Nobel Laureate Speaks up for One-child Families

More than a year after his Nobel win that rocked the country, Chinese writer Mo Yan is still ill at ease with the media attention.

"I hope you could accurately report my speech. Don't invent sensational headlines to mislead readers," Mo, the 2012 Nobel literature laureate whose words have been misinterpreted on several occasions, cautioned half-jokingly as he shared his proposal during a discussion at the ongoing annual session of the political advisory body.

This is the second year he has served as a political advisor. In 2013, Mo, whose pen name means "don't speak," remained largely silent during the political event despite his Nobel fame.

His proposal this year called for more attention to families with only one child, particularly those who had lost their only child, based on "a year of research and thoughts."

While China's one-child policy seems irrelevant to Mo's job on first sight, the 59-year-old writer is no stranger to the topic.

In his latest novel, "Frog," he depicts a rural midwife who has carried out thousands of abortions to strictly implement the country's birth control policy.

As a writer who works with "hallucinatory realism merged with folk tales, history and the contemporary," Mo haunted his heroine with delusions that she was trapped by frogs whose croaks symbolized the cries of the babies she had aborted.

Instead of dwelling on the controversy of the policy like he did in the novel, Mo sought to remedy the negative consequences of the rule in his proposal submitted to the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

He acknowledged that the one-child policy helped contain rapid population growth at a time when economic progress was key, but it also created financial stress for aging parents, as the elderly traditionally rely on their children to support them.

In many areas, one-child families get a monthly allowance of a mere 5 yuan (0.8 U.S. dollars) under a policy established in the early 1980s, Mo noted in his proposal, a sum that he said was too low to cover costs.

For those who have lost their only child, things are even worse.

In Weifang city in east China's Shandong Province, Mo's hometown, there are more than 3,000 people who have lost their only child.

"You can imagine. How can a rural couple in their 60s spend their lonely life?" the novelist said.

He proposed that parents who have lost their only child should be included in the government pension and medical insurance system and that financial support should be improved.

"When they lose their ability to work, they should enjoy the same wage and treatment as government civil servants," he said.

Along with his proposal, Mo also shared his opinions on some widely-watched social issues, including corruption and moral collapse, during the ongoing session.

"For a writer, corruption is a matter of humanity -- the conflicts between desire and laws, morality and the social system," Mo said in a 30-minute interview with the Procuratorial Daily, where he worked for ten years.

People need external strength to help rein in their innate desires, and that is something they can find in literature and books, Mo said.

"I believe that, pooled together, the good will of the masses will form into an insurmountable moral strength that can help check the evil and right the wrongs," he said.

Source: Xinhua