They labour to fulfil the "strategic plans" of their corporate commissars.
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.
When, in an authoritarian country, swathes of the population are given up to invaders or sacrificed in battle, there isn't much the victims can do to trouble the commissars.
Sound effects and grumpy asides do not fully convey the lice and foul food of the ruin in Stalingrad, where a bunch of exhausted Russian soldiers resist an implacable German assault, while commissars fret about their lack of discipline.It is not only descriptive passages that have suffered in the editing.
Like the crowds at Nanjing's memorial hall, the volume of such content ebbs and flows, according to tide tables set by the commissars who control Chinese media.
AFTER being subject to commissars in Moscow, some east Europeans are twitchy about commissioners in Brussels.
Orthodox Christianity, for its part, has in its earthly affairs shown a chameleonic gift of adaptation to almost all regimes, from Ottoman sultans to Soviet commissars, as long as its spiritual mission is not completely crushed.
He cut the army by 1m, and in the process dismissed many political commissars (and their dancing girls).The Tiananmen decisionBut in pursuing their divine right to meddle in China's future, the elders clashed with a younger generation of technocrats.
AS MORE and more Chinese find their way on to the Internet, China's bureaucrats, commissars and secret policemen find themselves with a digital dilemma.
Cultural commissars chided her for overuse of metaphor: how could the sea be "yellow in the twilight", when it was obviously blue?
Non-governmental organisations were barred from teaching peasants that the ballot would be secret; ZANU commissars quietly promised that it would not be.Some rural voters genuinely support ZANU, but many are simply terrified not to.
