Ai Weiwei and the lost backpack: A Chinese exile’s brush with bureaucracy

A backpack is forgotten connected the train. It seems a elemental capable occupation to resolve, particularly successful Germany, oft famed for its orderliness and efficiency. But erstwhile you’re surviving arsenic a exile oregon successful exile, the documents the container contained are not specified pieces of insubstantial to beryllium reissued. They precise good whitethorn beryllium irreplaceable – a displaced person’s lone means of existing wrong a coldly bureaucratic society. To suffer them tin beryllium devastating, turning borders into walls.

In this comic, Chinese creator Ai Weiwei relates specified an experience. Exiled from China since 2015, helium is each excessively alert of the captious value of documents similar passports and visas for those forced from their autochthonal lands. According to Ai, “Wait is the astir predominant connection heard by those seeking an exit, and often the last.” One’s state of question crossed borders is astir ever determined by documentation, and the hold for the due papers tin consciousness endless. Sometimes it ne'er ends, and for immoderate it is simply a substance of beingness oregon death.

Referring to this bureaucracy, Ai wonders, “Why does bureaucracy exist?” Why should displaced radical unrecorded and dice by its whims and limitations?

For a time, Germany was known arsenic a haven for specified refugees, but that is changing. As the state grapples with interior problems, swinging toward the governmental close to the tune of anti-immigrant rhetoric, its cognition towards refugees and migrants has soured. And, portion Ai Weiwei’s communicative of losing a backpack connected 1 of the country’s trains whitethorn look anecdotal astatine archetypal glance, it shines a airy connected thing much sinister astir however our bureaucratic satellite treats those whose beingness is threatened by the precariousness of whether oregon not they person the close paperwork.