Brian Eckert

Artist Ai Weiwei, freed after 80 days of internment by the Chinese government, violated the terms of his release by penning a stream-of-consciousness polemic against Beijing in Newsweek online, using words such words as “desperation,” “violence,” and “slaves” to describe the capital city.

Ai’s comments closely followed the announcement that Chinese police may gain the authority to detain suspects at secret locations for up to six months without notifying their families. The macabre sentiments he expresses towards Beijing are very likely tinged by this news, not to mention his own detention, of which he writes: “My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. You’re not protected by anything. Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad.”

Reading these statements from my 17^th story apartment, gazing out the window at a thick haze that envelops Beijing, it’s difficult not to share Ai’s pessimism towards the city. The Cloud obscures buildings, chokes the lungs, and enervates the spirit.

Polluted, sunless days have been common in the months that I’ve spent in Beijing, and they bring to mind Ai’s final words in his Newsweek piece: “This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. Cities are really mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare.”

On days that The Cloud lies thick over the city, Beijing is indeed a reality that I’d like to wake up from, although not for the same reason as Ai. Many in the West are quick to criticize China over its human rights record, but as a foreigner living in Beijing, the oppression remains merely anecdotal. Walking through the city, the only sign of centralized power is an occasional solider standing at attention.

More prominent is the chaotic crush of humanity that seems at liberty to do whatever it pleases. The police presence, if it could be called that, is laughable. The rare sight of an officer issuing a citation is typically accompanied by verbal assault from the ticketed. Hardly the actions of a beaten down people.

In his Newsweek essay, however, Ai points out that this appearance of freedom is misleading. “Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sorts of buildings. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights.”

The tremendous growth of the Chinese economy has presented opportunities for not only native born residents, but foreigners as well. They run the gamut from illegal, unskilled laborers from border countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia to registered, highly educated professionals from Europe and the United States. Among the latter group, many come simply for jobs, while others want to immerse themselves in Chinese culture, have new experiences, and witness the dramatic transformation taking place in the Middle Kingdom.

Whatever their specific reasons for moving to China, it’s fair to say that the lives of Western foreigners in this country stand in stark contrast to that of most Chinese citizens. Our visas may have been issued by China, but our passports bear the seal of the United States, Canada, France, Spain, et al. Western countries certainly have transparency and corruption issues of their own, but most, at least ostensibly, provide free presses and independent judicial systems.

As a result, no matter where they happen to be living presently, people who grow up in these parts of the world consider individual liberty and the institutions that support them to be basic rights, and we generally act as if we will protected by the rule of law.

Even in a place like China, where citizens don’t have basic rights, Westerners exist in bubbles of freedom. The Chinese might be barred from using social media or reading dissenting opinions on the Internet, but these issues are easily skirted by Westerners accustomed to freedom of the media.

Penetrating the Great Firewall with web proxies and virtual private networks (VPNs), we can access Ai Weiwei’s musings on his detention earlier this year or the brutal beating he received at the hands of police in 2009. We are able to read details about the crackdown this spring in response to fears over the Middle East revolutions that resulted in many Chinese dissidents going missing. The fact that one term of Ai’s release is the inability to meet with foreigners indicates that the Beijing overlords view us as a potentially unsettling force.

But even if people from Western democracies do manage to arouse the ire of Chinese authorities and find themselves temporarily stripped of freedom, we have recourse. Embassies, governments, and families, while unable to force Beijing’s hand, can at least petition for our release. Chinese nationals have no such recourse.

It is possible for Beijing to make a foreigner “disappear” just as easily as it could Ai Weiwei or another Chinese dissident. Doing so, however, would put China in a tight spot at a time when the world is increasingly looking for the country to demonstrate moral leadership commensurate with its economic prowess. Unless a foreigner committed a serious crime such as murder, drug smuggling or fomenting an anti- government uprising, any overseas troublemaker would mostly likely be deported and barred from reentering the country.

What the Chinese government seems to fear most of all is an organic rebellion. During Beijing’s crackdown this past fall, thought to be associated with online calls for a Chinese version of an Arab-style “jasmine revolution,” detainees were interrogated, tortured, deprived of sleep, and forced into giving video-recorded confessions. Many of them now live in constant fear of speaking out, fears made all the more real by the proposed new surveillance laws, and instead choose to keep quiet.

Compare this scenario with the imprisonment of American free speech protesters during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. New York artist James Powderly and five others in his group were held for six days by Chinese authorities for their role in conspiring to display pro-Tibet electronic messages. Powderly arrived in Beijing with equipment capable of projecting the words “Free Tibet.” Before he and his accomplices could display the message on a building in Tiananmen Square, however, they were taken into police custody, interrogated for 26 straight hours, deprived of food, water, sleep, and medication, subjected to death threats, and sentenced to 10 days imprisonment. Before being released and deported, $2,000 was allegedly removed from each of their bank accounts. Far from a mild-mannered affair, the treatment of these American free speech proponents was still more humane than that reserved for outspoken Chinese nationals.

Moreover, it seems that Beijing makes no distinction between its citizens and ethnic Chinese who have become citizens of other countries. Take, for example, Australian writer Yang Hegjun, who temporarily disappeared in March amidst the government crackdown. Although he was quickly released and did not admit to being held, he spoke in cryptic terms such as “friends” and “illness,” which is commonly interpreted as code for “secret police” and “detention.”

When asked to comment on Yang’s disappearance, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said, “I have not heard of that person.”  Yang is considered to be the most influential political blogger in China.

