Since the Chinese author and playwright, Gao Xingjian, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 10 days ago I have been waiting in vain for an assessment of his works in the official Chinese media.
At first, the newspapers failed even to mention the first award of the Nobel Prize to a Chinese writer in the Swedish Academy's 99-year history. An official at the Beijing Morning Post admitted: "OK, I'll say truthfully that his award was too politically sensitive, we were not sanctioned to publish the news."
Apart from a begrudging comment the next day from the official Chinese Writers' Association that the award was politically motivated and that Gao's opus was "very, very average", nothing has appeared since.
In Chinese literary circles outside the People's Republic, however, there is a sudden clamour for Gao Xingjian's works. In Hong Kong the Chinese University Press quickly ran out of Gao books and is rushing out 5,000 more copies of his recent novel, The Other Shore. The sales manager of Cosmos Books in Hong Kong, Mr Chan Chee-hwa, said Gao's books were being snapped up this week even though he has never been a well-known writer there. It has been the same story in Singapore, and in Taiwan, where Gao has accepted an invitation to spend January as an artist in residence.
Some scholars in China have defied officialdom and openly congratulated Gao. "Giving this to a Chinese is a great thing," said Zhang Xianliang, a controversial novelist in the 1980s and now a member of the Chinese Writers' Association.
Mo Yan, author of Red Sorghum, praised the Nobel decision and the "enormous contribution" Gao has made to Chinese drama.
But the 60-year-old Nobel winner, now exiled in France and a French citizen, is officially persona non grata in Communist China, where his works have been banned since 1986. During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution he was denounced by his wife and forced to burn a suitcase filled with manuscripts, including 10 plays and novels, to avoid them falling into the hands of government officials.
By 1983 he had become Beijing's most avant-garde playwright but he fell foul of Deng Xiaoping's campaign against "spiritual pollution" over his Godot-like 1983 play, Bus Stop, and left China for France in 1987. He resigned from the Communist Party after the Tiananmen bloodshed of 1989. The Chinese government hardened its attitude towards Gao over his 1993 novel Fugitives, because it was set against a background of the military crackdown.
But Gao is not a conventional dissident obsessed with the China problem - though 60 Chinese dissidents yesterday signed a petition urging Beijing to allow publication of his works. The award was given to the writer for a range of original and sometimes difficult literary work, in particular his lengthy novel Soul Mountain, first published in Taipei in 1990 and translated into English over 10 years by Prof Mabel Lee of Sydney University.
Soul Mountain is as unique in Chinese literature as was James Joyce's Ulysses in English.
The work is not in the mould of Jung Chang's 1991 Wild Swans which set a trend for English translations of victims of a cruel China.
These popular autobiographies have coloured the way English-language readers perceive China, while obscuring outstanding Chinese writers like those who experimented with the novel during the 1980s.
Soul Mountain, which the Swedish Academy singled out as "masterly" breaks modern conventions for the novel. Divided into 81 self-contained episodes, the 562-page volume is a picaresque odyssey by an ethnologist who travels among minority communities in remote parts of China. It has been depicted as an exploration of individual identity in a collective society, and a search for the sacred in ancient Chinese myths and legends through encounters with shamans and spirit-mediums.
Reviewing it earlier this year, Simon Patton, a fellow in Asian Studies at the University of Queensland, described Soul Mountain as "a wonderful realisation of the multiplicity of Chinese cultures and the persistence of a sense of the divine in the face of so much official hostility", marked by "linguistic energy and exuberant storytelling". For a generation of Chinese under 35, Gao will remain largely unknown. And the chances of him returning to China are slim.
Said exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao: "He thinks that if you go back, especially as a writer, you have no freedom." Ironically, the type of avant-garde experiments damned as "spiritual pollution" in the 1980s are now almost mainstream in today's globalised China, and an evening of experimental theatre is all the rage for students and literary types in Beijing - though they are banned from seeing anything by China's one and only Nobel laureate for literature.