Ai Weiwei quietly returns to China after a decade: ‘It felt like a phone call suddenly reconnecting’

By Stephy Chung, CNN

(CNN) — In 2015, China handed back something of great value to Ai Weiwei: his Chinese passport. The move allowed the dissident artist to travel for the first time since authorities revoked his document in 2011 – the same year he spent 81 days in secret government detention for alleged tax evasion. He moved to Berlin shortly after.

For the past 10 years Ai has lived in Germany, the UK and now Portugal, never once setting foot in his native country, where people with far less controversial pasts have faced arbitrary detention. But in mid-December, he decided to take the risk, returning for a three-week visit.

“It felt like a phone call that had been disconnected for 10 years suddenly reconnecting,” he said of the instant he arrived into Beijing. “The tone, rhythm and speed, all returned to how they were before.”

Glimpses of the visit are on Ai’s Instagram account, where the artist actively posts but doesn’t typically write captions, contributing to the trip’s under-the-radar quality. Varied scenes include a video of smokestacks in the unmistakable soft light of a Beijing winter, the artist puffing cigarettes as a Lazy Susan spins leisurely with dishes and a bottle of Nongfu Spring, a local mineral water brand; and a robot getting out of an elevator.

Still images show the artist lifting dumbbells at an indoor gym and catching up with old friends – the ordinary becoming somewhat extraordinary when compared to how intensely he was surveilled by authorities when he was last in China’s capital.

Nostalgia permeates the images. “What I missed most was speaking Chinese,” he said. “For immigrants, the greatest loss is not wealth, loneliness or an unfamiliar lifestyle, but the loss of linguistic exchange.”

When Ai left in 2015, he was a thorn on the government’s side. The outspoken artist and activist relentlessly criticized China on everything from alleged human rights abuses to censorship and corruption, with artworks such as “Remembering” (2009) – an installation commemorating the thousands of children killed under the collapse of shoddily-constructed school buildings during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake – gaining international attention. In “S.A.C.R.E.D,” he depicted what it was like to be imprisoned for nearly three months, in the form of six life-sized dioramas that debuted at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Such pieces came at a time when – in the years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics – officials carefully projected a new era of Chinese development and aggressively cracked down on any dissent. In the decade Ai has been away, China’s censorship and surveillance efforts have only grown more sophisticated, with critics now fearing that artificial intelligence is turbocharging these systems of control.

Ai had previously said he had no illusions about his chances of returning to China. But now his son is almost 17 years old, he no longer bears the same weight of parental responsibility – and feels “relatively freer” to act of his own accord.

Poignant photos from the trip shared with CNN show the father and son walking out of Beijing Capital International Airport, as well as reuniting with Ai’s 93-year-old mother.

“When I saw my mother, she was smiling and especially happy to see my son. They held hands the entire time. She did not say much, but she was deeply content. That contentment was like a gentle wind on a hot day, or a few drops of rain during a drought – natural, humane happiness.

“I am not familiar with this kind of feeling, and it surprised me,” he added.

Ai didn’t take any specific precautions when planning the trip but was “inspected and interrogated” for almost two hours at Beijing’s airport before he was allowed to pass immigration. “The questions were very simple: How long do you plan to stay here? Where else do you plan to go?”

The fact that rest of the 68-year-old’s visit was “smooth and, one could say, pleasant” may signal authorities’ confidence on a number of fronts: a Chinese public that is increasingly unfamiliar with the artist as his name and works have been largely censored on the country’s social media platforms; and in the expansive reach of their surveillance technologies. Politically, there might also be little to gain from the international outcry that would arise were the high-profile artist detained or prevented from entering Beijing.

The red lines in China, as always, are vague and fast-evolving. Another prominent Chinese artist, Gao Zhen, had relocated to New York but returned to China in June 2024 to visit family, only to be detained about a week before he planned to return to the US, for scathing sculptures of Mao he created over a decade ago.

From Europe, Ai has continued to produce works that are critical of the state, such as the 2020 documentary “Coronation,” on China’s initial handling of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and “Cockroach,” a sympathetic take on the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. But he has also gone to great lengths to make art of what’s in front of him: the global refugee crisis and, more recently, the war in Ukraine.

When asked if he thought the Chinese government’s attitudes towards him had changed given his trouble-free stay, he said he didn’t think any change began recently.

“Rather, it comes from my long-term public work in expressing my views… Although a country or group may disagree with my positions, they at least recognize that I speak sincerely and not for personal gain.”

He believes China is “in an upward phase,” pointing to individual wealth, national strength and personal freedoms, though discussing political topics remains taboo. “The overall trajectory is one of ascent, even though different problems emerge at different stages.”

Western society, conversely, is in decline, he argued, in perhaps rare agreement with the frequent message from Chinese leaders. He added that changes he’s seen over the past 10 years have “shocked” him. “It feels like a landslide burying the highways it once built. Values once celebrated now appear hollow and collapsed. The West increasingly struggles to sustain its own logic; in many areas it has lost its ethical authority and descended into something barely recognizable.”

So does he plan on moving back to China anytime soon?

“I have never truly left anywhere; the distance has simply grown longer,” Ai explained. He once said he felt that he belonged nowhere, a “stranger” everywhere he goes. But it’s his Chinese passport that keeps him rooted.

“Even when I lived under great difficulty, I still felt that this identity gave me the fundamental right to return to my place of birth. Other human-made obstacles were secondary.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.