In response to Guardian's reportage of Mo Yan's Nobel Prize win

The relevant article is here: Headline as of 18:47 UK time: "Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2012: Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for 'hallucinatory realism'"

frothwrath

11 October 2012 3:37PM

The only reason Gao Xingjian no longer has Chinese citizenship is that his citizenship was revoked by the Chinese government after it expelled him from the country. It's very disappointing that the Guardian, presumably just for the sake of a headline, is legitimising the political persecution of Gao Xingjian in this way.

Since Gao was born and raised in China, writes in Chinese and never chose to give up his citizenship, it's ridiculous to say Mo is the first Chinese writer to win the prize. The most you could say is that he's the first PRC citizen to win it. Since Gao's citizenship was revoked precisely because of his writing, what is actually meant by "Mo is the first Chinese writer to win the prize" is "Mo is the first Chinese writer to win who doesn't annoy the Chinese government"

Disgraceful, Guardian.

Well said!!!

And despite Sarah Crown's later comment about how the Guardian has amended the story, the headline and the standfirst still unashamedly label Mo Yan as the "first Chinese" to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.


A bloody disgrace.

There is a lot more I could say about the Graun's CCP bias in its other reporting, but I shall refrain from saying anything here seeing as I am already pre-moderated and every single comment I made has to have first gone through Guardian censorship.

---------------

The above comment was submitted at 6:44pm on the Guardian website. As expected, it hasn't gone through, at all. More importantly, the standfirst referring to Mo Yan as the "first Chinese" to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is still NOT CORRECTED as of 12 October, 2012. Says it all about Guardian bias, really. I rest my case.

Bookish quotation 1 for deckchair competition

Yiyun Li

"I want to interfere with history, making things up at will, adding layers to legend... The scenes always move me, as they are the central scenes of a hero's story. I want the story to be about bravery. But always I am stopped."

(excerpted from "What has that to do with me?", first appeared in the Gettysburg Review, vol. 16 no. 2, re-printed at the end of the "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers". Here Li was not referring to her stories, but about the difficulty of recounting history, specifically that from her own experiences before she left China for America. It struck me that, as the powers-that-be have no qualms about re-writing history, the writers themselves conversely become ever more cautious about the way they tell their stories.)