Ai Weiwei, an international artist and activist in China is still under detention. This morning, I got an interesting event invite from a friend on Facebook. The event is titled ‘1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei,’ a public event for supporters to gather and sit silently on April 17 at various Chinese embassies and consulates across the world. So far, the event has gathered more than 1,000 attendees and the number continues to rise steadily at every refresh.
“A question posted on Facebook about what we, as an arts community, can do to support the safe release of Ai Weiwei sparked great ideas, including one by curator Steven Holmes to reenact Ai Weiwei’s project Fairytale: “1,001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs—an installation which was comprised of 1,001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs at Documenta 12 in 2007 in Kassel, Germany—in front of Chinese embassies and consulates around the world,” as described on the Facebook event.
Ai Weiwei’s whereabout was unknown ever since his arrest on 3 April in Beijing. His last international appearance was believed to be at a TED event , through a video on February.
It’s support, but not overwhelming support
We should point out here that relatively speaking, Facebook is not currently a very popular social network within China according to numbers from Social Bakers. They currently report about 400,000 Facebook users in China, though there has been a mysterious drop off recently. We asked Social Bakers to explain this anomaly but they had no answer, pointing out the data displayed was based on Facebook’s own ad tool. Needless to say, for China these are not big numbers.
Public events at embassies around the world point to strong international support for Ai Weiwei. This is reminiscent of the over-hyped February 20th Jasmine revolution earlier this year. As the excellent Charles Custer explained on his blog afterwards:
It’s clear that if change will come to China, it will come from within. A revolution cannot be hoped or tweeted into existence by overseas Chinese, or overzealous Twitter fans drunk off their so-called victories in North Africa.
So while there’s support for Ai Weiwei on Facebook, don’t expect any Chinese revolutions there. The numbers just aren’t there. At least, not yet.
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