SOURCE: Kuhn, Anthony. “To Many in China, Author's Nobel Is No Prize.” Los Angeles Times (16 October 2000): E1, E4.

In the following essay, Kuhn explores the response of Chinese government officials, writers, and literary scholars to Gao's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

For the many Chinese who have long hoped that the Nobel Prize in literature would be awarded to a Chinese cultural luminary, thereby bringing recognition to their country's rich literary traditions, last week's winner came as a rude shock.

What they got, with the selection of experimental playwright and novelist Gao Xingjian, was a writer whose works few Chinese know; whom the government considers subversive and whom the domestic media have largely been banned from discussing.

But with mainstream Chinese culture caught between unbridled commercialism and official censorship, the award may serve to draw attention to China's small but vital avant-garde arts sector, which Gao...