 On the morning of April 3rd, 2011, the renowned artist Ai Weiwei was picked up by Chinese police at an airport in Beijing. Later that day, he found himself in the back of a van surrounded by security officials and wearing a black hood. They took him to a secret detention facility where he was interrogated and monitored. It was here that I began to think of his young son, wondering when he would see him again. I was thinking of being in that position for the next 10 or 13 years. That's what they told me. The memory only belongs to isolated men. I tried to capture what happened in the past. And I realized if there's a chance I would write it down. So I can pass to my son, and at that time he was two years old. So he would have a full record. After 81 days and following an international outcry, I was released by Chinese authorities, but he was far from free. They held onto his passport so he couldn't leave the country, and they continued to watch his every move. It was then that he began to write. The resulting book One Thousand Years of Joys and Sorrows tells the story of his detention, his repeated struggles with the communist government, and how what happened to his father, the famous poet Ai Qing, during China's Cultural Revolution, shaped his worldview. Why art is necessary and important? Why freedom of speech are necessary? So all those issues are not just come to me, but rather come from my father's generation. He was heavily punished with about half a million of the intellectuals, and they are the first generation to be sent to the reeducation camp. They relocated us from the capital to the most remote province, Xinjiang. And that experience gave me early, very intimate relations to politics. Growing up in exile and watching his father's struggle profoundly affected Ai's views on human rights, individuality, and freedom of expression, and he would later explore these themes in his art. In 2005, Ai turned his fingers from the camera lens to the computer keyboard and typed his first blog post, a move that had profound implications for his career. At that moment, neither Ai nor China's internet censorship apparatus anticipated quite what a transformational act this would turn out to be for me, he writes. Ai entered the public's field of vision with the force of a bullet from a gun. If you have art exhibition, you may have maybe 100,000 people went to those exhibitions, but if you put a social media post, you immediately can be saying 100,000 people a day, that's, you know, it's very, seems convenient. Ai also felt liberated. Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom, he writes. By enabling alternative voices, the internet weakened the power of autocracy, dispelling the obstacles it tried to put in the individual's way. Ai harnessed the power of the internet to push for government transparency, broadcast his anti-authoritarian views and advocate for change in China and abroad. Eventually, government censors shut him down. His blog, along with thousands of his photographs, disappeared. Even an online search within China for his name drew a blank, which foreshadowed his own disappearance a few years later. These Olympics, as you know, are hugely controversial. Why? China has been widely criticized for human rights abuses, including the mistreatment of pro-democracy activists and ethnic minorities. As the world watches the Beijing Olympics, American politicians have become more vocal in their criticism of China's record on human rights. Ai says these gestures will have little impact. When West talk about transparency and human rights, and China is not going to listen to it, because in the West, you cannot even defend the value of human rights. If you talk about United States, you have so many black people in jail. I mean, it contains the biggest population in jail in the world. And you support so many, you know, bad societies, terrorism, arms, and all kinds of dirty works. How can you talk about human rights and transparency? When you hold Julian Assange, a journalist, could be facing 175 years in jail, how can you talk about price freedom? So this kind of argument, you know, is not going to work. Ai sees the struggle between China and America continuing and remains deeply troubled by the direction of both countries. He recently drew headlines for comparing the state of free speech in America to the Cultural Revolution. In many ways, you already in the authoritarian state. You just don't know it. How so? Many things happen today in the US. This can be compared Cultural Revolution in China. Like what? Like people trying to be unified in certain political correctness. That is very dangerous. These thoughts are echoed in his memoirs. Ideological cleansing, he writes, exists not only under totalitarian regimes. It is also present in a different form in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don't believe in, simply to fall in line with a prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement. Tellingly though, Ai Weiwei's book is readily available in liberal Western democracies, where it's received widespread acclaim. In China, it's censored.