1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

by Weiwei Ai

“Poetry today ought to be a bold experiment in the democratic spirit,” he declared, “and the future of poetry is inseparable from the future of democratic politics. A constitution matters even more to poets than to others, because only when the right to expression is guaranteed can one give voice to the hopes of people at large, and only then is progress possible. To suppress the voices of the people is the cruelest form of violence.” Eighty years later, his faith in poetry as freedom’s ambassador has yet to find vindication in China.

In the years that followed, intellectuals would face increasing pressure to conform, leading ultimately to the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, which marked the end of intellectuals as a force in society. From that time on, Chinese intellectuals were confined to a marginal position, and they have been there ever since.

Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it

is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in, simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement.

I was eleven by then, and did not panic. We had become so accustomed to difficulties that it was second nature to me to take things as they came.

That is why 550,000 intellectuals would now be subjected to “reform through labor.” Twenty years later, when they finally received “rehabilitation,” only 100,000 would still be alive. By then, dissidence was all but dead.

Never forget that under a totalitarian system cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand.

From the founding of the new regime to the death of Mao Zedong, in 1976, China experienced more than fifty political campaigns, each more violent than the one before it.

The Cultural Revolution plunged the nation deeply into the realm of fantasy and delusion.

You can’t expect democracy to be handed to you on a plate—you acquire it through struggle.”

Deng Xiaoping had said to his aides, “Creating our Communist state cost twenty million lives. If people want to take it from us now, they’d better be ready to lose just as many heads!”

I had no illusions about my native land, however: the things that really needed changing had not changed at all, and maybe they never would.

To me, art is in a dynamic relationship with reality, with our way of life and attitude to life, and it should not be placed in a separate compartment. I have no interest in art that tries to keep itself distinct from reality.

Sometimes friends ask me how to make a documentary. There are three cardinal rules, I tell them: start filming, keep filming, and never stop filming.

‘I hope a breeze that likes him blows over his tombstone.’ ”

Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows

Not a trace can be found

You who are living, live the best life you can Don’t count on the ear...