MCLC: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (11,12,13)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney at mac.com>
Subject: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (11)
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Exactly how did the CCP end foreign encroachment and a century of
humiliation? It didn't even make much of an effort to fight the Japanese.
The KMT gets the credit for that. I think  this is very much party
propaganda, which many blindly believe. And I'm not sure it has the
undying allegiance of the intellectual elite or any real legitimacy. Think
the Great Famine, which took the lives of tens of millions, and which
caused unbearable pain, various detrimental political movements, the
Cultural Revolution, 1989, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, caused by the
government, which affects hundreds of thousands of poor farmers, who 20
years on still cant get compensation, SARS, melamine milk scandals, run
away corruption and countless other scandals in recent years. Also, is Mo
Yan a writer or someone seeking a high level leadership position? I think
we all agree he's an excellent writer. Does he need to be a party toady to
win the Nobel Prize? What does being a party member really do for him?
Many other outstanding Chinese writers are not party members. His
membership and failure to speak out about communist abuses is support for
these abuses, which continue today.

Paul

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From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (12)

I agree with Haiyan Lee and Sheldon Lu. Mo Yan is no intellectual, no
Public intellectual. Some writers can and want to play a role for their
nation, in addition to the writing. Sometimes that can become appalling.
Ezra Pound is one example, like Wolgang Kubin said. But Mo Yan's party
membership and writer's association post don't mean he wants to be a
public figure. The stories in his speech are open to different
interpretations. He doesn't Want to be a public figure. That's too bad.
China would need a few public intellectuals who are able to speak their
mind, and what could be a better boost for such a role than a Nobel? So
it's really to bad Mo Yan cannot play such a role. But Mo Yan didn't apply
for the Nobel. It's a little ironic they picked another writer who did
everything to be left alone, to be able to do his thing, and not be a
figurehead for anything. Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan are very human, and very
reluctant representants of China. They don't want to represent anything
except what they do in their works. Which deserves respect.

Martin

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From: wendy larson <walarson at uoregon.edu>
Subject: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (13)

Some time ago, I read Philippe Burrin's "La France a l'heure allemande,
1940-1944" (translated into English as "France Under the Germans:
Collaboration and Compromise"), a study that altered the myth, promoted
and believed in France, that most people had staunchly resisted the Nazi
occupation. Burrin argues that the most common reaction to intellectual
and physical occupation was accomodation, and that resistance and
collaboration are at the extreme ends. Accomodation occured in many ways
and at all levels of society, both institutional and individual, and was
the norm for intellectuals. The color gray, not black or white, applied to
almost all people in their responses to occupation.

As concerns Mo Yan, I have a lot of respect for an author whose work
sharply picks away at a social environment full of inequality, corruption,
poverty, and fear. I also admire Mo Yan for staying in China and working
critically within the system, as opposed to Herta Müller, who left Rumania
in 1987 and penned most of her devastating portraits of psychological
claustrophobia and physical torment while she was living in Germany. There
are many people in China like Mo Yan, who are working in slow and
relatively unspectacular ways to address the many ills of Chinese society,
which has changed a lot over the last 30 years. I am not convinced that
their work is less important or effective than the more visible efforts of
the "exiles" or those who end up in prison in China, although I also often
admire them.

While Mo Yan's airport security example was not convincing, he is correct
in saying that there is some censorship in all societies at different
times and under different conditions. In the immediate post-911
soul-searching period, I recall the shut-your-mouth fury rained on those
who insisted that long-term American policies were part of, or the main
reason, why the US was attacked. There are many kinds of self-censorship
in the form of when, to whom, and in what way certain
ideas/philosphies/critiques can and will be voiced, and peer pressure is
hardly absent in universities, which are supposed to be bastions of free
speech. That does not mean we should not draw a line between the heavy
restrictions on political speech in China (which nonetheless, as I imply
above, has loosened in the last 30 years--a professor in Shanghai recently
told me that jokes about 十八大 are now common and public, whereas they were
of course unheard of in the 1970s and even 80s) and the more liberal
standards of other countries.

Other questions where a black-and-white approach does not seem to
sufficiently address the complexity of the issue have been convincingly
addressed by members of our MCLC email group: does it mean the same thing
to be a CCP member in China now; does Mo Yan's copying of the Yan'an Talks
amount to a proclamation of their validity; variable rates of change in
countries and comparison with the West; the internal Chinese debate about
the valuable parts of socialism, the ills of capitalism, the pressures of
Western culture, and what kinds of change are necessary. It is unfortunate
that Mo Yan has been pushed to the point where he feels he must defend art
against politics, but that is, after all, one of the primary myths or
ethos of our period.

Here is a section of a review of Burrin's book, by Kathryn E. Amdur, and a
link to the entire review:

http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/id=293

Social and cultural life likewise betrayed a broad range of accommodating
behavior. Social or sexual contacts with Germans multiplied, to incur
sweeping disfavor only after Liberation. German supplanted English as the
favored foreign language to study - even for girls, in what Burrin deems
acceptance by their parents of a possible future German son-in-law. The
wartime vitality of French culture could be championed as an act of
defiance against German hegemony; but German cultural policy, notes
Burrin, was actually quite liberal, to promote the idea that France had a
cultural future in Nazi Europe. The prevailing tone of normality
encouraged authors to publish and even to alter texts to conform to
censors' standards. Scientific and cultural exchanges continued: "By no
means everybody regarded Nazism as a radical negation of all intellectual
values" (p. 361). The 'College de France' expelled Jews before being
legally required to do so. The historical journal 'Annales' continued
publication in Paris (under a different title) after its Jewish director
Marc Bloch was removed; it later used Bloch's martyrdom to justify calling
itself "one of the most vital centers of intellectual resistance against
oppression" (p. 327). Such accommodation "boiled down," says Burrin, "to
accepting the prospect of a future with no more Jews" (p. 328).

Many intellectuals and others went beyond mere accommodation to outright
commitment, whether from ideological or more mundane motives. Burrin
sharply distinguishes the two sets of behavior, given that most
"accommodators" hedged their bets from late 1942 onward, while true
partisans became more fanatical as German pressures increased. Burrin's
survey (Part III, "Commitment") covers not just the far right but also
leftists who took the "socialist" features of Nazism seriously, plus
"liberals" eager to streamline capitalism and unify the European economy:
those whom Pierre Drieu la Rochelle scorned as "liberal minds liberally
open to the opposite of liberalism" (p. 406). More is said about the
organized groups (including a socio-professional analysis of their
memberships) than about the size of their audience, but police reports
show they did not rant to empty houses. Thus, "the collaborationist
parties grouped the activist elements of a far broader current of opinion"
(p. 429). Burrin offers no parallel survey of Resistance networks, formal
or informal. His point is not to compare the two sides, but instead to
discern various modes of compliance or cohabitation and to show how the
defeat let erstwhile "patriots" find in Nazism (as many conquered peoples
had found in the French Revolution) a weapon against hated features of the
"old regime".

Wendy