BEIJING — One of China's most controversial artists on Wednesday spoke out in support of US Internet giant Google in its standoff with Beijing, and said his Gmail accounts had been breached by hackers.
In a commentary in The Wall Street Journal, Ai Weiwei said Google had set an important example for the Chinese people by challenging state censorship at the risk of sacrificing its place in the world's largest online market.
Ai -- who has a popular, but often censored, blog on which he writes political commentaries -- said two of his Google email accounts were hacked from October, with messages transferred to an unknown address.
The artist warned that China itself could not long prosper by persisting with broad censorship.
"The question then is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful. And if it can, what kind of monster it will become," he wrote.
Google last month threatened to abandon its Chinese-language search engine, google.cn, and possibly leave the country altogether over alleged China-based cyberattacks. The company also said it would no longer obey censorship rules.
The government has denied any involvement in the cyberattacks, which Google said had targeted the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
"It is encouraging for the Chinese people to see that a leading Internet company recognises that censorship is a violation of basic human rights and values," Ai said.
"To stand up and speak out in a society in which those values are under constant attack requires courage and deserves moral support.
"Politicians and enterprises should not trade those basic rights for profits, because any short-term deal will only lead to long-term losses."
Ai first came to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of an avant garde group of artists known as "The Stars". He then moved to the United States, where he lived for more than a decade before coming home in the 1990s.
He now leads a group of volunteers investigating the collapse of poorly built schools in the massive May 2008 earthquake in the southwestern province of Sichuan, which left more than 87,000 people dead or missing.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
