THE Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei believes that China is now moving ahead of the western world.
“I think they are winning,” he tells The Herald Magazine tomorrow in an exclusive interview. When it comes to infrastructure, he argues, China has overtaken the first world.
“Airport, the road, the train. It’s far behind,” Ai says of the west.
And China will continue to move ahead, he thinks.
“It’s simple. They have 1.4bn people. Each of them wants to become rich, so they work hard, maybe five times harder than the people in the west. They don’t have vacations, they leave their child in the countryside, only see them once a year.
“So that’s very different from the west. You enjoy your democracy, luxurious life, pensions and protections. You refuse to work more. All this makes China laugh.”
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Ai was speaking on a visit to Edinburgh to promote his memoir 1000 Days of Joys and Sorrows. It includes an account of his time living in a hole in the ground with his father, who was himself a dissident in China, in the 1960s. It also charts his own run-ins with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2011 Ai was arrested at Beijing airport and detained for 81 days. His passport wasn’t returned to him until 2015.
In tomorrow’s interview the artist also talks about his work on the design of the Beijing National Stadium, better known as the Bird’s Nest Stadium, and why he believes humanity is suicidal.
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