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Ai Wei Wei 3 June 2009

Ai Wei Wei, a famous Chinese artist and dissident, one of the signers of the Charter 08, made the following post on his blog on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the army's attack on the protesters of Tiananmen Square.

Ai Wei Wei has been working with a group of volunteers to compile and publish a list of the children who died in last year's earthquake due to substandard school constructions. His blog, where he publishes the updated lists along with political comments, is constantly subjected to censorship and shutdowns without explanation. The lists of dead children are continuously removed.

"Let us forget about June 4th, forget this ordinary day. Life has taught us, under totalitarianism, every day is the same. Every day in a totalitarian society is one day, there is no 'other day,' no 'yesterday' or 'tomorrow.' We no longer need partial truth, we don’t need partial justice or partial fairness.

Without freedom of speech, without freedom of news, without freedom of elections, we are not people, we do not need to remember. Lacking the right to remember, we choose to forget.

Let us forget every instance of persecution, every instance of humiliation; every massacre and every cover-up, every lie, every time we are pushed down, every death. Forget every moment of suffering, then forget every moment of forgetting. This is all just so that they, like 'men of honor,' might ridicule us.

Forget those soldiers who fired on civilians, those students whose bodies were crushed by the treads of tanks, the whistle and scream of bullets and blood on big streets and in the alleyways; a city and a Square without tears. Forget the interminable lies, the rulers hoping everyone has forgotten, forget their cowardess, their evil and ineptitude. We must forget, for they must be forgotten. Only when they’ve been forgotten can (we) exist. For the sake of existing, let us forget."

An excerpt from of Ai's posts of May 28, before his blog was shutdown, which refers to his posting of the names of the school children who died in last year's earthquake due to shoddy school constructions: 

"...I view these as menaces to people's dignity and rationality, as menaces to life's potential. I want to learn how to face them. Rest assured, I learn rather quickly; I won't let you down. Those rights of those children who lost their lives not long ago, their group has perished. They helped me to understand the significance of an individual life and society."

Links to China Digital Times and Chinageeks, which translate Ai Wei Wei's blog posts into English:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/ai-weiwei/
http://www.sun-zoo.com/chinageeks/

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