Coetzee in China

The Nobel Prize in Literature and its significance. In April 2013, J.M. Coetzee visited China for the first time as a participant in the second China Australia Literary Forum, hosted by the Chinese Writers' Association (CWA). On the agenda was a meeting with Mo Yan, who had been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature a few months earlier. A vice president of CWA, the official writers' union, Mo Yan was the first Chinese author to receive the honour" excepting, arguably, Gao Xingjian, to whom it was given in 2000: Chinese-born Gao, who writes in Chinese, was by that time a French citizen. China's "Nobel complex" has a long history, as explained by Julia Lovell in The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (2006). Mo Yan's win, for which CWA and other state organs had worked hard, was a game-changer, assuaging Chinese cultural pride and hugely enhancing the author's celebrity. It was a big deal, then, when Coetzee, who had won the prestigious prize in 2003, agreed to appear on stage with the new laureate.