Word: ais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...goes with Monologues. Chinese producers first attempted to stage the play in Shanghai in 2004, but the show was canceled after hundreds of tickets had been sold. Officials reportedly told the director, Li Shengying, that the play was "not yet mature." The same year, however, Ai Xioaming, the professor at Sun Yat-sen, staged the play unofficially with students, filming the process for a documentary called The Vagina Monologues: Stories From China. The play ran title and all, thanks, Ai says, to a moratorium on press before opening night. It's a lesson for would-be directors and social activists...
...half the run. In Beijing, the production was billed as The V Monologues. In Shanghai, two months later, the original title was restored. The name change was not endorsed by Ensler's camp, and critics were quick to spot the irony. "The point is to speak it out," says Ai Xioaming, a professor of women's studies at Sun Yat-sen University. But Wang insists that his decision was pragmatic: in Beijing, he could not find a venue unless he changed the title. In Shanghai, conditions were different. "I'm more wise than brave," he told That's Beijing...
...salutary example is Tan Zuoren, a 55-year-old environmentalist and writer who was compiling his own parallel list of dead students. On March 28, he was detained by police in his native city of Chengdu in Sichuan province and hasn't been heard of since. About 20 of Ai's volunteers have faced temporary detention and police harassment as they crisscrossed the quake zone interviewing parents and relatives of the dead, according to Ai, and two have been beaten. The volunteers "are constantly being harassed," Ai says. "But ... the parents who are trying to give us the names...
...Ai's stubborn stance is already having an influence far beyond the narrow issue of the number of dead students. As one 27-year-old volunteer put it, Ai has become a symbol for Chinese concerned about the state of society and its future course. "He makes me realize that it's possible to live as an individual in China," says the native of Liaoning province, who asked for anonymity. "I think the reason why the government is not functioning is because most people have automatically given up their own rights. The role of individuals is to stand...
...Still, Ai is keenly aware of the boundaries of dissent. When asked whether such an office would also look into the alleged abuses in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang, he acknowledges that that would be "suicidal." In the China of the next decade and further down the road, democracy won't be nearly as important as freedom of information, the artist concludes. "We need a scientific system more than a democratic one. The Communist Party can be in power for the next 100 years, but we have to question them, investigate them ... It doesn't matter as long...