The comprehensive gag on Ai, who is not allowed to post anything on Twitter or accept interviews for a year, raises questions about the Chinese government's repeated claims that his was purely an economic case.

We have the terrible habit of reducing issues to non-issues or, on the contrary, turning non-issues into issues. With the Facebook ban in May, the constant criticism was this: It’s just a ban on Facebook, get over it. But actually, it wasn’t “just a ban.”