an unknown location for the first time since his arrest more than 40 days ago. His wife described the meeting as tense and inhibited and told correspondents from the BBC that their unification was watched by several other people, some taking notes, and she was told not to ask too many questions and mainly talk about family and health. Mr Ai, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes, ensured his wife that he was being taken care of and was in good health.

The artist was detained at Beijing’s airport on his way to Hong Kong last month and has remained incommunicado ever since. He is allegedly being held under investigation for suspected “economic crimes” according to the BBC but his detention has come amid a nationwide crackdown on political dissidents following the revolts in the Middle East. Mr Ai is well known as a vocal critic of the Chinese government and has championed social activism since the earthquake in the Sichuan province, 2008. His work has delivered recurring provocations against the government which is why the greater question seems why he wasn’t detained before.

Calls for information and his release had so far led to a dead end as China’s foreign ministry has insisted, according to a BBC report, that Mr. Ai’s case has “nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression.”

One of Mr Ai’s friends, the lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, met with Lu on Monday and determined that the artist is most likely being held under residential surveillance within the capital. According to Chinese law, a suspect can be held in this type of detention for up to six months before a decision is made on the case, a research manager from the human rights group Dui Hua Foundation explained to the Washington Post. But in most cases, the law is used to legitimize a ‘blackout’ of the whereabouts of a suspect outside the regular detention facilities where a case must be processed within 30 days.

The American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and EU officials have respectfully criticized Beijing for ‘backsliding’ on human rights – but where is the outrage?

In an online column for The Telegraph, one of Britain’s best known politicians Boris Johnson, mayor of London, raises this significant point: “Where are the candlelit vigils, the rallies for Ai Weiwei? Where are the newspaper campaigns and petitions, the why-oh-why-oh-weiweis?”

His own answer? The West has acquired an unflattering habit of tip-toeing around the Chinese government, afraid that with China slowly overtaking America as a ruling economy, any critical assessment of China’s flagrant disregard for human rights towards its own public could turn up a financial checkmate. “I had forgotten that this is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. What we are hearing is the silence of the rabbits — and all the global rabbits are hoping that if they keep still and say nothing, they will be rewarded with nice, big, crispy wodges of Chinese lettuce.”

Madame Fu Ying, the former Chinese ambassador to London, has said that any “fuss” about Ai Weiwei’s detention by Western media is “condescending”. In response, Johnson argues that China’s free reign to behave in ways found unacceptable by the rest of the world should be regarded as even more “condescending.” Why does the governments of this world continue to allow China to export their economic superiority and culture while import is limited to raw material and currency? Why do those with the greatest power to foster freedom of existence in the Chinese society deliberately gag themselves when the chance arrises to speak up on relevant problematics?

The West rightfully opened its arms to the potential of the largest population on this planet, no question about that, but in its excitement (and greed), something seems to have been lost in translation: This is not the West, individual freedom is not a right and no matter how famous you are, the rule of the state is absolute. Admittedly, Mr Ai has been given an unusually great amount of leeway but that should only add to the cause – If this is really about taxes, he should be tried as others would in the same situation. And as far as Western leaders are concerned, they should stop hiding in the bushes and stand up for their supposed principles in the face of the Chinese dragon.

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The internationally renowned Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, was detained by local police on April 3 as he was about to board a flight for Hong Kong. According to The Guardian, the assistant traveling with the artist was told that Ai Weiwei had “other business” and was unable to join. Since then, no one has been in contact with Mr Ai.

The 53-year-old celebrated artist has a long record of groundbreaking and provocative, politicized work but his disappearance this month seems to be part of a wider crackdown on the freedom of expression in China. Writers, artists, lawyers and activists have since mid-February been rounded up and silenced in an attempt to strangle the so-called Jasmine Revolution, inspired by the uprising in the Middle East and Africa. According to a report by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), the government of China has since February, “criminally detained a total of 26 individuals, disappeared more than 30, and put more than 200 under soft detention” after anonymous calls for public protests began to circulate online. The New Yorker refers to the crackdown as ‘The Big Chill’, characterising the difficult situation which the politically active in the Chinese mainland are confronted with – the official position of the government is that these measures are necessary to preserve ‘stability’ but as described by Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, the government of China “has sanctified “stability” to such a degree that any dissent is considered unlawful, which may prove to be the very undoing of real stability.” In effect, ‘The Big Chill’ is reminding dissidents and foreign observers about the continuous surveillance and threat from the government; the lawyer Gao Zhisheng has been missing for nearly a year while a court recently gave the democracy activist Liu Xianbin an unusually harsh sentence for “inciting subversion of state power” – the same charge brought against the Nobel Peace Price winner Liu Xiaobo.

Ai Weiwei may join these names – whether he surfaces in the near future or not. Because of his increased international fame after his involvement in the ‘Bird Nest’ stadium for the Olympics, his detention is seen as the beginning of one of the most high-profile cases in recent years. The artist has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government but has led a surprisingly ‘spacious’ artistic life with only few interventions by the authorities. Some incidents have revealed the government’s supervision of the artist’s work – in August 2009, Ai was beaten by local police for planning to testify on behalf of the investigation into the bad constructions, suspected of having exaggerated the death toll of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The artist had to undergo acute brain surgery four weeks after the assault, due to a subdural hematoma. Another significant event was the demolition of his studio in Shanghai. However, in spite of these incidents, followers and supporters of Ai Weiwei have said that the artist never delves on these incidents but finds continuous inspiration in their injustice.

Human rights campaigners are viewing his disappearance as a signal to other activists and dissidents to watch out. “Ai Weiwei has been a bit of an outlier and the harassment against him has been more and more intense in the past few months,” Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian. In addition, Mr Ai had been revealing his plans to open up a gallery in Berlin, Germany in response to the constraints he is facing in China, shortly before his detention.

It is believed that The Big Chill was initiated as a response to an online campaign for a Middle East-style protest called the ‘Jasmine Revolution’. Although the anonymous calls were made from overseas and generally showed little domestic support, the Chinese authorities began to detain and harass people within hours of the message’s appearance. Patrick Poon, the executive secretary of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, told the Guardian that he believed the message was simply an excuse to initiate a crackdown on human rights defenders, who have been growing in numbers in the last decade.

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