IN WHAT could be read as criticism of China, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa launched a broadside against authoritarian governments in a speech in Shanghai yesterday, saying they corrupt and degrade society.
Local media reported on the visit by the 75-year-old Peruvian writer but carried no mention of his criticisms. He was speaking at Shanghai International Studies University, which named him an honorary professor.
The remarks came during a discussion with Spanish language students about his 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral".
Without specifically naming China, he said how “a dictatorial and authoritarian government corrupts all the society” and “effectively poisons the less political activities, those activities that are further from politics, corrupting and degrading them.
“Politics should not be left only in the hands of politicians because then politics start to go wrong,” he told the students. “Every single citizen should participate in the political life of his time and from that participation the best choices can result.”
His remarks come at a time when China is trying to keep a lid on dissent and muzzle any urges to revolt spurred by the “Jasmine Revolutions” against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and north Africa.
Many dissidents, lawyers and other activists have been rounded up as part of a crackdown, the most high profile of them being the controversial artist Ai Weiwei, who has been detained since March without charge.
What is surprising is that Vargas Llosa was allowed to travel to China to make a public address.
Last year he expressed his support for the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who China claims is a criminal.
Mr Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison in late 2009 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power”.
Vargas Llosa received his Nobel Prize for Literature in Oslo this December and hailed Mr Liu as “a Chinese fighter, who is a champion of democracy in his country.”
Vargas Llosa is on a nine-day academic tour in China at the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank whose foreign literature institute will today give the author a title of honorary researcher.
Other Nobel laureates have in the past received the same award.
The visit is also being organised by the online book vendor 99Read, the Beijing-based Cervantes Institute and two universities.
There was coverage in the Chinese press of the visit, but it focused on his work rather than his activism, quoting him saying how endless media interviews after winning the Nobel Prize disrupted his work and life.
Vargas Llosa is a giant of Latin-American literature and has written more than 30 novels, including The Green House, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriterand The War of the End of the World.His work is popular in translation in China and he will meet several renowned writers to discuss literature, reported the Shanghai Daily.