Die Welt, meanwhile, bemoaned "the triumph of China's global soft-power strategy," and contended that "the literature Nobel prize for...Mo Yan is an affront." Brazil's weekly Veja, itself once censored by a military regime, carried a story noting that the "Chinese writer has drawn criticism" for his "closeness to the Communist Party," and implied guilt by association: "Chinese Communist Party propaganda chief Li Changchun congratulated Mo Yan for his literature Nobel."

Mo's call -- at a journalist's prompting-- for the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo was regarded by some as too little, too late for an "establishment" figure who, despite the occasional banned book, thrives in and is celebrated by the system.

While noting Mo's "wide-ranging, earthy writing [on] even such sensitive matters as forced abortions," theInternational Herald Tribune hinted at Mo's being an apologist-intellectual like Ezra Pound or Jean-Paul Sartre: "was he, even then, under a kind of spell?" The paper quoted Gao Xingjian, the 2000 literature laureate whose dissident stature and French citizenship made him ineligible for recognition as a "Chinese" winner back home: writers need "'total independence' to create [...] 'eternal'" literature. "What is the relation between officials and literature?" Gao asks. "Nothing... They have nothing to do with literature, especially with literature [...] Where can officials and literature be connected? Nowhere. ... And if they are, then it's merely official literature, and that's a really laughable thing. So literature shouldn't be organized by officials."

Just don't tell that to Tang dynasty wordsmiths Li Bai and Du Fu, or the historian Sima Qian, painter-poet-calligraphers Su Dongpo and Ouyang Xiu, 11th-century public-interest crusader Bao Zheng, or prominent 2nd-century BC anti-corruption activist Qu Yuan. And definitely don't tell noted itinerant philosopher Confucius.

Because if Mo Yan was indeed "under a spell," then China's indigenous literary pantheon is a rogue's gallery of delusionally craven collaborators, apologists, stooges, and sellouts. To a man, all trained for government service and either served as officials or aspired to become one. These writers are little known or read by Westerners -- or Western journalists posted to Beijing. But their literary legacy casts a longer shadow on modern China than the Voltaires or the Byrons who shape our post-Enlightenment notion of how a "writer" should behave. In the Chinese tradition, literature does not exist as a sphere outside the state: literature is the state. Or rather, the state is literature itself.

The earliest Chinese writing -- carved into bones, bronzes and bamboo -- obsesses over forms of ideal rulership. Confucius spent his entire career traveling from kingdom to kingdom peddling his philosophy to various monarchs and seeking a court perch, the better to expound on political meanings of ancient poems. A few centuries later, the famous Imperial Examinations further cemented the link between a tiny literate elite, government service, and an orthodox canon of Confucian political thought.