China Daily, via Reuters
Mo Yan in Beijing in 2009.
BEIJING — Two years ago, when the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, the government reacted with contempt and fury, scrubbing the announcement from the Internet, condemning the award as a "desecration" and calling it a Western propaganda tool intended to insult and destabilize the ruling Communist Party.
Government officials even retaliated against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, denying visas to Norwegian dignitaries and delaying shipments of Norwegian salmon for so long that the fish rotted before they could clear customs.
But all that seemed forgotten on Thursday, when word came that another Nobel, the 2012 literature prize, had been awarded to another Chinese citizen, the internationally renowned author Mo Yan, and China erupted into something close to a national celebration. The state-run CCTV interrupted its prime-time broadcast to announce the news; the nationalistic Global Times tabloid posted a "special coverage" page on its Web site; and in a glowing account, the state-run People's Daily prominently wrote that the prize was "a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation — but even more so, it is a new starting point."
The award will probably act as a huge boost to China's national psyche, which has long suffered from a sense that its cultural accomplishments, at least in the eyes of the West, are overshadowed by its economic prowess.
"This will be embraced as an indicator that China has arrived in the world," said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The contradictions between their response to Liu Xiaobo's prize and Mo Yan's prize will not trouble them in the least."
The award represents something of a shift, too, for the Swedish Academy, whose members choose the Nobel literature winner.
During the Soviet era, it consistently gave Nobels to Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky and Jaroslav Seifert. Similarly, the only two previous mainland Chinese winners under Communist rule, Mr. Liu and Gao Xingjian, who won the literature prize in 2000 and who gave up his Chinese citizenship for French citizenship, are both dissidents.
Indeed, the academy has rarely, if ever, awarded one of its prizes to a writer or scholar embraced by a Communist government. The Academy's deliberations are shrouded in Vatican-style secrecy, but officials insist that neither politics nor any diplomatic or economic pressure from China played any part in the decisions.
"Basically, it's quite simple," said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Academy. "We are awarding a literary prize, and it's on literary merit. The political fallouts and effects don't enter into it.
"That doesn't mean we regard literature as unpolitical or that this year's prize winner isn't writing political literature," he continued, speaking of Mr. Mo. "You can open almost any one of his books and see it's very critical about many things to do with Chinese history and also contemporary China. But he's not a political dissident. I would say he is more a critic of the system, sitting within the system."
Mr. Mo, 57, is hardly a tool of the Communist Party; much of his work is laced with social criticism, and he is admired by readers of Chinese literature abroad as much as he is hugely popular in his own country. But he does not consider himself political, and his decision not to take a stand against the government — as well as his position as vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers' Association — has drawn criticism from Chinese dissident writers.
In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for "Red Sorghum," an epic that takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh conditions in rural China, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.
"Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives," the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award, "Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition."
The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 on the dusty plains of China's eastern Shandong Province, where much of his fiction is set. A teenager during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, he left school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People's Liberation Army.
The author's given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means "don't speak," is actually a pen name that reflects the time in which he grew up.
Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Sarah Lyall from London. Ian Johnson contributed reporting from Beijing, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Shi Da and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.
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