MCLC: cashing in on Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Timothy J.T. Pi <timothy.pi at gmail.com>
Subject: cashing in on Mo Yan
***********************************************************

Just a week later, controversy has moved on to the difficult subject of
how to distribute the spoils
of Mo Yan’s new fame. Local officials in the writer’s hometown of Gaomi in
the Eastern province
of Shandong have dreamed up a plan to create a ‘Mo Yan Experience Park’
and a ‘Red Sorghum
Culture Park’.

Tim

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Source: Financial Times (10/19/12):
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/10/19/china-how-to-cash-in-on-mo-yan/

China: how to cash in on Mo Yan

Kathrin Hille 


When the Chinese author Mo Yan won the Nobel prize for literature last
week, controversy broke out almost immediately among his countrymen.

While official media praised the Nobel committee’s decision and many
Chinese broke into patriotic cheers, many critics of the ruling Communist
party rejected the decision because Mo Yan, a party member and deputy head
of the official Chinese Writers’ Association, has been seen as toeing the
party line.

Wen Yunchao, a Hong Kong-based blogger and free speech advocate, warned of
“devastating moral and political consequences”.

Just a week later, controversy has moved on to the difficult subject of
how to distribute the spoils of Mo Yan’s new fame. Local officials in the
writer’s hometown of Gaomi in the Eastern province of Shandong have
dreamed up a plan to create a ‘Mo Yan Experience Park’ and a ‘Red Sorghum
Culture Park’.

The idea is to attract tourists by planting ’10,000 mu’ (approx 666 ha) of
red sorghum, a grain local farmers gave up planting many years ago because
it didn’t earn enough. Mo Yan wrote the novel which Zhang Yimou, the
acclaimed director, used as the basis for his famous film ‘Red Sorghum’.

Fan Hui, a local official, was quoted in a Beijing newspaper on Thursday
as saying he envisioned investing about Rmb10m a year and a total of
Rmb670m, and the sorghum “must be planted even at a financial loss”. He
was also quoted as telling the writer’s father that the family must
refurbish its ancestral home, Mo Yan’s birthplace, to be included in the
planned park because the house and the son were no longer his alone but
belonged to Chinese society now.

Within hours, the idea met with a wave of derision. So when contacted on
Friday, a Gaomi government spokesman described the plan as Fan’s ‘personal
views’. Nonetheless, the city government’s website carried a statement
quoting mayor Yang Jianhua as saying: “We must further stress the most
important points, create a ‘Mo Yan’ brand and stress the ‘Mo Yan’ factor.”

Internet users criticized the local government in unison. “Finally there’s
money to be made, now they can have a good run filling their pockets,”
said Xizhiming, a user of the Twitter-like Weibo. Another internet user
from Shandong said: “In China, the Nobel prize is like a mirror, it shows
you the real face of all kinds of monsters.”