Xi’s “China Dream” is Science Fiction

Following a decades-long ban that first began around the time of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and lasted until the late 80s, science fiction is now flourishing in China in a way that it hasn’t since the genre was first introduced to the country in the late Qing era and the period of China’s nationalist democratic government. From Kang Youwei’s Hundred Days Reform in 1898 until the Chinese Civil War of 1917, Chinese scholars and elites saw science fiction as a powerful tool for both political progress and scientific innovation. Now, as then, the reason for the genre’s popularity is not simply the intrinsic appeal of stories about the alternatively thrilling and terrifying possibilities of the future. Rather, the popularity of the genre in both the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is due to the fact that in both eras, Chinese governments promoted science fiction to support projects of national rejuvenation.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, many Chinese scholars and political strategists, including China’s former President Deng Xiaoping, believed that China’s modernization required popularizing Western ideas of science and progress. In the early twenty-first century, Chinese political strategists and academics continue to believe that realizing President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” requires the popularization of scientific optimism to reclaim China’s position as a technological superpower.

Over a century earlier, Chinese scholar-officials espoused the same idea. Following in a rich tradition of historical figures who were both scholars and Chinese government officials, Kang Youwei, as well as his protegee, Liang Qichao, successfully encouraged the Qing Emperor to implement a series of social, economic, and political reforms.[1] The first of these efforts, known as the Hundred Days Reform, urged Chinese citizens to learn useful foreign information, including science fiction. Although many of the policy reforms that Kang accomplished were struck down before their effects could come to fruition, the stimulus to learn about science fiction remained. Fellow scholar-officials would continue compiling and translating works of science fiction for public consumption for years to come.

Lu Xun (1881-1936)

Spurred by the efforts of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese science fiction, Bao Tianxiao, wrote that “science fiction is the vanguard of the civilized world….it is an adroit mechanism of importing civilized thought, and its seeds quickly bear fruit,” while his colleague Haitian Duxiaozi similarly wrote that “To get twice the result[ing innovation] with half the effort, what might we choose to make popular throughout the land? I implore you to begin with science fiction.” Meanwhile, other scholar-officials such as Xu Nianci and Liang Qichao contributed to the genre’s emergence by translating Western works of science fiction, including Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Begum’s Five Hundred Million.

These efforts to translate and promote science fiction from 1898-1917 did, in fact, spur technological innovation and scientific progress, and in turn, revolutions both political and economic. Kang Youwei’s Hundred Days Reform resulted in widespread industrialization, which encouraged further development of science fiction. The genre’s popularization kindled scientific optimism and made new technologies widely accessible, leading to the flourishing of many new types of industries in China, notably including the textile industry.

In the early twenty-first century, however, official Chinese government efforts to promote science fiction have been far less successful. This is not to argue that these official efforts have not encouraged an unprecedented rise in the popularity of the genre. They have. Indeed, largely because of these official efforts, a new golden age of Chinese science fiction has dawned, with the genre reaching new heights of both popularity and literary quality. But here’s the rub: those official efforts to promote science fiction in support of the project of national rejuvenation have had the perverse effect of encouraging the rise of a genre that is shot through with powerful anti-totalitarian tropes. Chief among these is the return of a popular trope from the early days of modern science fiction in China: “the sick man of the East.”

Liang Qichao (1873-1929)

True to the trope’s original purpose in Liang Qichao’s publications, the “sick man of the East" appears in modern science fiction as a physical manifestation of corruption and societal ills. At the time of its inception, the trope referenced the Chinese government’s decision to allow British opium to be sold domestically. The image of an old man whose opium addiction has rendered him incapable of anything more physically demanding than ingesting the drug exemplifies the visceral connection between governmental corruption and bodily suffering.

This time, however, the proverbial “sick man of the East” is not incapacitated by unmitigated Western influence but crippled by his own technological innovations. Authors of twenty-first century Chinese science fiction do not convey the desired techno-utopian vision laid out in President Xi Jinping’s futuristic manifesto but often develop far more dystopian themes. These themes undermine the scientific optimism of Party propaganda, ultimately calling into question the genre’s relationship with the Party’s nationalist vision. And that is a problem. Indeed, for a totalitarian regime committed to maintaining and even tightening its grip on the thoughts and actions of all of its citizens, it is more than a problem – it is a threat. In the next installment of this article, we will delve into three writers who have used the genre to subvert the Party’s agenda.

[1] The combination of being both a scholar and an imperial official was relatively common, and the two were often synonymous as emperors since the Sui dynasty (589 C.E.) used the imperial examination system to award government positions. The imperial examination was a written test whose requirements varied based on the level of influence that a given seat would hold, but which was designed to test an individual’s scholarly aptitude through analysis of Confucian texts.

Andrew Latham is a Professor of International Relations and Political Theory at Macalester College. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, in Ottawa; and a Non-Resident Fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, DC, where he is working on issues related to Chinese grand strategy.

Erica Paley is China Research Associate and Translator at Macalester College, where she is majoring in Anthropology and Chinese.