in april 2010, he went back to confront the police in sichuan who had beaten him in his hotel room. time, he didn't just bring a lawyer. he brought his personal videographer, zhaozhao, me, two chinese filmmakers, a "new yorker" reporter, and several assistants to post live to twitter. >> to a reasonable viewer who walked in and didn't know what was going on, you would have assumed it was some kind of reality show. are you expecting a successful result? >> the result, i don't think so. >> i asked him why he bothers to go through this process. he was wasting, basically, the whole afternoon on a process that he knew was ultimately doomed. and he said, "well, you know, you can't just say that the system is flawed; you have to work through the system and show it in all of its detail, and that's the only way you can ultimately make a critique." over the course of the afternoon, he'd been twittering about the fact that he was going to have dinner that night at a laoma tihua restaurant, which is a place that specializes in a certain kind of pig's trotter. and as soon as we got to the restau

the earthquake that had devastated sichuan province in may 2008. some 70,000 people were killed when poorly built government buildings and schools collapsed. when he toured the wreckage for himself, he grew outraged at the lack of government responsibility. his eye was especially drawn to the deaths of the school children whose names the government refused to release. >> this is absolutely crazy. come on. those people have names. none of them would give us single names. of who is dead. >> weiwei put out a call to action on his blog. he got an overwhelming response. he gave cameras to volunteers to film in sichuan as they began what he called a citizens investigation into the earthquake deaths. volunteers, young and old, began hounding local officials for the children's names. then more volunteers posted the names online. >> the act of organizing people into a community in china is in itself a very risky thing to do. he has dedicated himself to doing exactly that. that puts him into very small community of people. >> in the end weiwei's team publish