MCLC: is Mo Yan a govt stooge

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at mac.com>
Subject: is Mo Yan a govt stooge
***********************************************************

Source: Rectified.name (10/15/12):
http://www.rectified.name/2012/10/15/is-mo-yan-a-stooge-for-the-chinese-gov
ernment/

Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?
By Brendan O'Kane 

Spoiler alert: in keeping with the general rule about headlines posed as
yes-or-no questions, the short answer is ‘no.’ The more interesting
question is: why are people insinuating that he is?

Yo, man, Mo Yan. Even before the Swedish Academy announced Mo Yan as the
2012 Nobel Literature Prize winner, the Chinese internet was abuzz with
discussion of his work and his relationship with the Chinese government.
(Raymond Zhou’s October 9 piece in the China Daily
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2012-10/09/content_15803010.htm> gives
a good, even-handed overview of the discussion.) The announcement on
Thursday night that Mo had become the first Chinese citizen to win the
Nobel for literature set off a miniature firestorm of criticism, almost
all of it from liberal-minded Chinese Twitter users, that seems mostly to
have centered on several issues: Mo’s silence (now broken
<http://news.yahoo.com/nobel-winner-mo-urges-china-dissidents-freedom-09434
3893.html>) on Liu Xiaobo, his vice-chair position in the China Writers’
Association (作协), his role in an unbeliev– all-too-believably boneheaded
event in which 100 authors copied out Chairman Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an
Forum on Literature and Art
<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/chairman-mao-in-their-own-han
d/>, his behavior at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, and a bit of Weibo
doggerel that he allegedly wrote in support of Bo Xilai. Some of the
criticism is fair, but much of it isn’t, and I feel honor-bound, as a
translator and as an EU citizen and fellow Nobelist, to point out which is
which.

There’s no question that Mo’s win was welcomed by the Chinese government.
CCP propaganda chief Li Changchun wrote a letter to the CWA congratulating
Mo on the win,coverage occupied front pages of newspapers across the
country 
<http://www.danwei.com/chinas-front-pages-go-to-town-on-mo-yans-nobel-prize
/>, and foreign media coverage of the win was translated in Cankao Xiaoxi
(albeit in censored form, as Bruce Humes shows
<http://www.bruce-humes.com/?p=7274>). Given China’s Nobel complex
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/11/mo-yan-nobel-prize-from-litera
ture-china-complex>, however — or, more charitably, China’s sense that a
country with more than 2,000 years of literature under its belt should
have a slightly higher profile on the international literary stage than
China currently does — a win by any novelist not banned outright would in
all likelihood have been welcomed just as warmly.

Mo may not be a ‘dissident’ in the model of Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel,
but his work is filled with depictions of the venality, cruelty, and
stupidity of power and authority. The Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜苔之歌) opens
with a 
farmer who organized a protest against the corrupt local government being
arrested in front of his blind daughter. In The Republic of Wine (酒国), one
of Mo’s more experimental works, the protagonist is invited by Diamond
Jin, the corrupt Vice-Minister of the Liquorland Municipal Party Committee
Propaganda Bureau, to a boozy banquet at which the pièce de résistance is
braised child. The still-untranslated Frogs
<http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Frogs> (蛙), whose heroine is a midwife
turned abortionist, is an explicit critique of China’s one-child policy.
Red Sorghum (红高粱家族), the novel that made Mo Yan (and Zhang Yimou)
famous 
more than 20 years ago, depicts the Communist guerrillas in a decidedly
unflattering light, and they don’t come off much better in his 1996 novel
Big Breasts and Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀). His more recent Life and Death are
Wearing Me Out (生死疲劳) begins its survey of the past 50 years of Chinese
history with the protagonist Ximen Nao being unjustly shot in the head in
the land reform struggles that followed the establishment of the PRC in
1949. One of the recurring themes in Mo’s novels is the juxtaposition of
personal tragedy with the long, slow-motion tragedy of history, and
whether you think he does this successfully or not, it’s hard to imagine
coming away from his novels thinking that they are encomia to the
Communist Party.

Mo’s position in the China Writers’ Association is discomfiting to
observers, but the CWA is a big and diverse organization containing
talented, edgy authors as well as Audi-riding talent vacuums. Mo has
written movingly about growing up as a hungry, lonely child in an
impoverished backwater, and his novels show a keen awareness of the
smallness of individuals in the face of forces beyond their control. Given
this, it seems unsurprising that Mo would prefer the security of a
position that offers him some kind of official cover. As Mo said in 2009
<http://www.chinanews.com/cul/news/2009/12-16/2021204.shtml>:

“很多人说莫言是官方作家，我在中国文化部艺术研究院有一份工资，余华、苏童都有，享
受福利医疗。这是中国现实。国外无论在哪都有保险，在中国如果没有职业，生
病我治不起啊。”

In the NYT’s translation
<http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/the-writer-the-state-and-th
e-nobel/>:

“A lot of people are now saying about me, ‘Mo Yan is a state writer.’ It’s
true, insofar as like the authors Yu Hua and Su Tong, I get a salary from
the Ministry of Culture, and get my social and health insurance from them
too.
“That’s the reality in China. Overseas, people all have their own
insurance, but without a position, I can’t afford to get sick in China.”

