Hey look, a Mo Yan sighting.

It looks like the floodgates have opened as far as interviews, too. It wasn’t long ago that his first interview since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was published by Der Spiegel.

Members of 12th CPPCC National Committee arrive in Beijing (Xinhua via Global Times)

Since accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, the controversial Mo Yan has turned down every formal interview request from every publication in the world. But he finally broke his silence last week, granting a sit-down with Germany’s Der Spiegel, one of Europe’s largest news weeklies. The article was published in this week’s (February 25) issue, roughly coinciding with the German debut of Mo’s novel Frog. The author promised only a “very short” interview but ended up talking for two hours, according to Spiegel, and the result probably could not have been better for the venerable magazine.

Mo Yan called his writing style “un-Chinese,” though said his novels contain “hope, dignity and power.” He said that he “realized that the Cultural Revolution was the mistake of individual leaders. It had less to do with the party itself,” which could have been the sound bite of the interview if he hadn’t proceeded to rebuke Liao Yiwu’s criticism of him, then turn his focus on Ai Weiwei.

“Another one of your critics is Ai Weiwei, an artist particularly well-known in Germany,” the Spiegel interviewer says, and one can almost picture Mo snapping:

“What does he have to say about me?”

(We don’t know that he actually snapped; the published account gives no stage directions.)

And then:

SPIEGEL: He too accuses you of being to close to the state. He says you are detached from reality and cannot represent current China.

Mo: Aren’t many artists in mainland China state artists? What about those who are professors at the universities? What about those who write for state newspapers? And then, which intellectual can claim to represent China? I certainly do not claim that. Can Ai Weiwei? Those who can really represent China are digging dirt and paving roads with their bare hands.

Other highlights follow. Let’s start with this excerpt, out of which Der Spiegel pulled three words — “I am guilty” — for its headline:

SPIEGEL: Unspeakable things happen in many of your novels. In “The Garlic Ballads,” for example, a pregnant woman, already in labor, hangs herself. Still, “Frog” seems to be your sternest book. Is that why it took so long to write?

Mo: I carried the idea for this book with me for a long time but then wrote it relatively quickly. You are right, I felt heavy when I penned the novel. I see it as a work of self-criticism.

SPIEGEL: In what sense? You carry no personal responsibility for the violence and the forced abortions described in your book.

Mo: China has gone through such tremendous change over the past decades that most of us consider ourselves victims. Few people ask themselves, though: ‘Have I also hurt others?’ “Frog” deals with this question, with this possibility. I, for example, may have been only 11 years old in my elementary school days, but I joined the red guards and took part in the public criticism of my teacher. I was jealous of the achievements, the talents of other people, of their luck. Later, I even asked my wife to have an abortion for the sake of my own future. I am guilty.

Mo talks briefly about his writing…

SPIEGEL: Your books paint a bleak picture of modern China. There seems to be no progress. Neither your figures, nor society, nor the country as such seems to be heading anywhere.

Mo: I may be rather un-Chinese in this respect. Most Chinese stories and dramas have a happy ending. Most of my novels end tragically. But there is still hope, dignity and power.

…before dropping this semi-bombshell about the Cultural Revolution:

SPIEGEL: How do you yourself think about this? After all, you were forced to interrupt your education during the Cultural Revolution. And yet, you are still a member of the party.

Mo: The Communist Party of China has well over 80 million members, and I am one of them. I joined the party in 1979 when I was in the army. I realized that the Cultural Revolution was the mistake of individual leaders. It had less to do with the party itself.

The Cultural Revolution is referenced again as he addresses the media pressure that surrounded his Nobel win in the context of freedom of speech and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo:

SPIEGEL: But there are people in this country who are harassed, even arrested for what they write. Do you not feel an obligation to use your award, fame and reputation to speak out on behalf of these colleagues of yours?

Mo: I openly expressed the hope that Liu Xiaobo should regain his freedom as soon as possible. But again, I was immediately criticized and forced to speak out again and again on the same issue.

SPIEGEL: Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. And indeed, repeated statements of support would make a greater impression than a single comment.

