Literary prizes, wrote Kingsley Amis, are “all right if youwin them.” China’s political establishment takes a far less relaxed view of theNobel Prize in Literature. Since the country reintegrated into the globalcommunity after the death of Mao, its government has long craved a literaryNobel for a Chinese citizen living, working and thriving in China as proof thatthe People’s Republic has arrived as a modern world power. China’s longstandingNobel envy has turned the prize into a symbol of collective achievement, ratherthan of individual creativity.
In theory, the awarding of the prize to Mo Yan “ CommunistParty member and vice chairman of the government’s official Writers’Association “ should have put an end to China’s Nobel complex. An elatedPeople’s Daily, the national organ of the Communist Party, and Li Changchun,the country’s propaganda supremo, hastened to congratulate Mo. China CentralTelevision’s news broadcast interrupted its regular programming with a specialreport. The contrast with reactions to previous ethnically Chinese Nobel winnerswas marked. When the exiled author Gao Xingjian was awarded the literatureprize in 2000, Beijing denounced the Nobel Committee’s “political purposes.”After the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo “ a politicaldissident still serving an 11-year prison sentence for pro-democracycampaigning “ the Foreign Ministry described the decision as “blasphemy.”
Despite official jubilation, Mo’s prize has generatedpolitical controversy. Dissident voices in China have complained that the awardwas an “insult to humanity and to literature,” in Ai Weiwei’s words, on accountof the writer’s compromises with the political establishment and silence overthe incarceration of Liu Xiaobo. Critics brought up an episode from earlierthis year when Mo joined a group of authors in hand-copying Mao’s 1942 “Talksat Yan’an” “ the ur-text of Chinese socialist realism “ for a specialcommemorative edition. One angry netizen simply posted online an image ofhimself giving a photograph of Mo the finger.
Mo’s Chinese attackers “ those who live with the dailyreality of authoritarian censorship “ have some grounds for criticism. Inrecent years, Mo has sought to dodge political controversy. At the FrankfurtBook Fair in 2009, when China was the “market focus,” he allowed himself toserve as an anodyne literary figurehead for the official Chinese delegation.Along with the rest of his group, he dutifully boycotted events that includedexiled Chinese writers. He stayed similarly on-message at the London Book Fairin April of this year. Rumor had it that every member of the Chinese delegationwas issued a long list of topics they were forbidden to discuss with theforeign press “ most notably the purge of Bo Xilai, a scandal that was breakingaround the time of the fair.
But it would be intellectually lazy for distant Westernobservers of this situation to dismiss Mo as a literary stooge, or to assumethat his several historical novels set in post-1949 China offer an officiallysanitized view of China and its recent past. Since the publication of “TheGarlic Ballads” in the late-1980s, Mo’s fiction has sought to lay bare thebrutality, greed and corruption that has flourished under Communist rule.
Set in an invented Chinese province of the same name, “TheRepublic of Wine (1992),” for example, is a biting satire on the spiritualvacuum of China’s burgeoning market economy. Mo’s novels might not betechnically perfect or broach contemporary China’s most sensitive taboos,including the suppression of the pro-democracy protests of 1989 or theresponsibility of Communist leaders and institutions for many of China’spolitical inequities. But the grotesquerie of his narratives expresses anacerbic vision of the People’s Republic and, by logical extension, of itspolitical architects. Although his criticism of the status quo since 1949 israrely direct, it is implicit and ubiquitous.
Rather than condemning Mo for his political accommodations,we should expend our energies instead on fathoming what he and his fiction tellus about China today. Contemporary Chinese literature is, for the most part,not a Manichaean struggle between spineless appeasers of the regime and heroic,dissident resisters (although China has no shortage of exceptionally braveindividuals willing to speak truth to power). Rather, a spectrum of voicesstrives to operate within a realm of political possibility that is at timessurprisingly broad; some (including Mo) periodically push at its edges.
Mo alluded to this ambiguous situation himself when heanswered his critics in a post-Nobel press conference: “Many of the people whohave criticized me online are Communist Party members themselves. They alsowork within the system. And some have benefited tremendously within the system... If they had read my books they would understand that my writings (havetaken) on a great deal of risk.”
Mo is a writer who plays a public game with authority whilemaintaining a creative space that enables him to present an indirect challengeto this same authority. Intriguingly, the attacks seem to have nettled Mo outof his habitual political reticence. Since winning the prize, Mo has publiclyexpressed hope that Liu Xiaobo would “achieve his freedom as soon as possible.”The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature may augur interesting times for itslaureate.
Julia Lovell is anauthor, literary translator and lecturer in modern Chinese history at BirkbeckCollege, University of London. Her most recent book is ``The Opium War.''
