Ai Weiwei Returns to Beijing After a Decade Away (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: After 10 years of self-imposed exile, China's most famous dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, made a visit back to Beijing in mid-December. The three-week trip has largely gone under the radar, but photos and videos of the trip posted on his Instagram show him being reunited with his 93-year-old mother, as well as chatting with friends, capturing the city and its food. These scenes of everyday life are quite extraordinary, given that this is the same artist who relentlessly produced works critical of the Chinese government on everything from alleged human rights abuses to censorship and corruption. He consistently clashed with authorities, who in 2011 placed him in secret detention for almost three months for alleged tax evasion, charges many felt were politically motivated. Ai has since lived in Europe and the UK and continues to make works critical of China, but also of the West, where he says changes over the past 10 years have shocked him. He told CNN that Western society was in decline, while China's overall trajectory was on the ascent. The fact that authorities let him in may suggest that they are confident that they have effectively censored his works from the Chinese public, and that their surveillance systems are far-reaching.