China’s Nobel winning novelist Mo Yan targeted by growing band of online nationalists

Guan is no dissident. He is part of a state-funded association of writers and spent five years on the country’s top political advisory body.

His novels paint a nuanced portrait of Chinese society, and while they include criticism of China’s family planning policy, those works seem to have stayed within the red line set by Beijing.

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But as nationalistic sentiment grows less tolerant of China’s critics, Guan has increasingly become a target for nationalistic voices on Chinese social media platforms, who accuse him of defaming China.

A user on popular Chinese social media platform Weibo claimed last week to have filed a lawsuit in a Beijing court against the author – for insulting the People’s Liberation Army, the late chairman Mao Zedong and the “Chinese people”.

Wu Wanzheng said he was seeking 1.5 billion yuan (US$208.4 million) – “one yuan per Chinese person for loss of reputation”– in the suit, which had not been formally accepted by the court as of Thursday, according to Wu’s Weibo account.

But Wu – whose online handle is “Mao Xinghuo”, a combination of Mao and “spark”, in an apparent reference to a Chinese saying cited by Mao that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” – has attracted support from many fervent nationalists.

One post – reposted and commented on more than 10,000 times – claimed Guan defamed the Communist Party army in his depiction of its resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s.

“The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded because his work is in line with Western ‘political correctness’. His China is so in line with what the West thinks and expects of us,” the post also said.

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“Defaming the military” is a punishable offence under China’s civil law and in some parts of the country can also incur police detention.

Commentators said the criticism was a sign that online public opinion is becoming more conservative in China. Social media has filled with nationalistic tendencies in recent years, including attacks on “Western values” and liberal Chinese academics.

Guan has been repeatedly criticised online over the years for his novels and views on literature. But in the latest wave, nationalists are accusing him of winning the Nobel by exposing China’s flaws and “pandering to the West”.

Guan’s novels touch on many of the major events in 20th century China, in a style known as magical realism. Some literary critics have called him China’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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The civil war between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, the Korean war, the purge of intellectuals that followed Communist rule, and the Cultural Revolution that kicked off a decade of political upheaval have all been subjects of Guan’s work.

In his presentation speech in 2012, Nobel Committee chairman Per Wästberg paid tribute to Guan and noted that “the brutality of China’s 20th century has probably never been described so nakedly”.

The remark was deleted from official Chinese media reports, but has surfaced recently and been taken up by nationalist online commenters as evidence that Guan’s novels “smeared China”.

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The fight against Japan: China’s role in the second world war

The fight against Japan: China’s role in the second world war

Commenters have also referred to a speech given by Guan in 2005 when he received an honorary doctorate from the Open University of Hong Kong. “Literature and art should expose the darkness and injustice of society,” he had said.

Chinese society was not as dark as its depiction in Guan’s novels, according to his online critics.

State media have yet to comment on the controversies surrounding Guan, but the nationalist commenters appear to have been criticised without being named.

In an article published on Tuesday on its official public WeChat account, the propaganda department of Zhejiang province in eastern China criticised “using patriotic banners to attract attention and traffic” on social media.

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Some prominent defenders of Beijing’s policies have also spoken out against the behaviour, including Hu Xijin, the outspoken former editor-in-chief of nationalist tabloid Global Times.

Writing on Weibo last week in response to Wu’s lawsuit announcement, Hu said that suing Guan was a “farce” and a “populist” act. Support for the action represented “a very alarming trend in online public opinion” and had “negatively affected society”.

Wu responded by saying he would sue Hu as well, while his supporters also strongly challenged Hu’s views.

On Sunday, Hu posted again, to say that China must “resolutely stop the spread and development of extremist forces in our society”.

Hu added that the issue “cannot simply be covered up by some other tendencies of the Nobel Prize” – a reference that points to the complexity of attitudes towards the prestigious award in Chinese society.

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Prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while imprisoned in China in 2010, sparking years of diplomatic disputes between China and Norway.

Officials and nationalists in China have often claimed that the Nobel peace and literature prizes reflect “Western values”, although they have rarely criticised the science awards.

But Guan has been treated with official courtesy since winning the Nobel. “This night belongs to Chinese writers, Chinese literature and China,” state news agency Xinhua said when he accepted the prize.

Guan served as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s top political advisory body, from 2013 to 2018.

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Since 2011, Guan has been vice-president of the officially backed Chinese Writers’ Association and in 2015 he accompanied then premier Li Keqiang on a trip to Latin America.

A political scientist based on the mainland, who asked not to be named, said the controversy surrounding Guan “reflects the general trend of public opinion in recent years”.

When Guan won the award in 2012, “the climate of public opinion was not so conservative”, said the scholar, who has been following Guan for more than a decade.

“If this trend continues, China’s cultural and educational efforts will be severely damaged,” he said.