What Bart Simpson Might Say to Mo Yan

The American TV character Bart Simpson copies an often ironic sentence on the blackboard over and over again. It is a gag. But in China, prominent writers obediently did the same. Only not so funny. Four months ago, novelist Mo Yan copied by hand a passage of Mao Zedong's speech, known as the Yanan Talks, which exhorts writers to put their art to the service of politics.