I　found the majority of the piece to be really, really smug and kinda like the dude was completely uninterested in engaging with Chinese writers (at large, outside of Yu Hua and Guo Xiaolu, who both get a lot of burn in the West). The stuff about Guo Jingming was just absolutely pathetic, telling us what kind of car he drives and making sure we know he doesn't care about politics.

And, basically, I can't even make out what the authors of this piece want: are they saying that less censorship will radically change the best seller list? Are they saying that censorship is now secondary to market forces, when it comes to deciding who gets published?

The whole thing kinda upset me, how smugly dismissive it all is, how it turns people like Tie Ning into some kind of a wooden, slogan-spouting puppet for a government that the piece's authors are clearly disgusted by.

Have Wolfgang Höbel and Andreas Lorenz actually read Guo Jingming's books? Are they interested in actually understand the environment that produced the work, or the psychology of the author-- are they willing to do any intellectual work beyond giving us these surreal vignettes in which Chinese authors that they don't like are made to look ridiculous. Oh, Tie Ning says censorship doesn't exist. Oh, Guo Jingming says getting rich is good.

I think the piece is kind of shitting on China's readers and writers. Wolfgang Höbel and Andreas Lorenz are attacking Chinese literature for not producing the kind of literature that matches their political sensibilities, basically. I noted the Louisa Lim piece elsewhere, too, where she basically asks Guo Jingming why he isn't writing about Tiananmen.

I don't think this is only a problem that European intellectuals have with Chinese lit, either-- you could probably dig up a mirror image essay about American contemporary fiction somewhere. I don't think there's anything particularly "excellent" about the piece.

DylanK, October 15, 2009, 5:22a.m.

No arguments about the tiresome politics fetish that western journalists seem mostly to have, DylanK, but Tie Ning actually is a wooden hack, as I think anyone who met her at Moganshan would testify. Sure, answering the same questions about censorship by sententious Eurojournalists is enough to make anyone lose their sense of humor -- but she never had much of one to begin with.

The Pooka MacPhellimey, October 15, 2009, 6:55a.m.

I noticed a few factual errors in the Der Spiegel article, thought I should mention them here:

(1) Yan Lianke has a son, not a daughter.

(2) While it's true that Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuangmeng) was only available in Chinese bookstores for a short time - the first and only printing of the book sold very quickly, and a second printing was scrapped because of pressure from the censors - I'm certain that it was longer than three days. I think this is probably a literal translation ("three days") of a Chinese phrase that is used metaphorically to mean "a short period of time".

cindy carter, October 15, 2009, 10:08a.m.

Dream of Ding Village wasn't really recalled, or at least not to the same extent nationwide. I know during Yan's lawsuit against the publisher, he told the press that he was able to find the book on shelves, countering their claim that it had been a total loss on their part.

jdmartinsen, October 15, 2009, 1:35p.m.

Yeah, I managed to buy a copy at Sanlian bookstore in 2006. Apparently the publisher, hearing that the book would not be allowed to go to a second printing, rushed the first printing into bookstores. I heard the first/only print run sold very well. Don't know whether any books were actually yanked off the shelves, or if they just sold out quickly. Probably the latter.

cindy carter, October 16, 2009, 10:12a.m.