Mo Yan, a Chinese author, was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, which led to a national celebration in China. This was a stark contrast to 2010 when the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Chinese government reacted with fury. The award to Mo Yan, who is embraced by the Communist Party, represents a shift for the Swedish Academy which historically awarded dissident writers from Communist countries. However, Academy officials state that politics did not influence their decision and that Mo Yan was chosen based on literary merit alone.

1. MO YANBEIJING - Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and
internationally renowned Chinese author who
considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace
by the ruling Communist Party has drawn
criticismfrom dissident writers, was on Thursday
awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.
China erupted into something close to a national
celebration. The state-run CCTV interrupted its
prime-time broadcast to announce the news;
the nationalistic Global Times tabloid posted a
“special coverage” page on its Web site; and in
a glowing account, the state-run People’s Daily
prominently wrote that the prize was “a comfort,
a certification and also an affirmation — but even
more so, it is a new starting point.”
Two years ago, when the jailed Chinese
dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize,
“the government
reacted with contempt
and fury, scrubbing the
announcement from the
Internet, condemning
the award as a
“desecration”
and calling it a Western propaganda tool
intended to insult and destabilize the ruling
Communist Party. Government officials even
retaliated against Norway, the country that
awards the peace prize, denying visas to visiting
Norwegian dignitaries and delaying shipments of
Norwegian salmon for so long that the fish rotted
before reaching port.
But all that seemed forgotten on Thursday, when
word came that another Nobel had been awarded to
another Chinese citizen. The award to Mr. Mo will
probably act as a huge boost to China’s national
psyche, which has long suffered from a sense that its
cultural accomplishments, at least in the eyes of the
West, are overshadowed by its economic prowess.
”This will be embraced as an indicator that China
has arrived in the world,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal,
a China expert at the Brookings Institution in
Washington. “The contradictions between their
response to Liu Xiaobo’s prize and Mo Yan’s prize
will not trouble them in the least.”
The award represents something of a shift, too,
for the Swedish Academy, whose members
choose the Nobel literature winner.
During the Soviet era, it consistently gave
Nobels to Soviet and Eastern European
dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Joseph Brodsky and Jaroslav Seifert.
Similarly, the only two previous mainland
Chinese winners under Communist rule,
Mr. Liu and Ga Xingjian, who won the literature
prize in 2000 and who gave up his Chinese
citizenship for French citizenship, are both
dissidents.
Indeed, the academy has rarely, if ever, awarded
one of its prizes to a writer or scholar embraced
by a Communist government. The Academy’s
deliberations are shrouded in Vatican-style
secrecy, but officials insist that neither politics
nor any diplomatic or economic pressure from
China played any part in the decisions.
“Basically, it’s quite simple,” said Peter Englund,
permanent secretary of the Academy. “We are
awarding a literary prize, and it’s on literary
merit. The political fallouts and effects don’t
enter into it.”
“That doesn’t mean we regard literature as
unpolitical or that this year’s prize winner isn’t
writing political literature,” he continued,
speaking of Mr. Mo. “You can open almost any
one of his books and see it’s very critical about
many things to do with Chintory and also
contemporary China.” said, a few years later
while serving in the People’s Liberation Army.
Speaking
Truth
to Power
in C H I N A
MO YAN faces opposition as both 2012 Nobel Prize
winner and Communist Party protestor.
9 9 R e d b a l l o o n s M O D E R N E N G L I S H
Written In Stone
A
NEYOSHI, Japan — The
stone tablet has stood on this
forested hillside since
before they were born, but the
villagers have faithfully obeyed the
stark warning carved on its
weathered face: “Do not build your
homes below this point!” Residents
say this injunction from their
ancestors kept their tiny village of
11 households safely out of reach
of the deadly tsunami last month
that wiped out hundreds of miles of
Japanese coast and rose to
record heights near here. The
waves stopped just 300 feet below
the stone. “They knew the horrors
of tsunamis, so they erected that
stone to warn us,” said Mr. Kimura,
64, the village leader of Aneyoshi.
Hundreds of so-called tsunami
stones, some more than six
centuries old, dot the coast of
Japan, silent testimony to the past
destruction that these lethal waves
have frequented upon this
earthquake-prone nation. But
modern Japan, confident that
advanced technology and higher
seawalls would protect vulnerable
areas, came to forget or ignore
these ancient warnings, dooming it
to repeat bitter experiences when
the recent tsunami struck. The
tsunami stones are warnings across
generations, telling descendants to
avoid the same suffering of their
ancestors,” said Itoko Kitahara, a
specialist in the history of natural
disasters at Ritsumeikan
University in Kyoto. “Some places
heeded these lessons of the past,
but many didn’t.”
The flat stones, some as tall as
10 feet, are a common sight along
Japan’s northeastern shore, which
bore the brunt of the magnitude 9.0
earthquake and
tsunami on March 11 that left
almost 29,000 people dead or
missing.
While some are so old that the
characters are worn away, most
were erected about a century ago
after two deadly tsunamis here,
including one in 1896 that killed
22,000 people. Many carry simple
warnings to drop everything and
seek higher ground after a strong
earthquake. Others provide grim
reminders of the waves’
destructive force by listing past
death tolls or marking mass
graves.
7
Ancient stones placed near flood areas warn villagers of tsunami danger.
By Martin Fackler
Published: April 20, 2011
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