Nobel laureate condemns Beijing

Gao Xingjian in 1987 after he fled China for Paris

By the BBC's Elizabeth Blunt

The Chinese winner of this year's Nobel Literature Prize, Gao Xingjian, has launched a fierce attack on the cultural policies of the authorities in Beijing.

Mr Gao said in his Nobel lecture that over the past 100 years, Chinese literature had almost been destroyed.

But he also criticised the way Western economies had turned literature into a marketable commodity.

The Chinese authorities have previously criticised as "political" the decision to award Mr Gao the Nobel prize.

China's dictators

In his Nobel lecture, Gao Xingjian spoke movingly of the situation of the writer under dictatorship.

Even the traditional refuge of writers and scholars in remote mountain monasteries was no longer an option

He said he recognised that China has had many dictatorial regimes in the past.

But he said that Mao Zedong's dictatorship was so total that even the traditional refuge of writers and scholars in remote mountain monasteries was no longer an option.

To write even in secret, said Mr Gao, was to risk one's life.

To maintain one's intellectual autonomy, he said, one could talk only to oneself.

This he said, was the origin of his novel - Soul Mountain - written without any hope of publication, to dispel his inner loneliness at a time when even works he had written with rigorous self-censorship had been banned.

Purity and poverty

Mr Gao has been living in France since fleeing China in 1987, but he still holds tight to this notion of the purity of literature.

The writer must consider his work a luxury, a form of spiritual gratification

This is literature written for the author himself rather than for the reader, despite the magic power of the written word to communicate between individuals and cultures.

He warned his audience in Stockholm that the values of the consumer society were also subversive of true literature.

The writer must consider his work as a luxury, a pure form of spiritual gratification, he said.

If he devotes himself to this kind of writing, he will find it very difficult to make a living. Mr Gao concluded.