Literature should not be a Nobel pursuit

That Mo Yan would win the Nobel Prize in Literature was known, well almost, much before the Swedish Academy announced it, because for the first time China Central Television had been invited to interview the winner. Still speculation was rife, and the bookies seemed to favor Japan's Haruki Murakami and Canada's Alice Munro. But the odds were overwhelmingly stacked in favor of Mo Yan. The reason: American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth (and Bob Dylan) have not been favorites with the judges and Syrian poet Adonis could be ruled out because of the Syrian crisis.

These facts, however, would be obvious to anybody after Mo Yan's win, which certainly calls for celebration in a country that has prized literature for centuries. Literature has been part and parcel of Chinese society from the ancient times down to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and the republic period to New China.

The sheer volume, depth, variety and span of Chinese literature in modern times (let alone the mammoth tomes of creation in the earlier periods, for example, the Tang Dynasty which many consider the golden era of arts and literature in China) is mind-boggling.