Pen is mightier than the sword: Novelists help China’s soft power push in Latin America

Premier Li Keqiang is bringing along another group on his trip to Latin America as he tries to boost China's cultural influence in the region - novelists.

The writers will attend a seminar in Colombia on cultural exchanges between China and Latin America and speak to an audience including Li and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a social network account of People's Daily reported.

They include Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, bestselling spy-thriller writer Mai Jia, and Chinese Writers Association chairwoman Tie Ning. 

The trip marks a fresh push in Beijing's outreach efforts to build its soft power. 

"The export of literature is the export of the spirit and ideology that will affect others' indigenous culture and way of thinking," the article said. "Li's trip is just the first step."

Although China wields strong economic influence in the developing countries, the presence of Chinese culture abroad remains scant. China's cultural exchanges with Latin America were in "a complete deficit", People's Daily said.

Hardly were Mo Yan's works known to the Latin American public when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, the newspaper said, although the award citation described his writings as a mixture of reality and fantasy reminiscent of Latin American literature giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works.