There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

“Never Sorry,” Alison Klayman’s 2012 documentary on Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, languished in Curmie’s Netflix queue for rather a long time. This past weekend, Curmie finally watched it. I recommend it, by the way. But the quality of Ms. Klayman’s cinematic achievement isn’t why Curmie mentions the film. Rather, what stands out right now is one of the moments depicted therein: the January 2011 destruction of Ai’s million-dollar studio in Shanghai by the Chinese government.

Ai Weiwei in his Berlin studio.

Last Friday, the very day Curmie watched “Never Sorry,” it was déjà vu all over again, as Chinese authorities razed another of Ai’s studios, this one in Beijing. Ai has also been arrested, beaten, and “disappeared” for nearly three months. So while the destruction of the Beijing studio came as a surprise, it wasn’t a shock.

Naturally, there’s an official explanation: in 2011 it was tax evasion; this time it was an expired lease (Ai had an arrangement with the landlord to evacuate the premises by August 15; the wrecking balls and jackhammers arrived on the 3rd). But literally no one believes the real reason was anything more or less than Ai’s high-profile and relentless criticism of the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese government.

Ai was never a supporter of the government that exiled his father, Ai Qing, during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei’s international fame was nonetheless a source of pride for China, and when he returned to his homeland in 1993 after living in New York for several years, he was tolerated if not embraced by the authorities. Most famously—to the average American, at least—he was a design consultant for the “Bird’s Nest” stadium which became one of the most iconic images of the 2008 Summer Olympics. By the time the Games had opened, however, he had refused to attend the opening ceremonies or to pose for photographs outside the structure: “Today is not the time to dwell on our problems, but neither should we accept those who tell us these games are not political.”

More significant in terms of his relationship with China’s hegemonic rulers, however, was his lengthy and very public campaign to shed light on the actual death toll of the devastating Sichuan earthquake earlier in 2008 and to recognize the victims and their families. The official count of casualties—just under 70,000 dead (a figure later revised to about 90,000) told a grim enough story, but Ai believed, no doubt correctly, that the government was low-balling the estimate to avoid taking responsibility for the shoddy construction of schools, which contributed directly to the deaths of thousands of children.

Ai’s international fame, like that of other artists in totalitarian regimes, served for a while at least as a buffer against persecution. That is, China knew that international headlines would ensue from any action taken against Ai, and that, in turn, would call attention to the hollowness of China’s claims to free expression and the sanctity of human rights. On the other hand, willingness to arrest, incarcerate, and otherwise nettle Ai served as a warning to lesser-known artists and intellectuals: if we can do this to Ai Weiwei without repercussions, imagine what we can do to you!

It was precisely this latter attitude that undergirds the 2011 destruction of the Shanghai studio. This time, though, it seems different. Ai has lived in Berlin for three years, and whereas he seems ready to leave that city (if he has not already done so) while maintaining a studio there, there is no intimation that he will return to China. Moreover, his direct contribution to the overwhelming majority of his recent work is conceptual: other artists and craftsmen create the actual sculpture or installation or whatever.

A Study in Perspective—Tiananmen Square

So last week’s incident in Beijing isn’t so much about Ai Weiwei himself; it’s about the art. The Beijing studio was functioning as much as a storage facility as anything else, and the reason it had not already been abandoned was the difficulty of moving the massive artworks contained therein. This shift in emphasis on the part of Chinese authorities is problematic. Certainly it betrays something of the paranoia that always attaches to any dictatorial regime. But whereas Ai’s art has quite often had an obvious political element, that doesn’t mean its subject is inherently Chinese. Thus, whereas one of his most famous works, “A Study in Perspective—Tiananmen Square,” is a photograph of the artist giving, shall we say, a monodigital salute to the site of the massacre of peaceful protestors six years earlier, there are similar photos of the White House, the Eiffel Tower, and other Western landmarks.

Similarly, @Large, a 2014 site-specific work at Alcatraz, implicates a wide range of oppressors. Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer writes that U.S. State Department officials “knew the exhibition would deal with themes of freedom, captivity, and human rights. What they did not know is that the United States would be among the many countries Ai would call out for cracking down on dissidents.”

Likewise, in the 2017 film “Human Flow” (which made the Oscar short-list of 15 documentaries but was not one of the five official nominees), Ai, in the words of one critic, “created an ambitious, humane and often shocking cine-essay on the subject of migrants and the 21st century migrant condition.” Of course, having been directly affected by the Cultural Revolution, Ai knows whereof he speaks.

So it’s not the specific subject matter of the artwork that gets Chinese authorities in a tizzy. It’s the fact that it’s art. Ai explains this position in an interview with the Smithsonian’s David J. Skorton:

I had experience in [an] authoritarian society. I realize why they hate art, why they have to censor art, why they have to control art…. Art is not [always] political, or art [does] not function as some kind of statement, but still, art has been censored in many, many nations. So what is it they are really afraid of? I think because art represents our instinct, our sensitivity, which we… still have not clearly defined by science or by philosophy.

He goes on to suggest that it is art’s unpredictability that makes it so problematic for the oppressors. “Art,” he says, “talks about human’s inner truths.” And that is always going to scare The Man… and why these petty displays of censorial power demonstrate weakness more than strength.

Ai told NPR that “any authority that cracks down on artists, journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers has completely lost its legitimacy to rule. It is evidence of vulnerability and fragility in facing the challenges of today and the future, and an inability to do so with a peaceful mind or a rational manner.”

We—all of us, from the political left, right, and center—would do well to remember these words.

*This essay derives its title from a line by Ai Weiwei in an interview with the BBC Radio 1.