The news that Chinese writer Mo Yan (莫言) won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature comes as a surprise, and yet it was to be expected. Given the rise of communist China, it is an indication of how important a Nobel winner’s country is. The only thing is, Mo Yan is more affiliated with China’s power system, than that oppose to it, unlike the kind of writers who usually win the Nobel literature prize.
The Swedish Academy, whose members choose the Nobel literature winner, praised Mo Yan, saying that he had merged folk stories, history and modernity through his combination of fantasy and realism, and compared his writings to those of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
However, there is another side to Mo Yan that is pertinent to him being awarded the Nobel Prize.
China has festooned him with praise following the announcement of the prize. Compare this with Chinese officials’ vitriolic reaction to the announcements of Gao Xingjian (高行健) being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, or the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The official Chinese media has made much of the fact that, according to them, Mo Yan is the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gao, who now has French citizenship, is only known as a Chinese writer in Taiwan. Is it not funny that the China of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan has actually gotten one over the China of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China by not glossing over this fact?
Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum was adapted into a film by Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), and his books have been translated into many languages.
In his writings, Mo Yan concentrates on “representing the lives of Chinese people,” but he has never used his influence to speak out for freedom, and instead panders to the non-democratic Chinese leadership. This is, surely, to the shame of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2002 Mo Yan was among a group of writers who made a handwritten copy of the Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art delivered by late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in 1942 during China’s civil war, in which he talked on how Chinese artists and writers were to extol communist ideology.
Mo Yan, a writer acknowledged to be under the sway of the CCP, is a classic child of Mao, and not someone Chinese dissident writers would consider a suitable prize winner.
However, in Taiwan, writers and artists accustomed to life in the China of the ROC on Taiwan are clearly ecstatic about the news of Mo Yan’s award. How strange, and yet so strangely natural.
I am sure Beijing is over the moon that Mo Yan beat Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. China is hostile to Japan. Japan on the other hand has a former Nobel laureate in Kenzaburo Oe who has, in his writings, reflected upon his country’s invasion of China. The people who recommended Mo Yan — a writer who has rarely thought to question China’s increasing imperialism — have exhibited a degree of moral courage, but seem to be trapped within a masochistic historical view, and are biased.
Taiwan is not regarded as a country in and of itself. The people who live on this land have their own history of hardships, and their own story to tell, but the world sees the island as a place of economic production and consumers. This country, which is not quite a country, has something to say, but the world is not listening.
Mo Yan, communist China’s child of Mao, who has remained silent on freedom, has few authentic credentials as a writer.
Lee Min-yung is a poet and political commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs