Across town, at his studio, Ai Weiwei read that line—“There are no dissidents in China”—and it lingered with him. Ai’s visitors were increasingly using it to describe him, but the word dissident struck him as too simple to encompass the new range of dissent that was taking root in China. In the West, it had the ring of defiant moral clarity in the face of repressive power, but in China, becoming a “dissident” was complicated in ways that outsiders often underestimated.
