Mo Yan. Image by Bengt Nyman via Wikimedia under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. This post was written by Alex Colville and originally published in the China Media Project on March 11, 2024. An edited version is published below as part of a content partnership agreement with the China Media Project. A spat about the patriotism of one of China’s most celebrated writers has been blown out of proportion on the Chinese internet, thanks to harsher nationalist laws and an increasingly rabid cancel culture. At the center of the controversy is a hardline 2018 law on the protection of heroes and martyrs. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Mo Yan (莫言) has irked extreme nationalist bloggers on the internet, one of whom, writing under the account name “Mao Xinghuo Who Speaks the Truth” (说真话的毛星火), filed a court order late last month to remove Mo Yan’s books from circulation and force him to pay RMB 1.5 billion (over USD 208 million) in damages to the Chinese people and “stop infringing on heroes and martyrs” in his fiction. The blogger’s four-page indictment, submitted to the Beijing Procuratorate, meticulously lists Mo Yan’s supposed offences, including portraying members of the Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War as sexually abusive, “beautifying” Japanese soldiers, insulting Mao Zedong, and saying that the Chinese people have “no truth and no common sense.” A Weibo post from “Mao Xinghuo Who Speaks the Truth” details the bloggers accusations against writer Mo Yan. “Such words and deeds have greatly hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” Mao Xinghuo solemnly claims. “As an upright and patriotic young man, I feel very angry. How does the country allow such behaviour to exist?” The blogger has been trying to bring a case against Mo Yan for months, and has asked publishers not to work with him. Fellow nationalist bloggers rallied to the cause, pointing to the more sexually explicit parts of his oeuvre as pornographic. The incident shows how the active efforts of China’s leadership in recent years to enforce nationalist sentiment around the sanitized history of the Party can backfire and turn on cultural figures who are seen as a source of national pride. Since his Nobel win, Mo Yan has frequently been lauded and upheld by the government and the party-state media as a sign of China’s rising prestige in the world. Upon receiving news of the win in late 2012, Li Changchun (李长春), the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of ideology, sent a letter of congratulation to the semi-official China Writers Association hailing the news and calling it “a manifestation of the steady rise of our country’s comprehensive national power and international influence.” The prize immediately transformed Mo’s life and legacy into a public resource for national pride, to the extent that one local official in the author’s hometown reportedly told Mo’s father: “Mo Yan is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house.” Mao Xinghuo’s attack on Mo Yan is not the first time the author has been criticized for his work. But as one commentator with the username “Princess Minmin” (敏敏郡主) noted on WeChat, this time felt like a “large-scale siege” by a younger generation of internet trolls. An informal poll on Weibo asking netizens if Mo Yan should be criminally prosecuted received over 8,000 affirmative votes. The use of the country’s law on the protection of heroes and martyrs, introduced five years after his Nobel win, also adds a new twist. Mo is just the latest creative threatened with legal action by Chinese citizens for supposedly insulting the nation’s martyrs. In 2013, historian Hong Zhenkuai was ordered by a Beijing court to issue a public apology for his factual deconstruction of the apocryphal story of the “Five Heroes of Langya Mountain” — a ripping yarn about five soldiers holding out against the might of the Japanese army in 1941 to buy their retreating comrades time, before hurling themselves to their deaths. The case was brought against Hong by the sons of two of the five men, lauded as communist heroes. Such cases are now easier for citizens to bring to court. The Mao Xinghuo blogger seeks to prosecute Mo under the 2018 Protection of Heroes and Martyrs Law (英雄烈士保护法), urged for by the descendants of the Langya Mountain braves. There is also an amendment added to China’s Criminal Law in 2021 stating that “whoever insults, slanders or otherwise infringes upon the reputation and honour of heroes and martyrs” can be imprisoned for up to three years. Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly urged the nation to fight “historical nihilism” (历史虚无主义), a catchall euphemism for any interpretation of the past that runs counter to the patriotic, CCP-approved version of events.