AI WEIWEI: A CASE OF AN AUTHENTIC ETHICAL STANCE

Free speech is a chimera, regulated through more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive means

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Dissidents who escape from the eastern authoritarian regimes (Russia, China, Iran…) to the “civilized” Western liberal-democratic countries and engage in criticizing their countries of origin for their lack of freedom and democracy are then celebrated in the West as heroic figures (with some important limitations – Jewish refugees from Israel are mostly ignored or treated as traitors). Only a few of them are ready to make the next step: to discern other, more subtle but no less brutal and effective, forms of oppression in the free-and-democratic West itself. This second step is crucial: if we abstain from it, we remain caught in an ethically catastrophic choice. We either resign ourselves to the conclusion that, in spite of its limitations, Western liberal democracy is nonetheless the lesser evil of the two bad choices, or we come to the no less sad conclusion that, from the standpoint of social life, China or even Russia are nonetheless better than the decadent individualist and corrupted liberal West. Everything thus hinges on our readiness to refuse this debilitating choice.

There is a long history of figures who risked their easy fame and made the second step. The fate of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet diplomat who, in 1944, while in New York, defected and then wrote his famous bestselling memoir I Chose Freedom, is worth mentioning here.¹ His book is the first substantial first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism, beginning with the detailed account of the forced collectivization and mass hunger in Ukraine, where Kravchenko himself, in the early 1930s still a true believer in the system, participated in enforcing collectivization. The publicly-known story about him ends in 1949, when he triumphantly won the big trial against his Soviet accusers in Paris who brought to the court even his ex-wife to testify to his corruption, alcoholism, and family violence. What is much lesser known is that, immediately after this victory, when Kravchenko was hailed all around the world as a Cold War hero, he got deeply worried about the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt in the US, and issued warnings that such a way to fight Stalinism courts the danger of starting to resemble its opponent. He also became more and more aware of the injustices of the Western world, and developed almost an obsession to critically change also the Western democratic societies. So, after writing a much less known sequel to his I Chose Freedom, significantly entitled I Chose Justice, he engaged in a crusade to find a new, less exploitative, mode of the organization of production. This led him to Bolivia, where he put (and lost) his money into organizing poor farmers into new collectives. Crushed by the failure of his endeavours, he withdrew into private life and shot himself at his home in New York; his suicide was due to his despair, not to some dark KGB blackmail – a proof that Kravchenko’s denunciation of the Soviet Union was a genuine act of protest against injustice.

Today new Kravchenkos are emerging everywhere – is a new incarnation of Kravchenko not the famous Chinese dissident activist and artist Ai Weiwei who, in an interview for Fox News, said that “today in the West we are doing exactly the same things and sometimes even more ridiculous than [what the Chinese were doing in] the Cultural Revolution.”² Weiwei thus placed himself into a long line of authentic dissidents to whose ranks one has to include thousands of Jews critical of today’s Israeli politics. The price he paid came immediately.

Born in Beijing in 1957, Weiwei grew up in labour camps in northwest China after the exile of his father, the poet Ai Qing. Though a longtime communist, Ai Qing became a target first of the official Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957, and then of the Cultural Revolution. As a result of this, Weiwei has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese authorities and an advocate for human rights.³ After being excluded from the public space and imprisoned for 3 months, he emigrated to the West where he was instantly celebrated. In June 2011, he was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a move that highlighted his status as a key cultural figure amid his detention by Chinese authorities. In 2015, the Academy hosted his first major UK retrospective, featuring works on human rights and censorship.

And then… Weiwei faced a vote of no confidence by the Academicians after posting a controversial tweet about the war in Palestine; Lisson Gallery in London, which represents the artist, subsequently postponed a show of the artist’s works. The tweet began: “The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.” A vote was held at the RA to determine whether his membership should be revoked because of accusations that the post was antisemitic. The RA subsequently voted to retain his membership. But an article he wrote for the RA Magazine was withdrawn.

A spokesperson for the Royal Academy said that in 2023 Weiwei “posted a message on social media—subsequently deleted—which caused offence.” We have to ask here immediately the Leninist question (modelled upon Lenin’s famous line “Freedom – for whom? To do what?”): what Weiwei wrote caused offence – to whom? In what way? Didn’t he say something that millions (even a majority in all Western countries) think, something that offends only hardline Zionists? In its reaction to Weiwei’s tweet, the Royal Academy stated that it “supports freedom of expression, which is of fundamental importance to artists and the RA. Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect.” Yes, but the RA’s reaction to Weiwei’s tweet made it clear what kind of “freedom of expression” they have in mind: a freedom that offends… not no one, but those who are prohibited to be offended. And who decides on this prohibition? In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Weiwei said:

“I did what I should. And that sacrifice is very little compared to all of the lives lost and compared to those children who cannot talk about the future. They don’t even exist. What I did is nothing. I feel I’m a little bit ahead of time. Everybody would say whatever I said was very conservative. It’s not controversial at all.”

This is a properly ethical stance: not to boast that one did a big controversial daring act, but to insist that “whatever I said was very conservative. It’s not controversial at all.” The true problem is societies which censor such acts. In his new publication On Censorship⁴, Weiwei discusses issues around censorship, saying: “Every society – whether authoritarian or part of the so-called free West – employs different forms of indoctrination to guide behaviour, shaping people’s cognition, capacity for action and modes of thinking.” His main argument is that censorship is neither a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor something confined to “countries defined as autocratic and authoritarian”. In the West – “the so-called free world”, with its “ostensibly democratic societies” – free speech is a chimera, regulated through “more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive” means. Flexing his rhetoric, he describes censorship “as both an indispensable tool of mental enslavement and a fundamental source of political corruption”.⁵ This is how one can accomplish an authentic ethical act in our “confused” situation.

Let me finish by addressing a question directed at me as a Hegelian: what has all this to do with Hegel? Nothing… and everything: is the two-step criticism we celebrated not a clear-cut example of what Hegel called “negation of negation”?

1. See Mark Jonathan Harris’s outstanding documentary on Kravchenko The Defector (2008).

2. Exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: ‘Censorship in West exactly the same as Mao’s China’ (youtube.com).

3. https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/ai-weiwei-hon-ra.

4. See Ai Weiwei, On Censorship, London: Thames and Hudson 2026.

5. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/22/on-censorship-by-ai-weiwei-review-are-we-losing-the-battle-for-free-speech