The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that four other Australians were detained by the Chinese government in recent years: Charlotte Chou, Matthew Ng, Stern Hu, and James Sun. Aside from being successful Australian citizens, all four detainees are ethnic Chinese.

Which make the Chinese government very much like the Mafia: once you’re part of the family, the only way out is death. Though these particular enemies of the Chinese state may have been spared their lives, loss of freedom is a kind of living death. And then of course there’s the people that China actually executes, which Amnesty International put in the “thousands plus” last year, making China the top executioner nation in the world.

It is possible that Chou, Ng, Hu, and Sun did commit crimes, but the nature of their charges and convictions have an unspecific, Orwellian ring to them. Chou, immediately after being released from an 18 month sentence for a bribery conviction, was hit with embezzlement charges. Ng stands charged with two embezzlement charges, one bribery charge, and one of falsifying documents. Hu was sentenced to ten years in prison last March for bribery and stealing business secrets. Sun is serving a life sentence for espionage.

James Powderly, meanwhile, is presumed to be alive, well, and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon in Brooklyn. And as for the educated foreigners with good jobs who call Beijing home, they are equally comfortable and free to do as they please, so long as their pastimes don’t include collaborating with Chinese dissidents or otherwise raising the hackles of the authorities. Which they most certainly wouldn’t.

Why would they? For us, in many ways, China represents greater freedom. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. At the top of that list is economic freedom. China has been quick to hire Westerners in order to bring the country up to speed with Western standards, and we have been quick to accept those jobs because they increasingly offer better prospects than the crumbling economies back home do.

Ai Weiwei describes Beijing as two cities: one of power and money, the other of desperation. There’s no doubt which category foreigners like me fall into. Similar to the small propoertion of natives who have benefited from the rise of Chinese capitalism, foreigners who enjoy an excellent standard of living in China have little incentive to take a stand against the injustices of the system. Any of us who don’t like it here can leave.

This is not to say that that foreigners don’t have opinions about China. Quite to the contrary. Take a crawl through the bars of the fashionable Sanlitun district on a Friday or Saturday night and you’ll hear plenty of lively conversations about life in the Middle Kingdom.

Typical of cocktail talk, however, it leads to no action. Furthermore, such speculation is almost always limited to foreigner coteries. In most situations, living overseas is a far cry from full immersion in a new culture. Foreigners tend to hang out with each other. Outside of a handful of Chinese acquaintances, for the most part we befriend those people we can easily communicate with and relate to.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that a Westerner tries to broach the topic of Chinese oppression, it might not be well received. The 2008 Olympics demonstrated rising anti-Western sentiment, particularly among Chinese youth. Responding to Westerners who staged protests over China’s human rights record, particularly in Tibet, pro-China rallies formed, consisting mostly of people aged 30 and younger, in both Chinese and foreign cities. They were accompanied by accusations that the Western protests were “anti-China.”

Anti-Western sentiment has been on the rise in China since the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Going further back, it relates to the so-called “century of humiliation” which started with the Opium Wars and concluded with the end of World War II. Then there is the “Patriotic Education Campaign” that began in the early 1990s and helped boost nationalism by promoting the idea that China was strong-armed by the West and Japan for some 150 years. And who but the Chinese government knows the exact role that the highly-secretive Publicity Department of the Communist Party, and more generally the Party’s entire propaganda system, play in the rise of Chinese patriotism.

Forgetting momentarily the personal danger one might face if they chose to pry open the fingers of the Party’s iron fist and the sensitivity of broaching this matter with a Chinese person, there are the language and cultural barriers which alone make it difficult for many foreigners to probe the minds of a local.

But according to Ai Weiwei, there’s little to discover. “You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.”

This phenomenon, if it truly exists, could just as easily be the product of an effective brainwashing system as it could the fragile psychology of a man newly released from a three month stint in a secret prison.

As a relative newcomer to Beijing who’s only beginning to get a grasp of the Chinese language, culture, and history, I must concede that any final judgments on China are premature. My understanding of this vast, rapidly-changing country is a work in progress, prone to vicissitudes ranging from horror to bewilderment to admiration.

Still, this inability to make sense of things might not be a product of me being a stranger in a strange land. Ai says of Beijing, “You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.”

Ai follows up this statement by lamenting that he has no favorite place in Beijing, and on this point at least, I am fully qualified to agree with the artist. But he does admit that the city has some nice parks. On a bright, crisp, unseasonably warm late-November afternoon I head to one in order to do some thinking and see fellow Beijingers in a place removed from the constant din of construction and traffic.

A little bit of sun changes everything. Under its grace, I see Beijing in a new light: It is just a city like any other, a hodgepodge of buildings and the emanations of its inhabitants’ hopes, dreams, and fears.

I see old men and women discussing the daily dramas; workers digging, painting, and sweating; lovers lost in each other’s gazes. I see scowls and smiles, looks of fear and wonder. Any emotion you might expect to see on a human face can be found today at Chaoyang Park.

Several old men have brought caged birds to the park. As the men talk, laugh, and share a picnic lunch, the winged ones open their throats to sing with a fearful trill, just as Maya Angelou describes.

The following day The Cloud has returned, and with it a sense of Beijing’s looming barbarism. I imagine the thick cloud of smog to be the tendrils of centralized power reaching out over the city, obscuring its true shape. After all, it’s not what you see, but what remains hidden, that is most worrying.

I take the elevator down to the ground floor and hear a voice in song as I exit. After a hearty “Ni hao” the concierge returns to his melancholy singing while walking in circles around the lobby, hands enclosed behind his back. I whistle a cheerful tune as I mount my bicycle and pedal through the congested streets into the dim cityscape.