EARLIER this month, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei decided to mark the anniversary of the day in April 2011 when he was detained by police, taken to a secret location, held in solitary confinement for 81 days and interrogated, he reckons, about fifty times. Since his release last June, he has been forbidden to leave Beijing and compelled to ask police for permission whenever he wants to leave the courtyard compound where he lives and works, on the north-eastern edge of the capital. He has also been the subject of intense surveillance. He is certain that his phones and computers are tapped. And he knows of at least 15 police surveillance cameras mounted within 100 metres of his home. Spotting them is easy, as the police have helpfully chosen to decorate each camera with a bright red lantern. Not unreasonably, Mr Ai thought he was being helpful when he resolved to mark the anniversary by mounting four cameras of his own, covering nearly all his own movements, and streaming the live video footage onto the internet at a website he created, called weiweicam.com “I decided to give this, my privacy, as a gift to the people who care about me as a friend, or any people who have any curiosity about me,” he said while sitting in his garden with The Economist on a pleasant spring afternoon.

“I wanted to give this gift not only to the public, but also to the Public Security Bureau, because they are so eager to know about me. I wanted them to know what I'm doing in the office, who I meet in this garden, and how I've been sleeping,” he said.

The response from the Public Security Bureau, or China's police, to this gift was an odd one—amounting more or less to, “Oh, really, you shouldn't have!”

Less than two days after he turned his cameras on, Mr Ai recounted, police called to ask him whether he was in fact streaming his own self-surveillance video online. He answered truthfully. They asked what he would think of stopping it. He answered truthfully again, saying he thought it was a good thing, and that this was why he bothered to do it. If they really wanted him to stop, they would have to order it. They did, and he complied. The cameras are off and the website now displays only a blank white page.

It would seem a thoroughly Orwellian absurdity that police could put him under near-total surveillance while forbidding him from surveilling himself. Asked about this, Mr Ai thought for a moment before saying, “Yes, Orwell. Or maybe Kafka.”

Indeed, that description—part Orwellian and part Kafkaesque—applies to much of Mr Ai's experience over the past year. While it is always the police who deal with him (and always very politely, he is quick to add), he has no idea who in the government is handling his case. “Nobody even knows. That's so beautiful!” the artist said.

This, he said, is how the Chinese regime works. “It's there, but it's not there. It's not there, but it's there. So freedom, anyone who pushes extra, just a little bit further, is always dangerous for the people who want to have absolute control,” he said.

His detention came after many previous run-ins with the authorities over his increasingly bold and outspoken statements about China's suppression of expression and individuality. He also drew official attention with a high-profile campaign to publicise the role of corruption and shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

Only after his detention last year, and the search of his house and the interrogation of many of his friends, colleagues and relatives, did authorities announce that his legal problem had to do with tax irregularities.

But Mr Ai said that his interrogations never touched on the issue of taxes. He has never been formally charged, with tax violations or anything else.

“They told the whole world it's my tax problem, but they told me it's not a tax problem, so I shouldn't even argue about this,” he said.

His release last year came on the condition that he not leave Beijing, submit for one year to his bizarre form of semi-house arrest, and refrain from tweeting, writing, or meeting with foreigners and journalists. He readily acknowledges that he has violated these promises, and his meeting with The Economist was only one of many such instances. In part he blames his lack of self-discipline: “C'mon, I can't even lose weight!” he said. And indeed, he has largely reverted to the portly form he had lost during his 81 days of detention.

But he also makes a principled case for breaking his promises. “I feel sorry, because this is my life and I have to do this and that to explain my situation, especially after the kind of dirt they have put on me. This is the case I have to make about writing and talking to the press.”

He also believes that allowing people like him to express themselves would be good for China.

“The individual under this kind of life, with no rights, has absolutely no power in this land,” he said. “How can they even ask you for creativity? Or imagination, or courage or passion?”

Excellent questions all, and if Chinese police commissars keep an eye on their own video feeds of Mr Ai's activities, they may just glimpse some answers. They might even think about asking him to turn his own cameras back on.