By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Oct 19 2000 (IPS)

Each year when the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced, Chinese newspapers are filled for days with articles lamenting the failure of a nation with a literary heritage so enduring and rich as China’s, to win the prize even once.

So this year, when Chinese playwright and novelist Gao Xingjian was honoured with the prestigious prize, the silence with which Beijing met the announcement was baffling.

While news of the award was slowly filtering through Internet and the mainland’s academic circles, the state-sanctioned media was mum.

On Oct 13, the day after the announcement of the prize, the Chinese Writers Association issued a brief statement criticising the Swedish Academy of Literature’s decision to award the prize to a Chinese writer who has lived in France since 1987.

“The Nobel prize committee has ignored the fact that there are many excellent writers and works of literature in China,” said the statement. “The Nobel Prize for Literature has been used for political purposes and lost its dignity.”

Among cultural officials and party cadres in his home, Gao Xingjian is persona non grata — a dissident writer who left China in 1987 and who renounced his Communist Party membership following the 1989 Tiananmen onslaught on the democratic movement.

His plays and novels are banned in China, and his name omitted from the official history textbooks of Chinese modern literature.

While his experimental plays are regarded by some critics as a milestone in the development of China’s modern theatre, the new generation of mainland theater-goers has never heard Gao’s name.

The Nobel prize announcement caught even literary circles here by surprise.

“It came really out of the blue,” says professor Zhao Zumo from the Department of Modern Literature at Beijing University. “Gao has been in exile for many years and somehow out of the spotlight. The Nobel prize reflects the way the West appraises Chinese literature and we had expected someone like Bei Dao becoming laureate.”

Bei Dao, a 51-year-old Chinese poet from the mainland school of “misty poetry”, is another dissident writer who has found a new home in the United States. He has been a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years, also to the disapproval of Chinese authorities.

In announcing the prize, the Swedish Academy cited Gao for the “bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity” in his writings about the struggle for individuality in mass culture.

“He is a perspicacious skeptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing,” the citation said.

In the 1980s, Gao’s focus on the individual rather than the collective brought him the wrath of communist sensors of taste.

In their rigid pursuit of the canon of socialist realism, cultural officials saw dangerous elements of bourgeois decadence in Gao’s play ‘Bus Stop’ when it was first performed in Beijing in 1982.

“Gao’s play was heavily criticised in 1982,” recalls Carla Kirkwood, an American artist and writer who did the first English translation of ‘Bus Stop’. “It was one of the literary works that set off the ‘spiritual pollution’ campaign in 1983. Gao is really the leader of the ‘new democratic’ art movement in 1981.”

‘Bus Stop’ introduced elements of the theatre of the absurd to Chinese audiences and according to some who watched the performance in the 1980s, it was an instant popular success. The authorities banned the play after just three weeks of performance.

Together with Gao’s two other plays, ‘The Warning Signal’ and ‘Wild Man’, ‘Bus Stop’ was used to victimise the playwright during the Communist Party’s campaign against “spiritual pollution”, launched in 1983 to weed out Western influences.

For Gao, the persecution of the 1980s was a bitter episode reminiscent of his sufferings during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Then, he was denounced for his knowledge of a foreign language, forced by radical communists to burn a suitcase full of manuscripts and sent to a re- education labour camp.

Gao was not able to publish or stage anything until 1979, when the late leader Deng Xiaoping unleashed China into an era of market reforms that made the role of Communist ideology more subdued.

The democratic spell in culture and art however was short- lived. In the wake of “spiritual pollution” campaign, all of Gao’s plays were banned and in 1987 he was forced to flee China. Gao settled in France and is now a French citizen.

His foreign citizenship made numerous Internet chat rooms set up by major Chinese-language portals, such as Sina and Sohu, babble for days about the irrelevance of this literature prize to China.

Statements such as “this guy has a French passport, what does this prize has got to do with us?” and “this prize is a big joke with Chinese people” capture the general mood of Internet surfers.

A more high-brow contempt was felt in comments of some Chinese intellectuals who said the prize was another proof that “the West can not understand Chinese culture”.

But for people like Zhao Zumo and Carla Kirkwood who were among Gao’s audience in the early 1980s, both the popular and official reactions avoid the larger issue of Gao’s contribution to Chinese literature.

“It is simplistic to say that the Nobel prize committee had political motives,” argues Zhao Zumo. “If the political motive was decisive, they could have chosen Bei Dao. He is much more of a dissident than Gao Xingjian.”

“Many other Chinese writers in exile have written about the sensitive issue of Tiananmen democracy movement. So why Gao and not them? Because Gao’s plays were like a lightening to Chinese audiences in the 1980s,” he points out.

Adds Kirkwood: “His plays opened a door to the West and showed that Chinese contemporary writers were not frozen in their tradition of recreating the canon. This is the true significance of Gao’s prize.”

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