Mo Yan: 'China's Faulkner' tests communists' literary limits

Perhaps some failed to see Mo's characteristic satire and black humour in The Republic of Wine, his wildly imaginative novel in which a special investigator for China's ruling party probes rumours oflocal officials feasting on children.

Mo, 57, has pushed literary boundaries in China for three decades.His renowned experimentation has tested the limits of how much socialand political satire the Communist Party's state censors can allow.

His latest novel, Frogs, published in China in 2010, takes aim at the government's draconian "one child" family planning policy.

Extensive use of fantasy and satire have helped Mo to avoid themore serious punishments that await writers who directly attack theparty or its social and economic policies.

Censors have summoned him several times to discuss his writing,and some of his works have been temporarily withdrawn from sale.

Yet he has continued to operate inside the approval system imposedon Chinese writers and publishers by the government, insisting thath is writing undergoes little self-censorship.

"I said and wrote everything I wanted to say and everything Iwanted to write," Mo once said of his central novel, Big Breasts andWide Hips.

Chinese critics sometimes call him a "rural writer living in thecity." He lives in Beijing but most of his work is set in the semi-fictional Northeast Gaomi County in the eastern coastal provinceof Shandong.

Mo has likened Gaomi to William Faulkner's fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, reflecting his acclaim by some as "China'sFaulkner." Born Guan Moye in 1955, he grew up in Gaomi amid the brutality, deprivation and Maoist extremism of the 1958-1961 Great Leap Forward and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

He spent his early days as a farmer and worker before he was accepted into the People's Liberation Army in 1976.

In the army, he worked as a librarian and graduated in literature from a military college in 1986 before leaving the army after nearly 22 years' service.

The "class struggle" and communist fundamentalism of his youth left a deep impression on Mo, like all Chinese writers of his generation.

Mo and his "affluent peasant"-labelled family suffered constant political discrimination and, worst of all, he was prevented from reading books.

When he first read Chinese translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquezand other magic realists in the 1980s, Mo said they showed him that "you can write so freely." He acknowledges the influence of other foreign writers including Gunther Grass, DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Leo Tolstoy.

Mo adopted the ironic pen-name Mo Yan, an ancient literary expression for "don't speak". Critics delight in the fact that the"non-speaking" author is one of China's more prolific writers.

Quietly spoken and modest, he is best known outside China for Red Sorghum, which director Zhang Yimou adapted for an award-winning,1987 film of the same name.

Red Sorghum is an epic story of love, atrocity and liquor-makingset during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II.

Several other novels have been translated into English over thepast decade, most of them by US-based scholar Howard Goldblatt.

An English translation of Mo's 2003 novel Pow is scheduled forpublication in January.

Based partly on Mo's memories of his childhood in Gaomi, Powexplores social change and rampant corruption in a Chinese villagethrough the eyes of a 20-year-old youth who retains the personalityof a 10-year-old boy.

Mo said his love of ambiguity, with deliberate blurring of factand fiction, was not just a literary tool but a reflection of theuncertainties he sees in modern life.

Like other contemporary Chinese writers and film-makers, a keyfocus for Mo has been a moral crisis that many see as a symptom ofthe authoritarian government mixing the worst excesses of communismand capitalism.

He regards Big Breasts and Wide Hips, published in Chinese in 1996and English in 2004, as one of his most important and personal works.

It was criticised after the Chinese publication for its "incorrect view of history" by neutrally portraying the Communists, Nationalists and bandits of pre-1949 China.

Written partly as a tribute to his mother, Big Breasts depicts a family of large women and their weak, socially inept men folk.

Mo said it was partly a satire of modern, superficial consumerism and the use of sexuality in marketing.

It was also a literary synthesis of two key elements in his earlier work, epitomised by the family history in Red Sorghum and the magic realism of The Republic of Wine, he said.