They noted Mo’s silence on the fate of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese writer and activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize two years earlier and was represented during the ceremony in Stockholm by an empty chair. The government announced plans to transform the author’s rural childhood home into a £70m “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone”.īut a number of prominent intellectuals and Chinese dissidents, such as the artist Ai Weiwei, were horrified. One of the country’s top officials proclaimed the award an endorsement not only of the “flourishing progress of Chinese literature”, but also of the “overall strength of our state and its international influence”. Newspapers devoted special sections to discussing Mo’s work. China Central Television interrupted its scripted evening news programme to report the honour within minutes of it being announced. The Chinese government and state-run media outlets were euphoric. When the Chinese author Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, the response was decidedly mixed.
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