Rights Readers Authors on Chinese Dissidents

Today, many people are protesting the detention of the artist Ai Weiwei at Chinese Embassies and consulates around the world with a 'sit-in' homage to Ai's 2007 1001 Chairs exhibition. Check out video from the Berlin protest here.  Other creative protests by artists can be found here and here.  I'm pulling up a virtual chair and following up on my previous post about dissidents Ai Weiwei and Gao Zhisheng and the recent clampdown on dissidents in China and taking a look at what some of the authors we have read previously have had to say about recent events:

To appreciate Ma Jian's (The Noodle Maker) contribution, you first need to take in Ai Weiwei's show at the Tate in London:



The Tate has now incorporated a protest of Ai's detention into the exhibit. Ma Jian's editorial on the artist's detention, 'Sunflower Revolutionary', plays around with the seeds metaphor.

Philip Gourevitch laments that the dragnet has prevented writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up) from attending the PEN World Voices Festival in New York later this month. If we weren't reading Gao Zhisheng's A China More Just in July, I would be recommending that we read The Corpse Walker. I hope to get to it on my own. It's the least I can do.


Finally, Orville Schell (Mandate of Heaven) weighs in with some advice: