Chapter 9 Portal

In 1938, the battle for China was in full swing. Japanese troops had crushed Chiang Kai-shek's government forces in Shanghai and Nanjing, followed by notorious massacres and millions of refugees fleeing into the interior. Outside observers believed that China was only a few months away from full surrender.

Then a small miracle occurred. Chiang's army held out on the plains around Xuzhou for a whole month. After inflicting heavy casualties on the Japanese, the 300,000 defenders took the initiative to withdraw to the Dabie Mountains, where numerous mountains rose from north to south, like a natural barrier. The Chinese soldiers fought and retreated, covering each other. Their goal: to make a final stand at the gateway to the Chinese interior, the industrial city of Wuhan.

Wuhan has been strategically important for thousands of years. It lies at the confluence of China's largest river, the Yangtze, and the Han River, the most important north-south waterway. The source of the Han River is thousands of miles away in Xi'an. In the past, Wuhan consisted of three districts: Wuchang, the political and economic center of central China, was located on the south bank of the Yangtze River; across the river were Hankou and Hanyang, located on both sides of the Han River. In the imperial era, the Governor of Huguang was China's most powerful frontier official, controlling a large area of ​​complex water networks and wetlands. For centuries, Wuhan was known as the crossroads of nine provinces.

In 1938, Wuhan, the city of three cities, was the most important of the areas controlled by the Chinese government. It also showed how the Chinese could be if they were free. In order to unite the country as much as possible, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government allowed free newspapers and free artistic expression. Censorship and secret police disappeared, and the city was full of life. Newspapers emerged in large numbers, reporting on the government's various ills and the influx of refugees. Writers such as Lao She fled the Japanese occupation and came to Wuhan from Beijing, where they began to write about the Chinese resistance.

They were joined by famous photographers, filmmakers and writers from around the world who had come to bear witness to the Sino-Japanese War. These visitors included Hungarian photographer Robert Capa, Danish film director Joris Ivens, and two British writers, poet WH Auden and novelist Christopher Isherwood. Spain had just been defeated by fascism, and Wuhan would be next - in Auden and Isherwood's memoirs, this was a weather vane of the times and a prophecy of the future.

This was the real capital of wartime China. All kinds of people lived in this city... generals, ambassadors, journalists, sailors from foreign ships, soldiers who came to try their luck, pilots, missionaries, spies. There were all kinds of clues hidden in it. If someone could find the clues, he would be able to predict all kinds of events in the next fifty years. (Note 2)

Wuhan once had more than 200 lakes, remnants of prehistoric oceans, but of course most of them were later filled in. Although only about 30 lakes remain, its nickname is still "Sponge City". Water holes can be found at construction sites, roads are flooded, and parks are often flooded due to waterlogging. In the rainy season, water droplets falling from the sky mix with smoke and dust from factory steam engines, wrapping the entire city in mist.

It was on a day near the end of such a summer that I visited Ai Xiaoming (Note 1). She had lived in cold Beijing and subtropical Guangzhou, and was always drawn back to the center of China by her hometown—a family born in war, displaced, and controlled by the regime. Her life was filled with different roles in these different families: a responsible daughter, a caring mother, a prolific researcher, a social activist, and an underground historian.

Each role is centered on a different location. She lived in Guangzhou most of the time from 1995 to 2012, because she taught there. Her students and many activists were there. Her first film was also made in Guangzhou: The Vagina Monologues, which she shot with Hu Jie. The 2005 film Taishi Village documented how the authorities systematically erased the rights of rural residents. Her residence is almost a semi-public space, where activists and visitors can come to edit and screen films, or even live there when they have nowhere else to go. She is like a hen, taking guests to the market in the morning to buy vegetables, and then coming back to discuss the afternoon's work, and then cooking a large table of dishes in the evening. Dinner is the most lively part of the day.

In 2008, at the age of 55, she retired from the university. In China at that time, this was not considered early retirement. Talented and capable people were left aside, often at the peak of their creative careers, because they had to make room for young people - this cunning way allowed young people to find jobs and the elderly to be marginalized. She did not sell her house in Guangzhou immediately until 2020. At that time, the focus of her life completely returned to Wuhan, and the last class of students she taught graduated as early as 2012.

In Wuhan, Ai Xiaoming has three houses (Note 3), corresponding to her three roles: activist, daughter, wife and mother. She has so much space thanks to her brother Ai Luming, one of Wuhan's most well-known private entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Ai Luming has a doctorate in economics and founded Wuhan Contemporary Technology Group in 1988. Starting from biotechnology, it has become a large enterprise spanning real estate and other industries. In 2019, the Hurun China Wealth List estimated that his personal assets were nearly 1 billion. (Note 4)

In the lake-dotted southern district of Wuhan, near Metro Line 2 and the Third Ring Road, Ai Luming developed a property and lives there himself. Built in the 2000s, it’s not considered luxurious now, but the 23-story building looks pretty good, with about four units per floor, depending on the layout. The building is surrounded by trees and the narrow street is full of cars, but each car is parked in a designated spot. Of course, there are bulletin boards and banners admonishing everyone to keep up with the party’s latest campaign, “Red Education,” which happened to be on my first visit. The community, like most other communities in China, has security guards at the gate, who are used to block vendors and traffic trying to cut corners, and to record who visits whom.

The Ai family occupies a large unit. Their mother died in 1997, and their father continues to live here. Ai Xiaoming lives here most of the time, taking care of her bedridden father and doing research in her own study. A nanny helps her with the housework, and Ai Xiaoming does most of it - although it is tiring, she enjoys it. Her younger brother was born in 1957, four years younger than her, and she loves him very much. His brother has not retired yet, so she is happy to take on the responsibility of taking care of their father.

In addition, she has a smaller house of her own, and she is very careful to protect the privacy of her family. She and her husband have a son who once studied abroad and now works for his uncle. For many years, Ai Xiaoming also had a small apartment in the same community, where she entertained activists and dissidents. This way she can distinguish three different worlds without bringing negative impact to her core family or her original family. Like all entrepreneurs, her brother is also a member of the Communist Party of China, and she is very clear that her brother cannot be involved in her work. She never asks her brother for money, but is very proud of his self-made business and charity.

She places a computer screen and monitor in the study room of her brother's house, where she edits her work and maintains her fourth space: social networks, emails, and communication software in the virtual world.

These worlds revolve around her, dividing her time. We sat in her study and talked for hours, interrupted only by her going downstairs to look after her father. Although her public persona was a fierce defender of rights and the underprivileged, in private she joked and laughed a lot—especially at herself. There were so many twists and turns in the different aspects of her life: the enthusiasm of her youth, the apolitical and academic pursuits in her thirties, and the turn to feminism and social activism as she got older, when most people would have moved on to other goals.

From another perspective, her life has also come full circle. The first 25 years were spent in the Mao era, when nothing could be done. Then came the reform era, when Chinese people began to have more and more opportunities to shape their own lives. Now she is being controlled again, and politics has returned to the command mode. In all these experiences, one thing has remained unchanged: her blood and her family history have led her to a path of conformity that requires great effort to break free of.

Despite the world's attention, Wuhan fell in 1938. The battle changed the course of World War II. Japan had planned to win quickly in China so that it could turn to other parts of Asia. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek blocked Japan's westward advance and established a wartime capital in the city of Chongqing, farther upstream. Chiang's soldiers held off hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops until the end of the war.

But at the time, the loss of Wuhan was seen as another defeat in a long line of defeats. Of course, the human toll was unimaginable. The number of casualties soon rose to tens of millions, and the Yellow River dams were blown up to stop the Japanese advance. The flood destroyed hundreds of villages and submerged large areas of farmland. Adding to the disaster were tens of thousands of orphans. Rescue organizations launched campaigns at home and abroad to find adoptive families for the orphans.

Chinese government officials tried to lead by example, including Tang Shengzhi. He had been Chiang Kai-shek's battlefield rival. The year before, Chiang had asked him to defend Nanjing, an impossible task. As Chiang had hoped, Tang Shengzhi took responsibility for the defeat, resigned, and returned to the Hunan countryside to reunite with his family and study Buddhist scriptures. He had only one daughter, Tang Renqun, who married an air force instructor. General Tang Shengzhi responded to the call and adopted eleven children, who all lived near the family and went to school together at the Hunan Academy built by General Tang.

Not long after, General Tang's son-in-law died in a plane crash. The general's daughter became a widow and moved back to the family home with her one-month-old daughter, where she met these adopted brothers and sisters. Among them was Ai Renkuan, who was only thirteen years old at the time, six years younger than her. In the late 1940s, Ai Renkuan entered the military academy and fell in love with General Tang's daughter.

Their love story was complicated by the government's loss of the civil war to the Communists. The Tang family had the opportunity to flee to Taiwan, but Tang Shengzhi had dealt with Mao Zedong in the 1930s and did not participate in the hostile activities between the government and the Communists. He felt that he was fine, so he stayed. The Communists also gave a good reward, declaring Tang Shengzhi a democrat and appointing him as vice governor of Hunan Province, of course, this was mostly an honorary position.

As the head of the family, General Tang's decision applies to all family members, including his daughter. Ai Renkuan could have flown to Taiwan, but he stayed in the mainland because of his love for Tang Renqun. The two got married in 1950. Ai Renkuan was approved to join the People's Liberation Army and later joined the party. His crime as a former KMT government official seemed to be forgiven. He followed the troops to Wuhan and was demobilized a few years later. He found a job in the Wuhan commercial sector and then became a primary school teacher. Thanks to the good education he received in General Tang's private school, his English level was good, so he passed the exam and became a middle school English teacher.

In 1953, their first child was born, a lively daughter named Ai Xiaoming. This was the most common name at that time, expressing loyalty to the new regime. Xiao means dawn, and Ming means light. Under the leadership of the Party, China is ushering in its brightest day.

Ai Xiaoming, her sister, 14 years older, her stepdaughter from her mother's first marriage, and her brother, born a few years later, grew up as "the general's grandchildren." It was a quiet life of minor privilege: Unlike many, they were not rationed, and their family backgrounds were respected. But they knew their status was precarious. Millions of people with ties to the previous regime were purged or killed in the Communist Party's earliest campaigns. They survived by the grace of the party.

Ai Xiaoming recalls the 1950s and 1960s when she grew up in Wuhan. It seemed quiet. Her mother, Tang Renqun, was psychologically fragile and prone to schizophrenia. Her gender was the focus of the general's complicated family life. He had been married before, but because his wife only gave birth to a daughter, Tang Renqun, the general divorced her - the general needed a son to carry on the family line. After the divorce, Tang Renqun lived with the general and his new wife. Because the second wife also had no children, the couple made Tang Renqun dress in boys' clothes and pretended that they had a son. When she was ten years old, Tang Renqun had a mental breakdown and screamed for her mother. She was sent away to live with her mother and then married her first husband, the air force instructor. After her husband died, she returned to the Tang family and finally found the man she loved after marrying Ai Renkuan. Her mental state became stable. But social pressure came again. Blood ties once again became the center of this family's disaster.

Ai Xiaoming's parents knew that their personal background was deeply connected to the old dynasty. They tried to prevent their children from being implicated and hoped that their children would have a distant relationship with them. They told Ai Xiaoming and his brother that they could not give advice on how to be a good citizen. What they earnestly advised was to keep a low profile and not to seek attention, and to learn to adapt to society.

"My father was very strict with us, but not in the sense of wanting us to stand out or achieve success in our careers," (Note 5) Ai Xiaoming recalled. "On the contrary, he didn't want us to get into trouble or think independently. His goal was the safety of his family and children."

In 1966, my father's fears were vindicated -- years of caution had failed -- when the Cultural Revolution arrived. General Tang was arrested and imprisoned, where he died in 1970 at the age of eighty-one. Ai Renkuan, the adopted son and son-in-law of a Kuomintang general, was also affected. He was not only a "historical counter-revolutionary" -- a crime the Communist Party gave to people who had made similar mistakes before 1949. He was also an "active counter-revolutionary," meaning he had long been opposed to the government.

To prove this point, the party used examples from his English teaching. He was accused of writing on the blackboard in English, "Mao Zedong was born in China," and "Lei Kai is a sharpshooter." In his confession, Ai Renkuan admitted that the two sentences had nothing to do with each other. The first sentence came from a textbook. The second sentence was about a student who graduated from the school and became a sharpshooter, and he returned to the school to give a report that he became an excellent sharpshooter because he studied Mao Zedong Thought. There was no hidden malice or implicit threat to Mao Zedong in these two sentences.

Regardless of the evidence, Ai Renkuan was fired from his teaching position, beaten, and had his head shaved. For the next few years, he was responsible for cleaning toilets. Later, because of his handyman skills, he was allowed to repair tractors, watches and other equipment. He also helped in the kitchen.

