(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)I think China is going collapse in a year or two, Gan iMi (not the real name), a writer friend, said me when he came my place buy books at a much reduced price of my overfilled stock before departed for China, once again on a professorship, this time in Shanghai. system can't hold long as it's corrupt the core.When my boy found a girlfriend in Beijing, Ji Liao (not the real name), another writer friend, said in her sick bed when visited. I said him, as part of my order, it is fine as long as you two come back Australia for the delivery of the baby because China is such a dirty and poisonous place.If you want you can go, Kou Feng (not the real name), not a writer but a friend, said. But I'm not going. The food there is simply uneatable.A recent news item in Chinese caught my eye that seemed prove the first point about corruption to the core: a Party official has had over 100 qingfu (mistresses), including a mother and her daughter.1My arrival back in Shanghai-I had been a postgrad in Oz Lit more than 20 years earlier-began with dinners and phone calls, back in touch with old contacts. When told Zou Xin (not the real name) of what Kou had said about the bad food galore in China, Zou said, with a retort, Despite that, Chinese people can still manage live till they are 70 or 80 and have yet see you Australians can live 700 or 800 years if your good is that perfect.Kuang Jing (not the real name), an academic friend, was less passionate, with a funny bent of mind. On hearing my concerns about food filled with chemical substances, Kuang said, Have you not heard the joke about the Americans losing their chemi- cal warfare in China as the Chinese people, long bred on sub- stances, such as melamine and shouroujing, lean meat powder or clenbuterol,2 are immune from any chemical attacks? You could hear my fear much allayed in my uncontrollable laughter.My visit, over the National Day break, a poet in Zhejiang, helped me witness, for the first time, what had only read in the news: digouyou or ditch oil. As Yang took me a nearby restaurant for a belated dinner, late at night, after a three-hour gaotie (high-speed) train journey, he cautioned me about the slippery ground in front of a hotel that was walking on. It was not till then that noticed that the ground around a sewer man- hole cover underneath my feet was shiny with oil. Asked what that was, Yang said that it was a place where a gang of people regularly come after midnight, suck the waste vegetable and industrial oil for the purpose of refining it before selling it the consumers in the market.3 Why did they do that? Yang explained: It's because the cost of crime is so little that if you get caught you are sentenced below five years.4 A bit like the punishment for raping in India, was reminded.As we were seated in the restaurant, it became immediately clear that Yang wasn't a regular customer, as he didn't even seem know what best order; in fact, he hardly ever ate out in any restaurants in town, preferring eat non-chemical veg- etables grown by his parents in their rural land allotted by the village. When he revealed that cigarette filters were no longer safe, seeing that was smoking, as they were made of inferior and toxic material reduce the cost, decided then and there quit, once and for all.That's China for you, for the moment at least.But what about Mo Yan, hear you say. What about him? We've heard enough about him; we've read enough about him; and we've seen enough of him, at least on TV, in a China that can now proudly claim that they have a truly native Nobel laureate, thrusting at one go all the other three laureates (Gao Xingjian, Dalai Lama, and Liu Xiaobo) into the badland of bad memory. When an Australian journalist emailed me asking, Is Mo a great writer? …