Mo: I am reminded of the rituals of repetition in the Cultural Revolution. If I decide to speak, then nobody will stop me. If I decide not to speak, then not even a knife at my neck will make me speak.

He also turned his attention to Chinese exile Liao Yiwu, one of his most vocal critics. (Liao organized a naked-run protest outside the Nobel Banquet Hall in Stockholm the night that Mo received his prize.)

SPIEGEL: When Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was awarded with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade last year, he criticized you in SPIEGEL as a “state writer” and said you don’t keep enough distance to the government.

Mo: I have read his statement and I have read the speech he gave at the award ceremony. In the speech, he called for the split of the Chinese state. I can absolutely not agree to this position. I think that the people of Sichuan (the province where Liao is from) would not agree to cut their province out of China. I am sure Liao’s parents could never agree to this position. And I can not even imagine that he himself can, in the depth of his heart, agree to what he said there. I know he envies me for this award and I understand this. But his criticism is unjustified.

Mo clarifies that by “criticism” he’s referring to Liao’s accusation that Mo praised Bo Xilai in a poem.

Mo: … in a poem. Actually, the opposite is true. I was sarcastic, I wrote a satire. Let me jot it down again for you.

(Mo Yan takes a notebook and writes)

Sing-red-strike-black roars mightily,
The nation turns its head to Chongqing.
While a white spider weaves a real net that catches bugs,
A black horse with loose bowel movement is not an angry youth.
As a writer one should not be afraid of either a left or right party,
As an official one should hold dear one’s good name before and after his death.
A gentleman, a bedrock in turbulent waters, that you are,
The splendid cliffs shine on Jialing River like fire.

And he addresses the infamous book, which features his writing, that celebrates Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an speech:

Mo: Honestly, it was a commercial project. The editor of a publishing house, an old friend of mine, came up with the idea. He had convinced around 100 writers before and when we attended a conference together, he walked around with a book and a pen and asked me, too, to hand-copy a paragraph of Mao’s speech. I asked “What should I write?” He said: “I chose this paragraph for you.” I was vain enough to take the opportunity to show off with my calligraphy.

There’s more over at Der Spiegel’s website. Go give the interview a read.

Nobel Laureate Mo Yan: ‘I Am Guilty’ (Der Spiegel)

Richard Burger of The Peking Duck has rightly directed our attention to A.E. Clark’s recent essay on Mo Yan, “Mo Yan’s Middle Finger,” in which Clark analyzes the three stories Mo told in his Nobel lecture on December 7.

You’ll remember that the stories — obviously fables — came toward the end of Mo’s speech, called “Storytellers.” “Forget about everything else for one second,” I wrote at the time, “if you’re a fan of stories, just scroll down to the very end and read the three stories that finish the speech.”

The first, about fake crying, addresses Liu Xiaobo, according to Clark:

Apologists for the Communist Party of China often say that foreigners’ purported concern for human rights is a pretext for China-bashing. To put it personally: Mo Yan doesn’t care what happens to people like Liu Xiaobo, and he doesn’t believe you care either. To him, the clamor for rights is humbug and bullying like what he witnessed under Mao, and he asserts his right to stand aloof from it.

The second story contains obvious allusions to Liu as well — there’s an empty chair in Mo’s tale, after all – though Clark resists reading too much into it:

He wants to transcend a grievance, yet on this topic he has nothing but the grievance to express. One can recognize the classical rhetorical device of praeteritio, albeit in a specifically adolescent form: You didn’t notice my haircut, but I’m too mature to let that bother me. Let’s not even talk about how you forgot my birthday; I’m above that kind of thing.