His wife, Tang Renqun, the general's daughter, was also beaten and imprisoned, and forced to write a self-criticism. (Note 6) In addition to accusing her father, she also had to reflect deeply on the mistakes she made while working in the university library. In order to make chili sauce, she used her own food coupons to buy chili from the school store. This was a serious problem, she admitted. She had these extra food coupons because her father was a famous general. Her attempt to use the food coupons to buy luxury goods showed that she had no clear understanding of her privilege.

While her father and husband were incarcerated, she wrote and re-wrote self-criticisms, leaving Ai Xiaoming and her brother unattended at home. (Their half sister, the flight instructor's daughter, had married and left the family.) She was eventually released, and her new job was cleaning the grounds at a tourist attraction. Her schizophrenia recurred, and sometimes she would run to neighbors' homes and bang on their doors, demanding to know why her family had been destroyed.

When her father was accused, 12-year-old Ai Xiaoming also became a target. She was on her way to the school store when two students stopped her and asked her to distance herself from her father. Before she could figure out what was going on, she was struck by lightning and ran home in panic.

That night she took out a newspaper and wrote a big-character poster with a brush to accuse her father of being a tyrant at home. This was not a strict accusation, and her big-character poster was not very big, but she knew that this was the only way for her to draw a line between herself and the family. The next day she returned to the school store, climbed onto a chair, and posted the big-character poster on the wall.

She was in a state of confusion. She went to school like a robot. Her father had disappeared, and her mother spent her days either repenting for her crime with chili sauce or mopping the floor at the scenic spot. Ai Xiaoming and her brother had to find their own food.

One day the teacher called her over.

"What did you write in your composition book?"

"Just write it casually."

"You wrote about Ai Renkuan, didn't you?"

"I didn't write it!"

"We know everything about your father. You are still hanging on. Why don't you cut it off? What else do you remember? Think about it!"

The teacher took out Ai Xiaoming's composition book and turned it over. On the back was written "Ai Renkuan is a good person." It was handwritten in pencil. Although the handwriting was crooked, it was clear. That afternoon, the students all listened to the propaganda drama on the school's loudspeaker, which was installed in every classroom. She recalled clasping her hands together, and although there was a lot of noise around her, she was almost dozing off. Did she write it herself?

The teacher wrote a report and put it in her file: Ai Xiaoming wrote counter-revolutionary slogans.

Ai Xiaoming still tried to be a good citizen of the new China. She tried to join the Red Guards and was rejected because of her family background, but eventually joined another group because the criteria were relaxed. She learned to do revolutionary dances. She changed her name. No longer Ai Xiaoming, but Ai Weidong, which means defending the East, that is, defending Mao. When her group of Red Guards met Mao in Tiananmen Square, she wrote in her diary: "My parents gave me life, and Chairman Mao educated me."

In 1969, Ai Xiaoming finished primary and middle school. The reality test came: she was rejected by high school because of her family background. Her studies were interrupted because of her family's political reasons. The next year, she changed her name back to Xiaoming and went to the countryside with thousands of other urban youths to work in the fields and learn from the farmers.

When she recalls the past, she laughs at the absurdity of the time. She spent her teenage years farming and reading Mao's Selected Works. One day, when we were talking about this again, she couldn't help but blurt out: "It was a complete waste of time!"

Then her bloodline saved her. In 1974, two years before the Cultural Revolution ended, the party restarted higher education. The college entrance exam wouldn’t be resumed until 1978, but Maoist universities began admitting the children of high-ranking officials, including those who had died in Maoist violence. Like Xi Jinping, Ai Xiaoming got into college without even a high school diploma. Her grandfather was General Tang Shengzhi, which qualified her.

But unlike Xi Jinping and others who used this opportunity to launch their own successful official careers, Ai Xiaoming was transformed by what she learned. She entered Central China Normal University in Wuhan, which, like many other colleges, was forced to move to the countryside at the time. So Ai Xiaoming was still far away from home, and most of her daily classes consisted of reciting Chairman Mao's poems. She and other classmates found novels by foreign writers, such as Tolstoy and Stendhal, and passed them around. They also read Chinese classics, which had profound thoughts about morality and philosophy.

Information settles very slowly. After Mao's death in 1976, Ai Xiaoming tried very hard to join the party, writing her application in blood. But she was rejected because of a stain in her file - a "counter-revolutionary" slogan that said her father was a good man. She persisted in applying and was finally approved to join the party in 1984. Later, she explained her thinking: Party membership is a "safe" - it can protect you in the years to come.

In 1985, she moved to Beijing to pursue a PhD in Chinese at Beijing Normal University. She completed her thesis on leftist literature in just two years—becoming the first female PhD holder after the Cultural Revolution. She then worked at the China Youth University for Political Studies, a college directly affiliated with the Communist Youth League Central Committee, an important party institution—an important channel for attracting young talent into the system. This job would have been impossible without a party member.

The job could have been the start of a promising career in education. But Ai’s mind was changing. She befriended outsiders like Wang Xiaobo, learning his concept of the “silent majority” and understanding the people the Chinese Communist Party had silenced. After Wang’s untimely death from a heart attack in 1997, Ai wrote a heartfelt memorial and helped publish a collection of his writings. As Wang’s body was placed in a coffin at the crematorium, Ai placed a newly published collection of his writings in his hands.

In 1988, Ai Xiaoming worked in Hong Kong for a year, studying Milan Kundera and translating his work The Art of the Novel. She returned to China in 1989, when the student demonstrations were taking place. She continued her academic work, and her life centered on her newborn son. Like Wang Xiaobo, she had no idea what the noisy scenes in the square would lead to, nor did she know what the students were asking for.

"People like us who experienced the Cultural Revolution instinctively want to keep a distance from political movements. I was against the 1989 student movement," she said, laughing at how ridiculous her attitude was when she looked back on it now - she, a political activist, was dismissive of the largest political protest in modern Chinese history. "My view is different now, but that was how I thought back then. Of course I support democracy, but we've experienced too many movements. I don't want to join any movement anymore."

But Ai Xiaoming fought for the students’ right to free speech. Many people left the square after the Communist Party declared martial law, knowing full well that the authorities intended to clear it violently, but it was at this juncture that Ai Xiaoming showed his true colors.

“Maybe I was influenced by Kundera. You can’t use such means against students. I have to stand up.”

She visited the square to see the protesting students and delivered blankets to the hunger-striking students. But the massacre caught her off guard. "We never thought they would do this. It's unbelievable."

After the massacre, her university launched a purge of all those involved in the movement. She escaped most charges but knew she had no future at a university that was deeply tied to the Chinese Communist Party's political structure. Tired of politics, she accepted a teaching position at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, a large city in the south not far from Hong Kong. She joined the Chinese department and later switched to comparative literature. Her attention turned to women's issues. She told me that she noticed something was wrong in the department.

"For example, at academic conferences, there are very few female scholars, especially senior scholars. There are especially few female professors in our department. Even the most outstanding female professors cannot serve as department leaders or other management positions. I realized that all the women's issues we talked about were very typical in the school."

1999 was a turning point for her when she spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of the South in Tennessee.

"American universities do more than just research. They also serve and change society. This had a great impact on me. It was the first time I thought about these issues. I really like democratic and equal forms of education."

“I participated in many activities on campus. The school emphasizes diversity. There are many activities on campus, such as African-American music groups and Martin Luther King’s memorial activities. This made me understand what a university should be like.”

She also learned how to shoot videos this year. She borrowed two or three videos almost every day, sometimes coming to borrow them at 7:30 in the morning and returning them in the evening.

While in the United States, she watched the play "The Vagina Monologues", which is about sexual experience, reproduction, circumcision and menstruation, as well as other female topics that are usually considered inappropriate, marginalized, and must be handled in a low-key manner. She returned to China in 2000, translated the play into Chinese, and had her students perform it on stage.

China is now experiencing a new round of fierce ideological collisions. Exposure of many social issues has become more common, including the 2003 Huang Jing case, in which a girl was raped and died by her boyfriend. Ai Xiaoming came out to advocate for Huang Jing's case, which attracted national attention. She also paid attention to Sun Zhigang, a young man who died in a shelter. This case rewrote the police's policy on sheltering migrant workers. It seems that a more transparent political system may be coming.

Ai Xiaoming made so many films on so many sensitive topics that the government finally paid attention to her after Xi Jinping came to power. In 2008, she was one of the first to sign Charter 08, a document calling for moderate political rights drafted and circulated by future Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The next year, she wrote to the party organization asking to quit the party. Although the party organization did not approve it, she later considered herself no longer a member, and she had no way of knowing whether the organization still considered her a member.

