Pankaj Mishra on Mo Yan and double standards

       In The Guardian Pankaj Mishra explains why Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorship.
       He suggests:

[Mo Yan's] writing, however, has hardly been mentioned, let alone assessed, by his most severe western critics; it is his political choices for which he stands condemned. They are indeed deplorable, but do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan's counterparts in the west to such harsh scrutiny ?

       I'm not sure he's right about Mo's 'most severe western critics' -- though I suppose if one focuses on the shallowest (i.e. solely easy-headline-seeking) ones he's right. (Many others have, however, attacked the writing itself -- see, for example, Anna Sun's The Diseased Language of Mo Yan.)
       But Mishra is certainly right that most people have been very quick to pounce on Mo for what he does and doesn't say about China (and his 'defenders' haven't done much to change the conversation, by insisting that he's merely approaching the matter differently ...) -- but then that's what both China and 'the West' want from the a figure that can't help but also be now Nobel-approved symbolic .....
       (As longtime readers know, I'm always for focusing on the writing and ignoring the politics; many of my favorite writers have held absolutely heinous positions, but those aren't the ones I want to judge their work by -- and it's only the work I want to judge.)