BEIJING (AP) — Outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei said Tuesday that tax officials are threatening to turn their investigation over to police unless he pays them $1.3 million by Wednesday, raising the prospect that he and his associates could be detained again.
Ai was taken away by police to a secret location for nearly three months earlier this year during an wide-ranging crackdown on dissent. He disputes the government's tax-evasion allegations, and says he does not even own the company involved, but added that under China's authoritarian government none of that matters.
"It's very simple," Ai said in a phone interview. "Those in power have the right to do anything and their power faces no restrictions."
The Beijing tax bureau says Ai's design firm owes 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) in back taxes and fines, but human-rights activists say the investigation is punishment for Ai's criticism of the government.
Ai said Beijing tax bureau officials told his wife Lu Qing, the legal representative of Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., that they wanted a 8.5 million yuan ($1.3 million) guarantee paid into one of their bank accounts.
"They also clearly told us that if we exceeded this time period, they would transfer the case to the public security. There would be a different kind of outcome from that," Ai said. "They were of course issuing a threat to us, but the threat is real."
A woman who answered the phone at the duty office of the Beijing Local Taxation Bureau referred the matter to the bureau's propaganda department, where repeated calls rang unanswered Tuesday.
Ai was the most high-profile target of a sweeping crackdown on activists that started in February in a bid to prevent protests similar to those in the Middle East and North Africa. Dozens of bloggers, writers, rights lawyers and other activists were detained, arrested or questioned. Many have since been released but continue to face restrictions on who they can see and talk to.
Ai, an internationally acclaimed conceptual artist, said that if the case were to go to the police it was possible that they would detain his wife, because she is the firm's legal representative, and the company's manager and accountant, who he says have been unreachable in the months since his release. He said police could also go after him even though he's not the owner of the company, just a designer.
"Even if they say right now that this has nothing to do with me, and that this targets Fake, the company, they could still take me away, because when they took me away previously they knew it had nothing to do with me but they still did it," Ai said.
Supporters have sent Ai nearly 8.7 million yuan ($1.4 million), but Ai and his company's lawyers said transferring that money into the tax bureau's accounts could be seen as admitting guilt and that if they win the case it would be difficult to get the money back. Instead, Ai was planning to be the guarantor and offer a bank certificate of deposit as collateral.
"This issue at this point is in a kind of deadlock," Ai said, though he said they would continue to negotiate. His lawyers say the tax bureau's request is illegal because Chinese law stipulates that a person trying to challenge a tax bill can use collateral to provide a guarantee.
"They have already clearly told me you can't argue with the government," Ai said. "If the government says you have evaded taxes, it will not change its view. By this point, it would be embarrassing for them. Even if they know it is illegal they will keep going on this path."
The donations Ai has received are rare for Chinese dissidents because of the threat of retaliation that comes with supporting high-profile government critics.
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Gillian Wong can be reached at http://twitter.com/gillianwong
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