18th Party Congress and Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize

In November 2012 the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing. It established the Scientific Outlook on Development as the guiding ideology the Party must uphold over the long term, set the goal of completing a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020, and laid out the overall plan of “five-sphere integration” covering economic, political, cultural, social and ecological progress, raising ecological progress to a new level for the first time with the call to “build a beautiful China.” It also advocated core socialist values: prosperity, democracy, civility and harmony; freedom, equality, justice and the rule of law; patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship. The First Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee elected Xi Jinping general secretary of the Party Central Committee. The Party then launched a drive on conduct and against corruption, starting with the “eight-point regulations.” In October that year the Swedish Academy announced that the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature would go to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, honoring him for “merging folk tales, history and the contemporary with hallucinatory realism.” Mo Yan (born 1955; real name Guan Moye) is from Gaomi, Shandong, and his best-known works include Red Sorghum, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Sandalwood Death, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and Frog. As the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he marked an important step for Chinese literature going global. In 2015 Liu Cixin’s science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award, and contemporary Chinese literature’s international influence has kept growing.