Faced with a sex scandal of breathtaking tackiness, a Chinese police district could be forgiven for feeling perhaps a flicker of relief last week when someone in the office stumbled on what must have felt like good news under the circumstances—a detail that, at last, would not add to the humiliation heaped upon the brave men and women in blue in the county of Usu.
In a recent conversation at the Asia Society, novelist Sheng Keyi said she felt the critism of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize was unjustified. The controversy, she said, arises from Mo Yan’s politics rather than his literature, “and I think to critique him on that front is unfair. The Nobel Prize for Literature is given for literature and nothing else.”
Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10.
The 57-year-old novelist often writes stories based on memories of his village childhood, and his work and his political views have triggered wide debate.
In discussion with ChinaFile Associate Editor Ouyang Bin, literary critic and political activist Yu Jie says it was a mistake to award Mo Yan the prize, both from a political and an literary point of view. Yu says the prize is evidence of the double standard with which the West evaluates Chinese literature.
When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics attracted much attention. The award is often given to writers who forcefully oppose political repression. When authors are from countries recently embroiled in political strife, or there are repressive dictatorships or socialist regimes involved, sometimes the artistic aspects of an author’s work receive less attention than they would for more famous authors.
Two hundred million Sina Weibo users found Tuesday they could search for Chinese leaders and were free to critiique.
Xi Jinping is hitching himself to Deng Xiaoping’s legacy and style and is serious about reinvigorating reforms.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says nearly two-thirds of China's 32 jailed journalists are ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs.
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Frequent media reports of overwhelming popular support for mass surveillance are propagandistic in tone and content. However, is there nonetheless some truth in the ‘happy Chinese panopticon’? An international comparative survey on privacy and surveillance in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the USA found that Chinese citizens were the least likely to answer ‘highly intrusive’ (2.8%) when asked: ‘To what extent do you believe laws aimed at protecting national security are intrusive upon personal privacy?’ The respondents who answered ‘not very intrusive’ or ‘not intrusive at all’ made up 64.7% of the Chinese answers (50%+14.7%). Indeed, 83.8% of the Chinese respondents held that CCTV cameras were ‘very effective’ (23.9%) or ‘somewhat effective’ (59.9%) in this regard, figures surpassed only by interviewees in Japan and Hungary.
The new Communist leaders must reduce China’s reliance on exports to sustain expansion as the country faces a wealth gap that runs a risk of fomenting social unrest.
