Mo Yan's Nobel prize in literature should help China overcome its Nobel complex

Post-Mao China has long coveted a Nobel prize in literature for a resident writer, so Mo Yan's win has a special significance
Mo Yan
Out of the shadows … The novels of Mo Yan, who has won the Nobel prize in literature, have shone an unforgiving spotlight on communist society. Photograph: AP

In Chinese, Mo Yan means "don't speak". It's an odd choice of pseudonym for a writer who has produced 10 novels, several novellas and more than 80 short stories, establishing himself as one of mainland China's best-known authors both in the Chinese-speaking and anglophone worlds.

In his 30-year writing career, Mo Yan has gained a reputation for speaking out with uncommon directness on the absurdities and corruption of modern China. Born in 1955, he won celebrity during the mid- to late-80s, participating in two key developments in the post-Mao literary thaw that, together, transformed the imaginative landscapes of mainland writing: the root-seeking and avant-garde movements. The root-seekers opened up fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture and aesthetics, countering decades of anti-traditionalism both before and after the communist revolution of 1949. The experimental avant-garde writers, meanwhile, released literary form and content from the stranglehold of socialist realism.

For three decades, Mo Yan has reeled out colourful historical epics (such as Red Sorghum, adapted for film by Zhang Yimou) set in the wilds of his native north-east China. In the process – not least in The Garlic Ballads, The Republic of Wine, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out – he has laid bare the grotesquerie and cruelty of communist society since 1949.

Mo Yan is notable not only for his creative engagement with modern Chinese history but also, more simply, for his dedication to the craft of writing. As the catchphrase of the market economy-oriented 1990s became "wang qian kan" ("look towards the future", which, in Chinese, neatly punned the word for "future" on the word for "money"), many writers who had found fame in the 80s joined in the capitalist free-for-all. Plenty of once-serious novelists shelved literary fiction in favour of profit-making: television and film scripts, song-writing, business ventures. In this febrile cultural context, Mo Yan stands out for his commitment to his literary vocation. He is one of the relatively few contemporary Chinese novelists who has stuck with the form long enough to attain intellectual maturity.

Nonetheless, his longer novels have sometimes suffered from the slapdash impatience that runs rife through China's marketised literary economy, often affecting professionalism in both writing and editing. One rumour goes that he is supposed to have written the 500,000-plus characters of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in 43 days.

In many countries, perhaps, a Nobel prize for literature is seen as an award to a creative individual, without any broader, collective symbolism. Not so in China. Since its re-entry into the global political, economic and cultural realm in the early 1980s, China's establishment has craved Nobel prizes in science, economics and (particularly) literature. As part of a broader post-Mao yearning for international prizes and "face" (for the Olympics, to qualify for the football World Cup, to enter the World Trade Organisation), Beijing has desired a Nobel for a Chinese person living, working and prospering in China, as nationalistic validation that the People's Republic of China has made it as a modern global power.

Ethnically Chinese individuals have achieved Nobels in science and literature in the past, but they were resident outside China at the time of winning. Two years ago, the award of the Nobel peace prize to Liu Xiaobo – a political dissident still serving an 11-year prison sentence for pro-democracy campaigning – caused Beijing intense embarrassment. Perhaps this prize to Mo Yan – an active member of communist China's Writers' Association – will go some way towards resolving the country's Nobel complex.