He is, of course, not just talking about health insurance here.

Mo Yan’s role in the CWA likely explains his public silence (until the day
after the Nobel announcement
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/12/mo-yan-nobel-liu-xiaobo>) on
Liu Xiaobo and his copying-out of Mao’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art
<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv
3_08.htm>. It most certainly explains his leaving the stage at the
Frankfurt Book Festival when Dai Qing tried to ask a question. CWA
authors, even very well-known ones, are told in no uncertain terms what
they are and are not to say internationally — so much so that at the
London Book Fair earlier this year, one normally brash author was almost
comically careful not to be photographed with the dissident author Ma Jian
— and Mo said as much in the 2009 Chinese interview linked above,
immediately before the “health insurance” remarks:

没有办法。我看有的人说秦晖教授怎么没有离席，他是单独由德方邀请的。我是新闻出版
署和作家协会他们让我去的，我属于代表团团员。
I didn’t have any choice. Some people have said that [historian and public
intellectual] Qin Hui didn’t leave the stage — but he was invited on his
own by the German organizers. I was sent there by GAPP and the CWA as a
member of their delegation.


Some of the strangest criticism is revolving around a snippet of doggerel
that Mo posted on his microblog on November 8, 2011. The verse, addressed
to one or more “literary friends” (文友) in Chongqing, is being cited as a
sign that Mo was a fan of Bo Xilai, the unbelievably corrupt,
fantastically twisted former Party secretary of the municipality. Seeing
Red in China has a translation of the poem
<http://seeingredinchina.com/2012/10/11/mo-yan-or-dont-talk-winner-of-the-2
012-nobel-prize-for-literature/>, but the translator’s reading is based on
the assumption that the poem is in fact in praise of Bo. I’ll put up a
longer post about the poem with an alternative gloss within the next
couple of days, but for now I’ll just say that the poem can be read,
Rorschach-like <http://club.kdnet.net/dispbbs.asp?id=8701231&boardid=1>,
either as a paean to Bo Xilai or as a suggestion that the reader not get
mixed up with either the pro-Bo or anti-Bo crowds. The latter reading
would seem more consistent with Mo’s personality.
________________________________________

T.S. Eliot was a stone-cold anti-semite
<https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/Julius.html>. Ezra Pound was a
fascist-sympathizer who spent the end of WWII in a cage
<http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/attainted-the-life-and-afterlife-of-ezra
-pound-in-italy/>. Roald Dahl was mean to just about everybody
<http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/6/1/in-which-we-consider-the-macabre-u
npleasantness-of-roald-dah.html>. If we’re willing to accept The Waste
Land and the Cantos and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the works of
flawed men, men who were subject to all of the limitations of their
condition, then it seems grossly unfair to condemn Mo Yan for the lesser
sin of keeping his head down. The fact of the matter is that there are
many excellent Chinese authors who are not banned or in jail. They choose
to work within the confines of officially acceptable discourse, pushing at
the boundaries wherever they can, because the alternatives are banning, or
jail, or at best an honorary professorship in Berlin and the lonely
irrelevance of the exile. The people insinuating that Mo and other CWA
members are lightweights incapable of writing lasting or eternal
literature seem to be saying that such privations are a prerequisite for
literary legitimacy — for Chinese authors, at least.

Exceptional courage is a rare quality. It may be admired and praised in
others; it cannot be demanded of them. People might feel better about Mo
Yan if he were more publicly outspoken, but I wonder if the people now
calling Mo a lapdog of the Chinese government have given much thought to
the very real costs that he would pay were he to do so. His remarks on Liu
Xiaobo’s case may be a sign that the Nobel will inspire him to speak up on
behalf of Liu and other censored or imprisoned writers, but it seems
unfair to demand that he join their number in order to make himself more
immediately appealing to outsiders.

Mo Yan is a serious writer with a substantial body of work, much of it
dealing with Chinese social and historical issues as directly as he dares.
We might wish as readers that he were more daring, but we don’t get to
make that call — he does. He has chosen to ensure that he will have the
freedom to keep writing and publishing. Mo’s novels and stories do his
speaking for him, and they do so eloquently and forcefully.