Xi’s "China Dream" is Science Fiction: Part II
In the last installment of this article, we covered the history and usage of science fiction in China in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We now turn to the genre’s modern resurgence, and the ways in which authors use the genre to subvert the Party’s policies. Three writers – Ma Jian, Han Song and Hao Jingfang – convey something of the tone and tenor of this anti-totalitarian current in contemporary Chinese science fiction. All three employ an updated version of the earlier mentioned “Sick Man of the East” trope in which technology has physically weakened the Chinese people—not because technology is inherently evil, but because the Party has appropriated it for the “China Dream,” causing their citizenry to suffer.
Infamous for his banned science fiction novels, Ma Jian is one of the most prolific anti-totalitarian sci-fi writers in China since the period of opening-up began in 1978. Having grown up prior to the Cultural Revolution, Ma Jian has a different perspective on the Chinese Communist Party in comparison to the many younger Chinese authors in the genre. Ma’s works exploit the abstract nature of science fiction to explore various taboo subjects ranging from the stark reality of life during the Cultural Revolution in China to the all-consuming nature of Xi’s “China Dream.” His most recent novel, China Dream (2018), directly criticizes Xi’s nationalistic social project. The novel’s protagonist invents a chip that can be inserted into the brain which causes the recipient to forget all individual dreams other than the China Dream. Ma’s works encourage his readers to resist the Party’s scientific optimism and exposes this optimism’s ties to the Party’s nationalist agenda. Moreover, his novels are evidence of a social remnant from an older generation that remembers the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution—atrocities that were also committed in the name of social progress. Ma has long since fled China, living first in Hong Kong and then in London after the former became part of China proper, but he has continued to publish literary works throughout his exile. Ma’s case exemplifies both the type of critical, anti-totalitarian mindset present among authors within his genre, as well as the Party’s inability to censor authors once they gain international prominence.
Han Song is another science fiction author whose works of science fiction use the Sick Man trope to subvert the Party’s agenda. Curiously, however, his works were once honored with the prestigious Galaxy Award (China’s top accolade for science fiction writing, which is sponsored by the state-owned literary publication Science, Literature, and Art). After Han published his short story “My Country Does Not Dream” (2016), the Party was quick to ban all of his work, including those works which had previously received the award, due to the short story’s blatant criticism of Xi’s political program. In his short story, Han criticizes the China Dream for causing Chinese citizens to work inhumane hours, a demand enabled by a recent technological innovation. Upon discovering this technology, the Party forces citizens to work as they sleep, allowing them no time to dream. Han’s short story is a meta-criticism of the current circumstances for his genre’s flourishing—that is, the government’s support of the genre—since it warns readers that under the current political conditions, technological innovators will only be crafting the means of their own enslavement. Since the short story’s release, Han has gained an international following, which demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the Party’s retroactive censorship of influential authors.
Folding Beijing
Hao Jingfang—the youngest of the three authors to invoke the trope—similarly uses the Sick Man trope to critique the Party’s promotion of scientific optimism. In the crux of her novelette, Folding Beijing (2016), Hao’s protagonist Lao Dao becomes physically trapped between two liminal socioeconomic classes of his world, “spaces” that occupy physical boundaries and have the ability to crush those caught trespassing between their borders. In this scene and throughout the book, Hao explores the harsh realities of China’s current class divide. She uses Lao Dao as a vehicle for exposing the fallacies of Party economic policies and the inherent dangers of scientific optimism. Hao’s audience sees the world of Folding Beijing for the first time as Lao Dao realizes that his occupation as a garbage collector and his position in society as a member of the working class are obsolete. Although the labor that he produces no longer has any purpose or value (due to technological breakthroughs in waste disposal that allow all waste to be chemically dissolved), Lao Dao learns that his city only kept him employed to prevent him and those of similar classes from demanding social security. Hao’s Folding Beijing is a scathing indictment of Xi’s technocratic utopia and reflects the shared anxiety of working- and middle-class people in China as they fight against the current of scientific optimism flooding Party-run media. Though Folding Beijing did not win the Galaxy Award, it did win the 2016 international Hugo Award for best science fiction short story.
While government encouragement of the genre through the creation of the Galaxy Award as well as other national-level science-fiction specific awards has seemingly led to an increased participation in scientific discourse and innovation, it has also had the unintended effect of arming the Chinese people with a tool to subvert their own ideological control. Through the guise of hypotheticals and future realities, authors of the genre can critique current conditions and disseminate their ideas to a broad, sometimes international, audience. Indeed, the works of some of the more prolific authors within the genre, such as Three Body Problem (2016) by Liu Cixin, have made their way into U.S. bookstores.
These authors have displayed precisely the type of innovative thinking that the Party intended to foster by supporting the genre. The irony here is that many of the genre’s authors use the Party’s willingness to allow a certain degree of criticism within science fiction as a means to disseminate anti-Party messages through their works. Banning an author’s opus within China has also proven ineffective, as once the party recognizes an author’s talent and allows them to gain an international following, those authors have the ability to continue publishing internationally, and are therefore not dissuaded by the possibility of being banned. The late-Qing effort to use science fiction to promote national rejuvenation in China ultimately led to the nationalist revolution that ended the Qing dynasty once and for all in the early twentieth century. One wonders if the efforts of Xi Jinping will help set the stage for a similar revolution in the twenty-first century.
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.