The dissident Chinese writer is an apocryphal beast. There are Chinese dissidents, of course, and some of them even write, but romantic images of Soviet-style repression — hostile state censors redacting novels with a red pen, writers forced to choose between humiliating submission and courageous defiance — do not apply in China today. Dissidents are regularly disciplined or imprisoned for their academic research, their journalism, their legal activism or their ethnic identity. But a mere poem rarely lands anyone in prison. The Chinese poet-hero does not exist.
For years Chinese authors in China have been writing books that get banned, with no dramatic repercussions.… Seguir leyendo »
When the Swedish Academy called the Chinese writer Mo Yan to tell him he had won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the novelist reportedly told them, in what must be one of the most poignant Nobel reactions in memory, that he was “overjoyed and terrified.”
It isn’t hard to imagine why a writer who chose “Mo Yan” as his pen name would find fear at the heart of such a happy occasion. The name, meaning “don’t speak,” was his parents’ admonition when they sent him out to play in the Maoist 1950s and ’60s. Half a century later, Mao’s party, stripped of ideology but intact in its machinery, remains in charge, and at least 40 of Mo Yan’s less circumspect contemporaries are locked in Chinese prisons.… Seguir leyendo »
Literary prizes, wrote Kingsley Amis, are “all right if you win them.” China’s political establishment takes a far less relaxed view of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Since the country reintegrated into the global community after the death of Mao, its government has long craved a literary Nobel for a Chinese citizen living, working and thriving in China as proof that the People’s Republic has arrived as a modern world power. China’s longstanding Nobel envy has turned the prize into a symbol of collective achievement, rather than of individual creativity.
In theory, the awarding on Thursday of the prize to Mo Yan — Communist Party member and vice chairman of the government’s official Writers’ Association — should have put an end to China’s Nobel complex.… Seguir leyendo »
Tan pronto como terminé de leer un artículo que se ensalzaba a Vaclav Havel, el dramaturgo que se convirtiera en disidente, revolucionario pacífico y presidente, y que acababa de morir, dos noticias posteriores pusieron en contexto la su extraordinaria carrera: la muerte de Kim Jong-il, adicto a la pornografía y líder supremo de la nuclear Corea del Norte y las protestas pacíficas contra la expropiación de tierras por los campesinos de Wukan, en la provincia de Guandong, sur de China.
Si Havel tuvo alguna vez momentos de duda acerca de su impacto positivo y duradero en el mundo, espero que fuera capaz de ver las noticias sobre Wukan antes de morir.… Seguir leyendo »
No sooner had I finished reading an article that eulogized Václav Havel, the playwright turned dissident turned peaceful revolutionary turned president who had just died, than two subsequent news stories set Havel’s extraordinary career in context: the death of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s pornography-addicted and nuclear-armed supreme leader, and the peaceful protests against land expropriation by the villagers of Wukan in Guandong province, southern China.
If Havel ever had any moments of doubt about his lasting positive impact on the world, I hope he was able to see reports from Wukan before he died. In that fishing village of 6,000, the “power of the powerless” that Havel promoted as a means to undermine totalitarian rule was demonstrated anew, and with such enormous dignity and discipline that it has galvanized China like no protest since those in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989.… Seguir leyendo »
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