Finally we get to the third story, probably the most important. Clark again:

In a speech where the first-person-singular pronoun appears more than three hundred times, when a lone figure appears in a parable one may guess that the storyteller is referring to himself. That, plus the manifest emphasis on the moralism of the bricklayers who cast him out, suggests an interpretation. The storm represents social stress and human suffering, perhaps specifically such as the Chinese people have endured in modern times. The temple stands for a moralistic and illusionary system of values in which many take refuge. The bricklayers are writers and artists. The outcast is Mo Yan, whose mind has departed from the constricting framework of moralistic thinking and who on that account is condemned by some. The other bricklayers are his contemporaries in the arts who seek to hold him accountable for imperfections in Chinese society and would reject him as unworthy. The ostracism has not actually happened (and in the case of a Nobel prizewinner it is a bit of a stretch even to imagine it) but Mo Yan may feel it is the goal toward which the attacks on him are tending. He is saying to those who have called him a sellout or a tool of the regime and would place him beyond the pale: “Fine, cast me out. I’m finished with your values. Don’t preach to me about the writer’s moral responsibility. Your morality is flawed and it will bring ruin upon you if you persist in it. I am, luckily, a pragmatist, and pragmatism has served me well.”

Clark notes that “sometimes what we’ve got is a conflict of core interests or a clash of mutually exclusive values, which no amount of communication will resolve.” We have to believe that Mo Yan recognizes this, and perhaps that’s why he chooses, sometimes, to say nothing.

(Mo Yan’s Middle Finger)

That last video we just put up of a man streaking outside the Nobel Banquet Hall in Stockholm wasn’t just some prankster after a laugh, or a drunk man who’d lost his wits. It was part of a coordinated protest featuring none other than Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker and the recipient of this year’s German Peace Prize. He’s the one wearing a black overcoat who ushers the streaker, Meng Huang, over the cordon, and then tells him (clearly audible in the video) to “run.”

Apparently Liao, who lives in Berlin in exile, travelled to Stockholm on Monday with Meng, an artist, according to Scandinavia Today. Sven-Erik Olsson, a spokesperson for the Swedish head police, said Meng was rowdy and drunk, but those charges have since been disputed.

SVT News reports that a photographer on site, Mikael Eriksson, said he smelled absolutely no alcohol on Liao when they hugged before the streaking happened, and that “they both behaved calmly and in good faith.”

Apparently Liao and Meng were at the ceremony to see whether Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Mo Yan would present an empty chair for jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. The empty chair was first placed for Liu at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, Norway to symbolize his absence because he was serving an 11-year prison sentence in China.

When no chair was brought out, Liao and Meng sprung into action.

Liao, who spent four years in a Chinese labor camp himself, has been one of the most vocal critics of Mo winning the Nobel. Asked if he’s met Mo, he replied:

Yes, he once visited Chengdu and we met there. After that there were a number of opportunities for us to meet but he always avoided me. He knows that he represents a superficial China, one that can seem very glossy. Whereas I stand for a grassroots China, its dregs, its dirt.

As quoted in Sweden’s major daily, Dagens Nyheter, he called Mo’s award “the Nobel prize’s biggest dishonor in a hundred years.” And as paraphrased by the BBC, Liao said he was “shocked that Mo Yan won, because he is too closely associated with the establishment.”

He’s now taken things into his own hands. The news, for whatever reason, has yet to spread to English-speaking media. We’ll see if that changes soon.

UPDATE, 4:09 pm: A translation of that SVT (Swedish state television) story comes via one of our readers:

There were absolutely no signs of intoxication, says SVT Culture News photographer Mikael Eriksson.

The background story to the nude action, which attracted a lot of attention last night, involved Liao Yiwu, Meng Huang and an additional regime critic who had planned a protest action against Mo Yan being awarded the Nobel prize.

The plan was to bring a chair for Mo Yan to give to the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. It would symbolise the empty chair meant for Xiaobo when he could not attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2010, due to him being in jail.

But since the chair never arrived, the artist trio decided to perform a different action. In central Stockholm, Huang got undressed and jumped the fence, dashing toward the concert hall, cheered on by Liao Yiwu (the man in the black coat in the video).

UPDATE, 3:43 pm: Please see this update.

In Stockholm on Monday, on the night of the Nobel banquet, a man dashed butt-naked through the cold and snow, his ebullient battle cry resonating across the dark Swedish night. Wherefore?

According to SVT News (via Notes on the Mosquito, a website about the poetry of Xi Chuan), the streaker was protesting Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. (We don’t know Swedish, but we see very clearly after putting the article through Google Translate that Mo Yan is involved.) He was also very drunk, which most people have to be to denude in subfreezing temperatures.

Via SVT via Google Translate:

The photographer captured one of the men springandes naked on the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the ceremony takes place. The man was quickly disposed of by the police.

- The men were drunk and has been hospitalized for sobering up. They showed up with rowdy and drunk, says Sven-Erik Olsson, press spokesman at police länskommunikationscentral.

Do we know why they showed up like that?
- No, it has not revealed anything. They tried to ask them before putting them in sobering. We’ll see if they can say something sensible when sober.

We’re not holding our breath on that last part.

UPDATE, 2:55 pm: Thanks to the top commenter, who points out that a second SVT article claims the streaker, Meng Huang, was “completely sober when he was arrested.” Also, Liao Yiwu was there: he’s the man in the black overcoat who ushers Meng over the first cordon. You can clearly hear Liao (or someone) telling Meng in Chinese, “Run.

UPDATE, 1:47 pm: Youku censors figured it out; the video has been deleted. We’ll try uploading to some other places. 4:20 pm: It’s on 56.com, embedded above. Let’s see how long it lasts.

I’ll leave the parsing to others, but here’s the body of Mo Yan’s meticulously arranged speech at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony last night:

I am well aware that there are many writers in the world who would be more worthy Laureates than I. I am convinced that if they only continue to write, if they only believe that literature is the ornament of humanity and a God-given right, “She will give you a garland to grace your head and present you with a glorious crown.” (Proverbs 4:9)

I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient. When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance

I want to take this opportunity to express my admiration for the members of the Swedish Academy, who stick firmly to their own convictions. I am confident that you will not let yourselves be affected by anything other than literature.

“Many writers in the world”! Bible quote! Literature as a God-given right!

I am confident that you will not let yourselves be affected by anything other than literature!

What does it all mean? Which parts were written by Mo, and which by the Gaomi, Shandong province government? Which were penned by the inspired graces of good angels, which were muttered with the hot breath of the devil? Which represent fireplaces, safety, comfort in an iron home, which are forest conflagrations choking oxygen out of the very air we breathe? Which are fine, which are loathsome? Which are good, which are bad? Which is Mo, whence does Yan?

Go read these stories about him. Check out his considerably longer lecture. Um, read the Xinhua write-up? Then chatter away.

POSTSCRIPT: Interesting or no? Here’s how Per Wästberg, Swedish Academy member and chairman of the Nobel Committee, began his introduction of Mo:

Mo Yan is a poet who tears down stereotypical propaganda posters, elevating the individual from an anonymous human mass. Using ridicule and sarcasm Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications as well as deprivation and political hypocrisy. Playfully and with ill-disguised delight, he reveals the murkiest aspects of human existence, almost inadvertently finding images of strong symbolic weight.

Mo Yan gave his traditional Nobel lecture, “Storytellers,” about 10 hours ago at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm. He was introduced by Kjell Espmark, member of the Nobel literature committee.

Mo’s 32-minute talk has already been translated by the preeminent Howard Goldblatt, here, which you should take a minute to read before letting the news media inundate the conversation with all their cherry-picked selections that fit their narrative.

Some highlights, presented chronologically (cherry-picked by yours truly, so yeah, you should probably just skip this and go read the whole thing):

Mo starts — fittingly and endearingly — by talking about his mother, with a truly contemporary story about how his family had to dig up her grave due to a proposed rail line. The story is imbued with all the details you’d expect from a novelist, leading into memories of how she treated him, her youngest son: “Distinguished members of the Swedish Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen: // Through the mediums of television and the Internet, I imagine that everyone here has at least a nodding acquaintance with far-off Northeast Gaomi Township. You may have seen my ninety-year-old father, as well as my brothers, my sister, my wife and my daughter, even my granddaughter, now a year and four months old. But the person who is most on my mind at this moment, my mother, is someone you will never see. Many people have shared in the honor of winning this prize, everyone but her.”

And this: “I was born ugly. Villagers often laughed in my face, and school bullies sometimes beat me up because of it. I’d run home crying, where my mother would say, ‘You’re not ugly, Son. You’ve got a nose and two eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with your arms and legs, so how could you be ugly? If you have a good heart and always do the right thing, what is considered ugly becomes beautiful.’ Later on, when I moved to the city, there were educated people who laughed at me behind my back, some even to my face; but when I recalled what Mother had said, I just calmly offered my apologies.”

Also, she was illiterate. “My illiterate mother held people who could read in high regard.”

It all leads to the story of how he began as a writer, “It did not take long to find retelling someone else’s stories unsatisfying, so I began embellishing my narration. I’d say things I knew would please Mother, even changed the ending once in a while. And she wasn’t the only member of my audience, which later included my older sisters, my aunts, even my maternal grandmother.”

Comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez are apt. “I must say that in the course of creating my literary domain, Northeast Gaomi Township, I was greatly inspired by the American novelist William Faulkner and the Columbian Gabriel García Márquez. I had not read either of them extensively, but was encouraged by the bold, unrestrained way they created new territory in writing, and learned from them that a writer must have a place that belongs to him alone.”

The only four mentions of the word “politics” occur over the span of two paragraphs: “My greatest challenges come with writing novels that deal with social realities, such as The Garlic Ballads, not because I’m afraid of being openly critical of the darker aspects of society, but because heated emotions and anger allow politics to suppress literature and transform a novel into reportage of a social event. As a member of society, a novelist is entitled to his own stance and viewpoint; but when he is writing he must take a humanistic stance, and write accordingly. Only then can literature not just originate in events, but transcend them, not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics. // Possibly because I’ve lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. I know what real courage is, and I understand true compassion. I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer gives free rein to his talent. So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.”

Addressing controversy surrounding his selection, and what will inevitably be the most oft-quoted part of his speech: “The announcement of my Nobel Prize has led to controversy. At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I’ve come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me. Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers. I was afraid he would succumb to the assault, but he emerged from the garlands of flowers and the stones, a smile on his face; he wiped away mud and grime, stood calmly off to the side, and said to the crowd: // For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated. I would like you to find the patience to read my books. I cannot force you to do that, and even if you do, I do not expect your opinion of me to change. No writer has yet appeared, anywhere in the world, who is liked by all his readers; that is especially true during times like these.”

Forget about everything else for one second — if you’re a fan of stories, just scroll down to the very end and read the three stories that finish the speech.

And finally, last words: “I am a storyteller. // Telling stories earned me the Nobel Prize for Literature. // Many interesting things have happened to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that truth and justice are alive and well. // So I will continue telling my stories in the days to come. // Thank you all.”

p.s. Mo wore a Mao suit. Surely he’ll choose something different for the actual ceremony, then?

As Mo Yan prepares to speak in Stockholm — in less than 10 minutes, at 12:30 am local time, barring delays — the piece you should read if you haven’t already is Kenyon College assistant professor Anna Sun’s essay in the current issue of The Kenyon Review. Here’s an excerpt from “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan“:

Is “hallucinatory realism” the next, improved step of “hysterical realism”? The Latin root of “hallucination” refers to “a wandering of the mind,” and hallucinations are often described as dreamlike sensory experiences that have no relation to reality, which exists only in the imagination. It is reality heightened and transformed. Instead of an aimless velocity found in hysterical realism, here we expect a natural lavish flow of impressions, an extravagant and reckless expansion of the literary imagination. One imagines that the language of such hallucinatory realism must be fluid, colorful, affecting; it might even be extraordinarily so.

The kind of reality Mo Yan depicts in his impressive oeuvre might indeed be “hallucinatory reality.” The characters in his novels engage in struggles with war, hunger, desire, and nature; it deals with brutal aggression, sexual obsession, and a general permeation of both physical and symbolic violence in Chinese rural life. But unlike the great novelists who grapple with the harsher side of the human condition – Dickens, Hardy, and Faulkner, for example – Mo Yan’s work lacks something important which these authors have, although it is seldom spoken of: aesthetic conviction. The aesthetic power of these authors is the torch that illuminates for us the dark and painful truth of humanity. The effect of Mo Yan’s work is not illumination through skilled and controlled exploitation, but disorientation and frustration due to his lack of coherent aesthetic consideration. There is no light shining on the chaotic reality of Mo Yan’s hallucinatory world.

And one more:

Mo Yan’s language is striking indeed, but it is striking because it is diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious renunciation of China’s cultural past at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Mo Yan’s writing is in fact a product of the aesthetic ideologies of Socialist China. As Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893-1976), the leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1934 until his death, famously said in his seminal speech “The Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art” in 1942, a few years before the Party founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949: “Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.” As a result, Mao demanded writers in the socialist regime write for the masses: “China’s revolutionary writers and artists, writers and artists of promise, must go among the masses; they must for a long period of time unreservedly and whole-heartedly go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, go into the heat of the struggle. Only then can they proceed to creative work.” Not any kind of creative work, but work that serves the “proletarian revolutionary cause.”

As a result, a new literary language was invented…

Notable local translator Brendan O’Kane calls it “the best one I’ve seen so far” about Mo Yan, and that’s about right.

Mo’s Nobel speech can be watched live here.

Chinese students in Stockholm participated in a “Red Sorghum” flashmob at Galleria Department Store yesterday to “express joy and pride at Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize.” One-hundred-eight people took part.

Mo is scheduled to give his speech at 5:30 pm Central European Time (12:30 am in China). You can watch it live on the Nobel Prize website.

Youku video for those in China after the jump.

Mo Yan is scheduled to leave tomorrow for Stockholm, according to South China Morning Post, where on Friday he’ll deliver his speech to the Swedish Academy and the following Monday will attend the award ceremony.

Netizens all want to know: not what he will say (probably nothing, per his name), but what he will wear. Classic tuxedo? Western suit? Mao suit? Tang Dynasty robe? SCMP:

Some Photoshopped images of Mo in different suits have even been circulated. Shao [Chunsheng, an official in Mo's hometown of Gaomi, Shandong province] said that Mo will take five suits to Stockholm, including a tailcoat and a traditional Chinese suit similar to those worn by Mao Zedong . In an online survey conducted by CCTV News, more than 60 per cent of respondents to a Sina microblog poll said Mo should wear a traditional Chinese suit, while only 2.5 per cent favoured the tailcoat.

Below, you’ll find the man looking good in an array of dress. Life and death are not wearing him out*.

*Self-assessed -1 for contrived literary reference.

(H/T Alicia)

We love ourselves a good zinger. Via China Digital Times’s “NetEase News Calls Out Global Times,” we’re introduced to the image of the fleabane, which CDT explains is “known as qiangtoucao (墙头草) or ‘wall-top grass’ in Chinese. Qiangtoucao also means ‘fence-sitter,’ someone who bends to the prevailing political or social winds to stay rooted.”

Who could that possibly be applied to?

NetEaseNewsClient: The wheel of history rolls forward. Only the grass that is adept at adjusting its direction can keep sticking to the front of the car. @HuXijin @GlobalTimes

Of course: Hu Xijin, Global Times editor-in-chief, one of our favorite people in the world. You’ll remember that after Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hu’s public sentiment transformed from “keep a ‘calm heart’” to “China’s mainstream cannot be rejected for much longer.” (TAR got really upset at that line.)

We’re far from calling Hu unprincipled, however. It’s just a different set of principles, requiring a different type of man; one made of straw, presumably.

A lot of people have expressed their desire to see newly crowned Nobel laureate Mo Yan speak out against the more grievous shortcomings of the Chinese government. The extent to which he leverages his publicity to enact change will ultimately be up to him, but if his most recent quote — just a day after winning the most prestigious award in the world — is any indication, he might be off to a good (and surprising) start. As reported by Reuters:

Chinese Nobel Literature Prize winner Mo Yan said on Friday he hoped jailed compatriot Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, would be freed soon.

