Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP - Getty Images

The 2012 Nobel Literature Prize laureate, Mo Yan of China, poses for photographers during a press conference of the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize laureate in Stockholm.

BEIJING — When the Swedish Academy selected Chinese writer, Mo Yan, as this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the move was hailed by the state media, only two years after blasting the same committee for awarding the peace prize to fellow countryman and outspoken dissident Liu Xiaobo.

However, outside of the country,  some critics pointedly questioning Mo’s Communist Party membership, his unwillingness to speak up for freedom of speech on the mainland and his apparent reluctance to speak out for his fellow laureate. "Giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature," declared noted Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, at the time.

Perhaps sensing the backlash, Mo spoke out the evening his Nobel victory was announced, telling journalists he hoped Liu — who is currently serving an 11-year sentence for his work on a direct call for political liberalization known as Charter 08 — could “achieve his freedom as soon as possible.”

The supportive words seemed to help give Mo the benefit of the doubt among critics and the foreign press, but comments he gave on Thursday regarding Chinese censorship and Liu’s plight have reinvigorated criticism of the acclaimed writer.

'The highest principle'
During an interview in Stockholm, Mo surprisingly defended China’s suppression of free speech, saying that censorship should not prevent the truth, but that rumors and defamation "should be censored."

"But I also hope that censorship, per se, should have the highest principle," Mo added.

Mo Yan's Nobel win celebrated -- and panned -- in China

Mo went on to liken censorship to the airport security he passed through flying to Stockholm.

"When I was taking my flight, going through the customs ... they also wanted to check me even taking off my belt and shoes," he said. "But I think these checks are necessary."

Special coverage of China: Behind the Wall on NBCNews.com

Mo caused further ripples when he told reporters he did not plan to sign an appeal being passed around by his peers calling for the immediate release of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.

It has been signed by134 fellow Nobel laureates, including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Always an 'independent'
Mo explained his unwillingness to sign as a desire to maintain his independence.

"I have always been independent. I like it that way. When someone forces me to do something, I don't do it," he said.

For Chinese winner's wife, Nobel is no prize

Mo’s comments and reticence in voicing support for his compatriot, Liu, was seen as particularly appalling as it came the same day as the publishing of a distressing interview with Liu’s wife, Liu Xia.

The interview, made possibly only after AP reporters slipped by Chinese security away at lunch, was the first she had given in 26 months and graphically showed the emotional stress of being under home detention since her husband’s imprisonment. 

China’s reception of Liu Xiabo and Mo Yan’s Nobel victories couldn’t have been any more different.

While Mo Yan’s award this year has been hailed in state media – despite many of his books being censored in China – Liu’s victory was roundly rejected by Beijing.

In a statement issued by the foreign ministry soon after the 2010 announcement, the government wrote that Liu’s victory "runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and is also a blasphemy to the peace prize.”

Wang Wei / EPA

Nobel Prize-winning writer Mo Yan holds a press conference in his hometown of Gaomi, in China's Shandong province, on Friday.

BEIJING -- State media gave the official stamp of approval Friday over the decision to award the Nobel Prize for literature to Chinese novelist Mo Yan, giving him front-page coverage across the country.

The warm coverage of the award is unsurprising considering the prestige and recognition that China's ruling Communist Party will collectively bask in as a result.

But in another sense, the warm reception for the awarding is striking considering the anger and hysteria drummed up by Beijing following the 2010 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned political dissident, Liu Xiaobo.

In the two years that have followed Liu’s win, which was heavily censored in state media, China has maintained a chilly relationship with the Nobel committee and its home country of Norway. Meetings with Norwegian ministers and trade delegations have been canceled and important talks regarding the eventual opening of the Arctic Sea route have been halting.

China even went so far as to develop its own ill-fated peace prize, while exports of Norway’s famed salmon fell victim to the frigid political atmosphere between the two countries.

China’s first Nobel-winning writer?
But Mo’s victory seems to have thawed the relationship long enough for China to celebrate the writer, who state media has hailed as the country’s first winner of the prize.

"This is the first Chinese writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature," gushed China’s People’s Daily newspaper. "Chinese writers have waited too long, the Chinese people have waited too long."

But critics of the Communist regime point out that Gao Xingjian, who won in 2000 in part for his critical writing of the government, was China’s first winner of the Nobel for literature. He had been exiled to France by the time the prize was awarded.

Mo Yan, which means "don't speak," is actually a pen name. The 57-year-old Mo's real name is Guan Moye.

Mo has been favorably compared to American author William Faulkner and is perhaps best known in the West for his 1987 book, Red Sorghum. That book heavily relied on his experience growing up in a farming community in China's northeastern province of Shandong.

That honest connection to the rural experience has been a central thread through much of Mo’s writing, according to Dai Wei, a professor of literature at China’s Jinan University.

Special coverage of China: Behind the Wall on NBCNews.com

"Mo's topics are typically about rural life and his own life experiences, his stories are very close parallels to the real circumstances he lived through," Dai told NBC News. "He often writes about suffering. ... Some people think he glorifies suffering for Westerners, but everything he writes is based on real experience."

'The dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature'
Mo latest book, Frog, tells the dark story of a midwife who enthusiastically goes about her work enforcing China’s family-planning laws through forced abortions and sterilizations. The story, a searing critique of China’s one-child policy, won China’s Mao Dun Literature Prize last year.

"A writer should express criticism ... at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression," Mo said in a speech at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize in literature

But despite the critical and popular acclaim and Mo’s willingness to confront sensitive social issues in China, Mo’s victory has not come without criticism.

“Giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature,” declared noted Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei to the British newspaper The Independent. "It’s shameful for the committee to have made this selection which does not live up to the previous quality of literature in the award."

Ai’s diatribe toward Mo appears to be rooted in part to his work on a book last year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of a speech given by Mao Zedong.

More book reviews and news on TODAY.com

Mao’s speech, known as the "Speech at Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature" set the guidelines for appropriate subject matter for Chinese writers and artists of that revolutionary period, calling upon them to focus on and espouse the merits of Communism and threatening punishment to those who did not bend to the will of the party.

Mo Yan and around 100 other Chinese writers and artists hand-copied paragraphs from the speech for the book.

Criticism
That act, in conjunction with Mo’s position as vice chairman of the government-backed Chinese Writer’s Association, which has failed to voice support toward fellow writer Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize victory, has raised the ire of artists like Ai who wonder just how committed Mo Yan is to free expression.

Complete Asia-Pacific coverage on NBCNews.com

After all, critics argue, if a Nobel Prize-winning author with a leadership position in the national writing guild fails to stand up for a fellow artist, then who will?

Not fair, said professor Dai.

"I don’t agree with Ai Weiwei, it's just his personal opinion," said Dai. "People have different values, so they evaluate people differently. I think Mo Yan is a great author and Mo Yan is prized by the Nobel Prize council."

Perhaps sensing the backlash against him, Mo spoke out Friday afternoon from his hometown. Mo told reporters he hoped that Liu Xiaobo "can achieve his freedom as soon as possible." He also noted that he had read Liu’s literary criticisms from the 1980s and that the dissident had the right to research his "politics and social system."

Complete World coverage on NBCNews.com

Other supporters of Mo have also came to his defense, noting that many of his books have been banned in China and that the Nobel victory will help put Chinese literature on the map.

But few believe that the victory will help put Liu Xiaobo back on the map in China, where his victory is still not acknowledged by the government. Liu’s name and the term "Nobel Peace Prize" remain blocked terms on China’s twitter-like service, Weibo.

Just this week, a BBC report on Liu’s imprisonment noted that the activist and his wife, who remains under illegal house arrest, have been facing extraordinary pressure to accept exile from China in exchange for their freedom.

NBC News' Johanna Armstrong and Yanzhou Liu contributed to this report.

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Updated at 7:40 a.m. ET: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, of Liberia, and Tawakul Karman, of Yemen are formally given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Published at 7:20 a.m. ET: Awarding this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the head of the selection panel forecast that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would succumb to a "wind of history" blowing through the Arab world and be forced to accept democratic change.

Presenting the prize in Oslo to three women who include a Yemeni activist whose Arab spring protests helped undermine her country's veteran leader, Thorbjoern Jagland, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said: "No dictator can in the long run find shelter from this wind of history."

"It was this wind which led people to crawl up onto the Berlin Wall and tear it down. It is the wind that is now blowing in the Arab world," he said.

Leonhard Foeger / Reuters

Norway's King Harald, Queen Sonja, Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Crown Prince Haakon (center left-right) attend the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, Saturday.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador to China on Saturday urged Beijing to improve its human rights record, pointing to imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo as an example where China falls short.

In a statement released on the U.N.'s International Human Rights Day, envoy Gary Locke said protection of human rights in China had not kept up with the country's massive economic gains.

'People's demand for freedom'
Jagland noted 2011 Nobel laureate Tawakul Karman's efforts to unseat Yemen's outgoing president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the bloody uprising in Syria.

"Not even President Saleh was able, and President Assad in Syria will not be able, to resist the people's demand for freedom and human rights," he said.

Suggesting Assad should want to be "on the right side of history", Jagland added: "The leaders in Yemen and Syria who murder their people to retain their own power should take note of the following: Mankind's fight for freedom and human rights never stops."

Karman was in the Norwegian capital to share the prize with two Liberian women, newly re-elected president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and rights activist Leymah Gbowee.

The prize citation honours "their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work".

Jagland said women's rights must be a key focus in the aftermath of change in North Africa and the Middle East, where Islamists have taken advantage of freer elections this year.

"The promising Arab Spring will become a new winter if women are again left out," said Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister. "Islam must be part of the solution.

"Only then will there be democracy and peace developments in this part of the world."

The laureates, receiving the prize on the 115th anniversary of the death of benefactor Alfred Nobel, will share a total award worth $1.5 million.

Illegal 'disappearing'
Ambassador Locke said the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo and restrictions on the freedoms of his wife, "the illegal 'disappearing' of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, the unlawful detention of Chinese citizens such as lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and constraints on the religious freedom and practices of Tibetan, Uighur and Christian communities do not bring China closer to achieving its stated goals."

Liu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is serving an 11-year prison sentence for co-authoring an appeal for political reform. His wife, Liu Xia, has largely been held incommunicado, effectively under house arrest, watched by police, without phone or Internet access and prohibited from seeing all but a few family members.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Friday that Liu was in jail because he was a criminal. China defends its human rights record, saying it has vastly improved living conditions for its citizens.

Gao, a human rights lawyer who has represented religious dissenters and advocated constitutional reform, has been missing for more than 18 months.

Chen, an activist lawyer who is blind, was released from jail a little more than a year ago, but authorities have turned his village in Shangdong province in eastern China into a no-go zone, where activists, foreign diplomats and reporters have been turned back and threatened.

Locke said Washington wants to build a partnership with China that includes regular talks on human rights issues. He said U.S. support for China reflects a belief that rule of the law and protection of "freedoms of expression, belief and assembly are critical to securing the growth, prosperity and long-term stability that China seeks and to realizing the full potential of its people."

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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