This week, the Chinese authorities finally gave dissident artist Ai Weiwei his passport after it was confiscated four years ago.
The government took the document in 2011 when he was detained in the Beijing airport and held for 81 days. He was later charged with tax evasion and was ordered to pay $2.5 million in penalties and back taxes. But even though he couldn’t leave the country, Ai Weiwei continued to produce art, which was mounted by volunteers outside China.
We spoke with the China-based New York Times reporter Austin Ramzy, who spoke with Ai Weiwei this week after his passport was returned:
"He seemed quite happy. It seemed like a burden that he's lived with a long time. The loss of his passport and the ability to travel abroad I think affected him greatly, because he has international stature. He seemed at peace and a certain sense of contentment at having gotten his passport back."
Ai Weiwei is known for his art projects that often criticize the Chinese government. He was — and continues to be — vocal about the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died, including several thousand children who died in collapsed schools. He also presented a major exhibition on Alcatraz Island that featured complex Lego portraits of political prisoners.
Ai Weiwei also made his passport confiscation an art project. Austin Ramzy says this may have helped convince authorities to return his passport:
"As he often does with things, he comes up with new and innovative ways to raise awareness and to protest things, so he has a bicycle locked outside his studio in Beijing and would put flowers out in the basket of the bicycle every morning and photograph them and put them online. Then other people around the world would take photographs of flowers and tweet them at him... I think maybe they just wanted this headache to go away. He recently had his first and only solo show in China, and it was sort of seen as a relaxing of the restrictions on him. It wasn’t overtly political, the content of the show, so I think maybe that was seen as a signal that the government could live with him, or would have to live with him."
Just days after receiving his passport, Ai Weiwei is already planning to leave China:
"He plans to go to Germany quite quickly. He’s opened a studio in Berlin. His son ,who’s now 6 years old I believe, has been living in Germany with his mother for about a year now. So his first priority is to get to Germany to see his son."
In addition to joining his family in Germany, the artist will also seek a medical exam. He had emergency brain surgery there in 2009, after he was hit in the head by a police officer in the city of Chengdu.
There is still a question of whether or not Chinese authorities will allow him to return to the country once he leaves. But Ramzy says Ai Weiwei was not worried about his ability to return:
"He said that he expected that if they gave him the passport he had the right both to leave the country and to return. But I think it’s still a possibility that shouldn’t be ruled out….You know, there are plenty of dissidents who have left China and not been allowed to return. He’s always been in a different category in the sense that he’s not merely a dissident or solely focused on politics... Not allowing him back would create an entirely new Ai Weiwei story and I’m not sure the authorities want that."