She has been unable to leave China since then. In 2010, she and human rights lawyer Guo Jianmei won the Simone de Beauvoir Women's Freedom Prize. She was invited to Paris to receive the award, but the police rejected her application to replace her passport, a strategy that would become a common practice for the police against many people in the future - and also the practice used against most Chinese during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one of her earliest films, Ai Xiaoming introduces the audience to Tan Zuoren, an activist from Chengdu who was the first to attribute the deaths of thousands of children in collapsed school buildings in the 2008 Beichuan earthquake to shoddy construction. Some 20,000 people died in Beichuan, and 49,000 died elsewhere. Tan Zuoren wrote the famous article “Longmenshan” (Note 7), detailing how the earthquake became a second man-made disaster for Beichuan.

The first disaster occurred as far back as 1935, when the Red Army passed through the area on its Long March and headed north to Yan'an. The Red Army stayed in Beichuan for 100 days, recruited 1,500 men, and withdrew, leaving the residents defenseless to face the retaliatory government troops. Worse, the Red Army implemented a scorched earth policy, destroying more than a dozen villages, a precious Tang Dynasty temple that has survived to this day, and most of the roads and bridges that the locals had painstakingly built in the mountains. In the end, half of Beichuan's 46,000 people were killed.

Tan Zuoren investigated many construction projects and posted his findings online. He called his work the "New Citizen Movement" - the idea that Chinese people should strive to be citizens rather than followers. In the 2000s, Ai Xiaoming's films were all about people like Tan Zuoren. These people tried to defend their rights, such as "rights lawyers" who quoted government legal documents word for word, standing up for these sacred provisions in China's constitution and laws.

Ai Xiaoming believes that whether this strategy will work depends entirely on the government's tolerance and how it responds to peaceful demonstrations. In the period after the Cultural Revolution, when people were discussing "restoring order out of chaos," that was the most ideal stage. Peaceful confrontation gradually changed from being tolerated to being a taboo. Ai Xiaoming feels that by the 2010s, many people who tried this kind of moderate reform were "stigmatized and punished, one after another, and the government changed its face - as if it had returned to the Mao Zedong era."

“The political pressure (Note 8) that the government has unleashed through these responses clearly demonstrates that it is untouchable, that it does not need to listen, and that it has idolized itself. The demonization of critics of the government, which has happened in the past, has happened again.”

Scholar Zeng Jinyan has written extensively about Ai Xiaoming, including for her 2016 doctoral dissertation. She documents the rounds of stigmatization that Ai experienced. First, she was the daughter of a victim of political persecution, which meant that her childhood was marked by state-orchestrated violence and exclusion. After a brief return in the late 1970s and 1980s, she became a scholar who most people considered too radical for her commitment to the feminist movement, a controversial topic in China at the time. Although well-respected in feminist circles, her work was not supported by her university, nor was she retained to teach after she passed the retirement age of 55—a common practice for established scholars.

The third stage of stigmatization came after she started making documentary films, which were considered too radical. Underground documentary festivals would not usually invite Ai Xiaoming to participate until they were shut down in the early 2010s. They preferred more aesthetic films and were worried that the lobbying or advocacy nature of Ai Xiaoming's films would cause them trouble.

For example, Zeng Jinyan recorded in her doctoral thesis that she was once invited to speak at a women's film festival, but the organizer reminded her not to mention Ai Xiaoming.

In order to avoid political risks, we did not invite Teacher Ai. If your speech involves her, it may not be appropriate... It is better for us to talk about other Chinese female directors. Teacher Ai is too sensitive and may be stopped. (Note 9)

Ironically, of course, such warnings were of no use, and the festival was eventually shut down. Ai Xiaoming realized early on that compromise was pointless, which led to her most famous action. In 2013, she wanted to protest the sexual abuse of children in a Chinese school. After the government arrested activists who exposed sexual abuse, Ai Xiaoming asked Zeng Jinyan to take a photo of herself, topless, holding a pair of scissors, with her body covered in calligraphy written with a brush to protest government inaction. She posted the photo on her Weibo, which was of course immediately banned, and then posted it on Twitter.

The image has become the most famous protest work of the past few decades, and a sign of the despair felt by people like Ai Xiaoming who are trying to change society. How can they change the system when their books and films about current events are banned?

In 2014, Ai Xiaoming’s interest in history grew. Her films had always focused on the present: women being raped, villagers protesting for democracy, citizens exposing corruption. Her next project was an epic documentary about the Jiabiangou labor camp. Ai Xiaoming spent several years completing her retrospective, and she doubled down on her interest in Chinese social media of the era, especially its most visionary author, Yu Luoke.