Beijing hails Nobel Prize win by 'China's Faulkner'

The Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm that the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to Chinese writer Mo Yan for the "hallucinatory realism" of his tales that "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."

Previous Chinese Nobel winners have won for work that challenged the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship; thus, the awards have received little acknowledgment in China, save for criticism and official anger.

In 2000, exiled Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, by then a French citizen, won the Nobel for literature for works that included criticisms of China's communist government. His works are banned in China.

In 2010, jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is handed out by a separate Nobel committee in Norway. Liu, an outspoken critic of the communist regime, helped draft Charter 08, a manifesto signed by numerous Chinese intellectuals that calls for more freedoms and an end to one-party rule in China.

Liu was not allowed to receive his Nobel and is a jailed political prisoner in China.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency had published reports this week that the "globally prestigious" Nobel Prize in literature could go to Mo, and the win has been splashed across its website.

"This prize may prove China, with its growing strength, does not have only dissidents who can be accepted by the West. China's mainstream cannot be kept out for long," Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalistic Global Times newspaper, wrote on his popular microblog, a Chinese version of Twitter.

The win also prompted widespread excitement, and some criticism, among ordinary Chinese on social media sites. Even Chinese who had never heard of the honored writer until Thursday appeared excited by the news.

"I haven't heard of Mo Yan, but I know the movie Red Sorghum," based on Mo's writing, said Zhu Kexin, a grocery store owner in Beijing's Chaoyang district.

"I am happy to hear that. China has so many good writers, I'm surprised the prize came so late. But it doesn't matter, our history is longer than the Nobel Prize," said Zhu, 35. "People around the world will know more about China in the future as Chinese become stronger."

Some critics have blamed China's decades-long and ongoing censorship of the arts for the lack of earlier Nobel success. Although he has tackled sensitive topics, Mo and his award have renewed debate in China about artistic freedom of expression.

Mo is obedient to the party and "dances in chains," complained Hangzhou writer Yin Deyi last week. Mo told Phoenix TV after his win that "this is an era in which you can speak freely." Shanghai-based commentator Zhao Chu called him "shameless," as Mo lives in a nation that exiled or jailed previous Nobel laureates, and daily deletes many microblog posts and cancels accounts, Zhao wrote.

Han Haoyue, a columnist writing about culture and entertainment, wrote on his microblog that an editor had canceled Han's comment piece as the media can publish only "reports," not "comments," on Mo's win.

None of this will affect plans to make Mo's work more widely available to the public outside China.

Mo's two American publishers -- Penguin and Arcade -- said they are rushing to reprint six of Mo's sprawling novels that have been translated into English. Arcade Executive Editor Cal Barksdale says its stock of five novels by Mo sold out within hours of the Nobel announcement.

Arcade, which first published Mo's The Republic of Wine, about debauchery in
post-Mao China, in 2000, is reprinting 10,000 to 20,000 copies of each title. Penguin, which released Mo's best-known novel, Red Sorghum, in 1994, about a young women's life working at a distillery, says it's reprinting an additional 15,000 copies.

Mo, 57, has acknowledged the influences of previous Nobel Prize winners, such as William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, on his writing style. He has been called "China's Faulkner" and has likened the setting of much of his work, Gaomi county in eastern Shandong province, to Faulkner's fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha.

Jeannette Seaver, a consulting editor and co-founder of Arcade, says Mo "isn't a traditional storyteller," but "he's funny, in a wild and crazy and wonderful way."

He "writes a kind of fantasy and magical realism that's really hiding all the restrictions and regulations of the (Chinese) regime," she says, "but it's never direct."

Seaver says Mo's writings were originally banned in China. He has since managed to avoid Chinese censorship and get along with the government, but "their relationship isn't a honeymoon."

Contributing: Sunny Yang in Beijing; Bob Minzesheimer in New York