Author Julia Lovell thinks China's decades long campaign to win a Nobel Prize in Literature has become a behind-the-scenes public relations game: China pushes for a politically acceptable choice while suspecting that the Nobel judges -- under the facade of aesthetic excellence -- will pick a politically acceptable candidate of their own, such as the 2000 award to Gao Xingjian.
Why is China obsessed with winning the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Is the Nobel Prize in Literature more about politics than aesthetic achievement? And is the desire of China's government and literary culture to win the award a reflection of their worship of authors from the West rather than books by writers from Russia or India?