“I hope he can achieve his freedom as soon as possible,” Mo told reporters in his hometown of Gaomi in the northern province of Shandong.

Liu has been serving an 11-year sentence since 2009 for subversion of state power. The government would rather pretend he — and to a lesser extent, 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Gao Xingjian — did not exist. Even if Mo Yan never bluntly criticizes the government, at least he’s doing the next best thing: restoring the people’s memory of these banished notables of contemporary China.

It’ll be difficult, of course. Will his newfound fame empower him, or will it force him to be more cautious, now that dozens if not hundreds of Party cadres will seek to wine and dine him and steer him toward the official line?

Didi Kirsten Tatlow, writing in the NY Times’s Rendezvous blog, gives us a glimpse at exactly how much pressure is on Mo. (Perhaps this is why he said he was “scared” when he found out he won.) Tatlow revisited a speech that Mo gave at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, attended by none other than vice president Xi Jinping.

Later that year, in an interview with China Newsweek magazine (which can be read here, in Chinese, on the China News site), Mr. Mo responded to critics who said he had toed the state line too closely at Frankfurt, where he walked out of a literary symposium, along with Chinese officials, to protest the presence of two dissident writers, Dai Qing and Bei Ling, creating a storm of controversy that would dog the fair: “I had no choice,” he said.

“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,” he said.

“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 said.

He can afford to get sick now — or, to extend the metaphor, at least wear less cumbersome clothing in this frosty and pathogen-plagued environment. Perhaps that’s the best thing the Nobel Committee did by awarding this year’s literature prize to a non-dissident, someone whom Peter Englund of the Swedish Academy said was “more a critic of the system, sitting within the system.” They’ve given him a chance to bust out.

And look: he’s already changing minds:

Just spoke to @aiww. He says he’s “very surprised” to hear Mo Yan spoke out for Liu Xiaobo. “”If he really did… I’m very grateful to him.”

— Mark MacKinnon/马凯 (@markmackinnon) October 12, 2012

The blitz is on. Eighteen hours after Mo Yan’s historic win of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a shedload of articles have appeared analyzing, praising, criticizing, and explaining what it all means to China, the Nobel Committee, literature, politics, activism, free speech, publishing, Ai Weiwei, and the world.

If you’re looking for a straight write-up, start with the New York Times, or this Reuters piece that features an interview with Mo Yan translator Howard Goldblatt: “He wants to continue to write, and to continue to write the kinds of things he needs and wants to write he has to live within certain parameters.” You can then move on to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos’s piece on the “politically tolerable Nobel laureate.” Christian-Science Monitor calls Mo “practiced in the art of challenging the status quo without offending those who uphold it.” Salon’s Laura Miller says the choice to award Mo fits the Nobel Committee’s unique position to “call the attention of the wider world to the best living writers of cultures prone to neglect outside their own national borders.” O never give the heart outright, eh Global Times? Simon Elegant’s short profile of Mo for Time in 2010 is worth a reread. Ai Weiwei: U mad, bro? Here’s Mo’s short story “Frogs,” via Granta. And finally, Mo was interviewed yesterday, as written up by Xinhua.

(I’ve definitely missed some great stories; please leave links to ones you liked in the comments section, though note that two or more links and your comment swings by moderation first.)

If all that’s not enough, here are reactions from the Twittersphere:

Mo Yan, 57, has made history by becoming the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Announced mere minutes ago, Mo will become the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize. Reached at his home by phone, he told the Nobel committee he was “overjoyed and scared.”

Mo was apparently co-favored alongside Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. His win will undoubtedly inspire passionate discussion in this country and elsewhere about his merits. Stay tuned.

2012 #NobelPrize in #Literature was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

— Nobelprize_org (@Nobelprize_org) October 11, 2012

(Note: Gao Xingjian, who was granted French citizenship in 1997 and won the Nobel Prize in 2000, was the first writer of Chinese ethnicity to win the Nobel in literature.)