Police Confine Beijing Artist and Activist

  A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, apparently at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them.
They were correct. In telephone interviews this week, Mr. Ai detailed a bizarre and mysterious chain of events in which Shanghai officials first implored him to burnish the city’s cultural credentials by building a million-dollar art studio, then ordered the finished building demolished at the command of anonymous higher-ups.
Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Shanghai on Friday to prepare a Sunday goodbye party at the studio, to be attended by eight rock bands and up to a thousand supporters from around China. But on Thursday night, he said, Beijing police officers came to his home and asked him not to make the trip.
On Friday, after he said he was going anyway, the officers placed him under house arrest — reluctantly, Mr. Ai insisted.
“They’re sorry, very sorry,” he said by telephone from his home. “They say they understand me and really agree, but this is really beyond what they can do.”
Mr. Ai said the officers told him that “Shanghai is very nervous” about the party. Like Mr. Ai, however, they did not know precisely who in Shanghai was nervous, or how they managed to arrange his confinement in a city 650 miles away.
Indeed, Mr. Ai said he doesn’t even know why the unnamed Shanghai officials have ordered his studio demolished, although, he said, he has his theories.
This is not the first run-in with the authorities for Mr. Ai, an artistic polymath who seems to be alternately tolerated and hectored by higher-ups. An internationally known sculptor, filmmaker, architect and performance artist, he helped design Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics, then renounced his role after concluding that Chinese leaders had politicized the games.
He was allowed to fly to Munich last year to stage a major exhibit that excoriated the government’s handling of children’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Yet months before, he was so severely beaten by police in Chengdu, where he had gone to testify in the trial of a fellow activist, that he needed surgery to drain blood from his brain.