Can you blam the guy, just like CDT, Liu Xiaobo too was on Uncle Sam’s payroll back then. Check National Endowment for Democracy’s own grant publication, Liu took in nearly a million dollars NED grants to write Charter 08, which acvocated abolition of China’s constitution.

China had every right to prosecute Liu Xiaobo, since such activity would be illegal under US law as well.

And I think Mo Yan has had the experience to know what an instinctual distaste for such processes are; he’s lived through the Cultural Revolution where the society was upended in the search of political purity; if the product, process, or behavior was not in accord with the latest ideological prescription from the state, it would be rejected no matter how inefficient, dangerous, or counterproductive the alternatives were.

In this context, then, Mo Yan is making a brave stand against the West; that is to say, he’s rejecting the West’s demands for ideological purity, that all that is respectable must take its viewpoints to be holy gospel, its values paradigms cannot be abandoned, and all must suffer in places where the West does not approve, because living is impossible without your new idols of Liberty and Democracy and all the slaves to its enemies should commit mass suicide in order to avoid “enabling” their dictators.

That said, I would question the quality of Mo Yan’s fiction, however. Reading it in translation, one feels as though something might have been lost, and it seems to lack the craft and beauty of prose that characterizes most Nobel laureates. There is also an exceptional vulgarity which makes his work quite questionable; for example, in the Republic of Wine, do we really need to know that a narrator character is attracted to his mother-in-law and more specifically his mother-in-law’s meaty farts? You can then propose that he is not the most qualified winner for this year, and that this was a Norwegian attempt at restoring relations with China after awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo last year.