Netizens Using Alipay to Give Money to Dissident Artist Ai Weiwei

via CNNGo

Ai Weiwei, China’s firebrand modern artist, has never been one to shy away from controversy, or away from a fight with the government. His iconoclasm brought him to the edge this spring, when he was arrested and detained for nearly three months for initially mysterious reasons. Eventually, he was accused of tax evasion. His arrest became an international incident, and his loyal army of Twitter followers was up in arms until he was finally released early this summer.

Now, Ai has been hit with a $2.4 million tax bill, although he says that the police confiscated all of his company’s financial documents while he was being detained and they have not received any evidence indicating he really owes this much. Ai has vowed to fight these charges “to the death” but his netizen fans have clearly decided to help him out, too. His friends have been tweeting ways netizens can use to donate him money, and just now we spotted this on Twitter.

Now, 400,000 RMB isn’t going to be enough to settle Ai’s tax bill, but that’s a massive amount of money to raise in just a few hours. People crowd-source art projects all the time these days, but this may be the first time an artist has crowd-sourced his taxes. Interesting.

This also has implications for Alibaba and Alipay, the online payment system most netizens are using to donate. Like Paypal, Alipay allows users to easily send money to other users, but as Alipay operates in China, there’s no way it can afford to be seen as a channel through with dissidents can raise money. Ai Weiwei — such a sensitive figure that his name remains a blocked search term on Sina Weibo even now — is not someone that Alibaba wants the government to associate it with.

On the other hand, the company risks angering netizens and appearing overbearing and authoritarian if it blocks donations to Mr. Ai. More practically, it may be difficult to actually do so; Alipay could easily close the Fake Design (Ai Weiwei’s company) account that’s being used to collect donations, but if Ai’s many friends and fans began to collect donations on their own to pass along, it could be very difficult for Alipay to weed out who was involved.

Of course, in a case involving the high-profile Mr. Ai, it’s unlikely Alibaba will be entirely free to choose its own response. The Chinese government is likely already aware of these donations; if not, it will be soon. It seems likely that steps will be taken to prevent people from donating to Ai Weiwei, or at least to stop it from being so easy to make those donations by blocking Ai’s Alipay account.

We’ll keep an eye on this and see what steps, if any, the government and/or Alibaba takes to attempt to block further donations to Mr. Ai. Netizens are also donating via regular bank transfers and have just added a Paypal account into the mix as well. It’s not entirely clear whether the money is being accepted as a donation or a loan. Some of the netizens organizing the campaign have asked donors to provide personal info so that they can be paid back, but exactly when and how that might happen are as yet unclear.

In the meantime, Ai’s remarkably fast fundraising seems to be proof that crowd-sourcing almost anything can work in China, at least if you’re a high-profile artist with a large online following.