MO YANBEIJING - Mo Yan, a wildly prolifi c and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the ruling Communist Party has drawn criticism from dissident writers, was on Thursday awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.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 certifi cation and also an affi rmation — but even more so, it is a new starting point.”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 “desecrat ion”

and calling it a Western propaganda tool intended to insult and destabilize the ruling Communist Party. Government offi cials even retaliated against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, denying visas to visiting Norwegian dignitaries and delaying shipments of Norwegian salmon for so long that the fi sh rotted before reaching port.

But all that seemed forgotten on Thursday, when word came that another Nobel had been awarded to another Chinese citizen. The award to Mr. Mo will probably act as a huge boost to China’s national psyche, which has long suff ered 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 Ga 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 offi cials 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 eff ects 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 Chintory and also contemporary China.” said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army.

Speaking Truth to Power in C H I N AMO YAN faces opposit ion as both 2012 Nobel Prize winner and Communist Party protestor.

9 9 Re d b a l lo o n s M O D E R N E N G L I S H

Written In StoneA NEYOSHI, Japan — The

stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since

before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: “Do not build your homes below this point!” Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone. “They knew the horrors of tsunamis, so they erected that stone to warn us,” said Mr. Kimura, 64, the village leader of Aneyoshi. Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past

destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation. But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck. The tsunami stones are warnings across generations, telling descendants to avoid the same suffering of their ancestors,” said Itoko Kitahara, a specialist in the history of natural disasters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. “Some places heeded these lessons of the past, but many didn’t.”

The flat stones, some as tall as 10 feet, are a common sight along Japan’s northeastern shore, which bore the brunt of the magnitude 9.0

earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that left almost 29,000 people dead or missing.

While some are so old that the characters are worn away, most were erected about a century ago after two deadly tsunamis here, including one in 1896 that kil led 22,000 people. Many carry simple warnings to drop everything and seek higher ground after a strong earthquake. Others provide grim reminders of the waves’ destructive force by l isting past death tolls or marking mass graves.

7

Ancient stones placed near flood areas warn vil lagers of tsunami danger.

By Martin FacklerPublished: April 20, 2011

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