, Columnist
Mo Yan’s Nobel: Parable of a Patsy?
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On Monday night, the Chinese author Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm. It was a big event for him, and an even bigger one for China’s newspapers and microblogs.
The interest was predictable: Mo is the first non-dissident Chinese national to win a Nobel Prize, and his award is thus celebrated as a moment of international recognition that has long eluded the world’s most populous country. In 2010, Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident author and activist won the Peace Prize -- the first Chinese national to win any Nobel -