"Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"

"Unfortunately he had no way of knowing that Mao was just then readying a major political 'rectification campaign (整风运动)' against 'incorrect thought (错误思想)' that would make self-expression among Communist intelligentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics. In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party’s quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Under its shadow, writes Ai Weiwei, 'everyone sank into an ideological swamp of "criticism" and "self-criticism"' in which the bourgeois tendencies of his father’s art marked him indelibly as being politically unreliable.... Then, like half a million other intellectuals, he was 'sent down (下放)' to the Great Northern Wilderness (北大荒)....

Ai Weiwei, then only two, accompanied him.... He would spend... two decades with his father, in effect a juvenile political prisoner in internal exile.... As China careened toward the Cultural Revolution, Ai Qing found himself under renewed attack. Red Guards put banners outside their shack that read, 'Expose Ai Qing’s True Counter-Revolutionary Colors!' Then the sons and daughters of many other exiled 'literary types' who’d once been regular guests in the Ai home began ransacking their house. 'Now that the political storm had arrived, they were first to trim their sails to the wind, betraying and slandering people around them, in the hope of enhancing their own position,' writes Ai Weiwei...."

From "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" by Orville Schell (reviewing "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows")(NYRB).