Chinese Dissident Ai Weiwei: "Beijing is a nightmare"

Earlier this year, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei was released from the clutches of the Chinese government after three months in jail. Apparently his stay in prison hasn't dampened his spirit, because late last month he published a scathing critique of the city of Beijing. Courtesy of The Daily Beast: 

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

H/t to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing. Meanwhile, Shikha Dalmia at Reason Magazine's Hit & Run blog adds:

The plight of rural migrants in China is one of the most under-reported stories in the West—but also one that spells most trouble for China’s autocracy. During Mao’s reign, the country implemented something called hukou, an internal passport that went to draconian lengths to control the movement of Chinese people. Under hukou, every citizen is assigned a status—urban or rural—upon birth, creating a kind of locational apartheid. If people want to move outside their birth hukou, they need official permission, which was virtually impossible to get before liberalization. Now, thanks to the need for cheap labor in China’s urban factories, men can get permission by paying a fee. Women have to pay—and take a pregnancy test to prove that they are not moving to evade birth control restrictions!