MCLC: Link on Mo Yan (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: Link on Mo Yan (2)
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There are two points in Perry Link's article that I should like to point
out:

Link says:

<<(It is doubtful that Mo Yan has read either Rabelais or García Márquez;
these are similarities, not influences.)>>

I think this has to be adjusted in the light of Mo Yan's explicit
statement in his acceptance speech that he read Marquez in the 80's and
was deeply influenced by him.

Link also says:

<<Mo Yan writes about people at the bottom of society, and in The Garlic
Ballads (1988) he clearly sides with poor farmers who are bullied and
bankrupted by predatory local officials. Sympathy for the downtrodden has
had a considerable market in the world of Chinese letters in recent times,
mainly because the society does include a lot of downtrodden and they do
invite sympathy. But it is crucial to note the difference between the way
Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like
Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the
entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels.
Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave
the top out of the picture.>>

I have not read Liu Xiaobo's collected writings that were published
recently, so my view is limited and I will accept corrections, but from
the reading of such a central manifesto as Charter 08 I didn't get the
impression that Liu's main preoccupation are the "people at the bottom of
the society", i.e. the "poor farmers" and the (economically)
"downtrodden". I think he's mainly concerned about liberty, freedoms,
civil justice, democracy, human rights. This is fine but not enough, as we
all know from the Russian 1990's. In fact, if I combine the Charter with
his other views about the Iraq War and the possible benefits of colonial
modernization, I would say that he is some kind of a right wing western
bourgeois liberal (in the European sense of 'liberal'). In Charter 08 the
only paragraph concerning "social rights", i.e. those that make up the
left's agenda since some centuries, is as short as this (HRIC translation):

<<16. Social Security: Establish a social security system that covers all
citizens and provides them with basic security in education, medical care,
care for the elderly, and employment.>>

It's 27 words in a text of 2834 words.

The Charter also has a paragraph about property:

<<14. Property Protection: Establish and protect private property rights,
and implement a system based on a free and open market economy; guarantee
entrepreneurial freedom, and eliminate administrative monopolies; set up a
Committee for the Management of State-Owned Property, responsible to the
highest organ of popular will; launch reform of property rights in a legal
and orderly fashion, and clarify the ownership of property rights and
those responsible; launch a new land movement, advance land privatization,
and guarantee in earnest the land property rights of citizens,
particularly the farmers.>>

This paragraph is what one would expect as a demand in a society where all
agricultural land belongs ultimately to the state, but again socially it
points to a classical 'bourgeois-democratic' agenda. The forces of the
market will do the rest, so poor farmers will stay poor farmers and work
for rich farmers and agricultural corporations.

So although Liu is obviously entitled to his own ideas, I'm not sure about
Perry Link's statement concerning how Liu Xiaobo deals with the
downtrodden of the poor farmer kind, not to mention industrial workers, of
whom there is not a single mention in the Charter. Again, might it be
because of my (very) insufficient readings?

I'm all for Liu's release, of course, and against persecution for
political beliefs, as well as I'm for multi-party political systems and
for property rights.

Costas