Mo Yan, the new Nobel literature laureate, works in a contemporary idiom and is seen as more-or-less mainstream, mainland establishment. On the other hand, dissident and exile Liao Yiwu, in his speech accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, said of the People’s Republic, “This empire must break apart.” Meanwhile, Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, models himself after the medieval Chinese poet-scholars.