Too Eager to Toe the Line?(Gao Xingjian)(Brief Article)(Column)

The crowd in the ballroom was restive. Five hundred of Hong Kong's top writers, poets and newspaper columnists had been waiting for an hour to hear the first Chinese man in history to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After living under the shadow of Beijing's rule for more than three years, most of them expected the exiled writer, Gao Xingjian, to pay tribute to a common struggle for freedom of expression. But when the lights went down, it became clear the soiree was more about showmanship than struggle. Wearing a drab gray suit, Gao spoke for a few minutes about the dangers of "commercialization"--then was whisked away by security guards. The crowd was disappointed. "The more I listened to him talk, the angrier I got," said one local writer. "The concepts he mentioned are no different from those found in official Chinese newspapers."

Gao, who has lived in exile in France for many years, was no doubt hoping for a happy homecoming. He didn't get it. After he won the Nobel Prize last October, he forcefully denounced the Chinese communist regime for destroying artistic freedom in China. But those sentiments were gone by the time he got to Hong Kong. Gao was invited by a newspaper and university friends to stop in the "Special Administrative Region" for three days of speeches, but there was one condition: he could not openly criticize Beijing. "I believe I'm here to talk about literature," Gao told a crowd of 1,200 college students. He later admitted feeling "embarrassed" by his sheepish acquiescence to his hosts' demand, adding: "I am not so free here as I usually am." That mea culpa wasn't enough to satisfy some writers, who complained that Gao had sold out the free-speech cause. "He should use this opportunity to criticize the government--how it has suppressed publishing freedom," says Bei Ling, editor of Tendency, an overseas journal for exiled Chinese writers. "For an artist, the most important thing is to hold fast to his principles."

Gao has never tried to be a hero. He was born in 1940 in eastern Jiangxi, and his early adulthood was one misery after another. During the Great Leap Forward in the 1960s, his mother drowned after being sent to the countryside to do forced labor. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was at its height, his wife denounced him, and he destroyed everything he had written for fear of imprisonment. In 1989, after the government ...