The Dark Shadow of the Chinese Dream | Los Angeles Review of Books (original) (raw)

CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION is in its golden age. In a startling reversal of fortune for a sci-fi scene that once subsisted largely underground, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, host to the prestigious Hugo Awards, was held in Chengdu last year. Seizing on the fact that the country’s sci-fi industry has grown exponentially since 2016, state journalists have labeled the booming field both “a business card modern China gives to the world” and a “bridge to the future” for domestic audiences. The genre’s success in China echoes the United States’ science fiction heyday that peaked in the early 1940s and continued until the 1970s. Much like then, sci-fi serves as the “barometer of technological modernization,” as Chinese sci-fi legend Han Song—who is 59 years old and the second most famous SF author in China, after only 61-year-old superstar Liu Cixin—put it. In China now, as in the US then, science fiction’s golden age reflects a nation embracing its newfound superpower status.

The current Chinese science fiction scene is rich with diversity. It runs the gamut from “hard” (heavy on tech and gadgets) to “soft” (heavy on social and cultural themes) sci-fi, giving rise to its own Isaac Asimovs and Ursula K. Le Guins. There is also, to cite a newer element in the global mix, Chinese “cli-fi,” as some dub environmentally minded sci-fi. This is represented by works such as The Waste Tide (2013) by Chen Qiufan (who also publishes as Stanley Chan) and the more recent novella City of Choice (translated into English by Ken Liu in 2023) by Gu Shi. The genre’s ascent in China has been nothing short of meteoric. Celebrity author Liu Cixin not only became the first Chinese writer to win a Hugo in 2015 for the first book in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, but also has gone on to become the best-selling Chinese author of all time in international markets. He has become a household name globally, a unique feat in the Sinophone fiction writer community. His name is certainly far more recognizable than those of Nobel laureates Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan, and his fame exceeds that of writers of earlier generations such as Eileen Chang and Lu Xun. Liu has cemented Chinese science fiction’s status as part and parcel of world literature.

This hypervisibility, however, is not evenly distributed. Liu defended the Chinese state’s mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in a 2019 New Yorker profile and has been embraced and heavily promoted by the state. Han Song, by contrast, a writer of the same generation whose works repeatedly satirize Xi Jinping’s public admonitions to “tell the good China story” (or “tell the China story well,” as if there is just one acceptable basic narrative), has struggled to get his writing published in China. The 2023 Hugos further amplified this entwinement between visibility and the “right” kind of politics. A retroactive investigation revealed that the Canadian and American organizers, seeking to abide by local laws, disqualified numerous titles by Chinese and Chinese American authors that were deemed politically sensitive, a form of preemptive self-censorship. Behind every blockbuster spectacle with crossover appeal—such as the 2019 film The Wandering Earth, and its prequel, both based on Liu stories—a darker, more ambiguous strain of speculative fiction struggles to make it into the light.

In his 2023 study Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction, which won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Book Award, Mingwei Song attempts to make sense of these contradictions. Combining narratives of key moments in the rise of Chinese sci-fi, such as conferences in which multiple notable authors took part, with theoretical discussions and close readings of various texts, he provides the first paradigmatic account of a sci-fi movement that has transitioned from a “hidden lonely army” to a worldwide mass cultural phenomenon. Song, a professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley, provocatively argues that sci-fi’s popularity in China stems from its unique capacity to visualize a technologically accelerated world. But even as the Chinese state works to make lucrative use of the booming industry, the vision of a nation in transition that fascinates current Chinese sci-fi writers is anything but untroubled. Encompassing cosmic sublimes, postapocalyptic climates, and sprawling institutional hellscapes, Chinese science fiction has, over the course of the last three decades, according to Song, produced its own “subversion,” exposing the dark shadow of the “Chinese dream.”

For Song, reality itself is science fiction. In theorizing the current writers, he shrewdly bypasses the long-standing debate about whether sci-fi is a mode or a genre, and instead extends a provocative argument first made by Seo-Young J. Chu in her groundbreaking 2010 work Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.Ours is a world dominated by the invisible, in which intersubjective experience is distorted in its encounter with cognitively estranging forces—be they ideology, quantum mechanics, global warming, or artificial intelligence. Cognitive estrangement, rather than being a prerogative of the fantastic, is increasingly woven into the real itself. In the works Song writes about, these distortions are homomorphic to the “intricately folded dimensions” of science fictional reality.

In describing the genesis of these writers, Song recounts how, in the early 1980s, sci-fi pioneer Zheng Wenguang attempted to bolster science fiction’s uncertain fortunes as a genre by positioning it as a form of “critical realism.” The label, inspired by the popularity enjoyed at the time by literature of historical witness (“scar literature”), didn’t stick. Now, however, Zheng’s conception of science fiction as society’s “refracting mirror” has found a second life in the discourses of writers like Han and the younger author Chen, who, despite the generational divide, both claim to be purveyors of the “hyperreal” rather than its fantastic inverse.

Song spends the bulk of the book close-reading Liu and Han, the two primary figures around which the “new wave” of Chinese sci-fi has coalesced. The former’s “hard” science fiction, overflowing with theoretical physics and supplementary dimensions, is counterbalanced by the latter’s more sociologically centered “soft” sci-fi that privileges history’s often traumatic intersection with the human body. Together, their polarly opposed corpuses—and politics—provide the limit points between which most authors in the fledgling movement fall.

Liu is the author of austere space epics that promise to induct the reader into the secrets of a cold, amoral universe. Science fiction functions as a mode of deconstruction for Liu, breaking down reality into its most minuscule parts in order to then reassemble it on a cosmic scale. In his novums, harried members of the technoscientific elite find themselves navigating varied regimes of the invisible/visible—on the level of both geopolitics and physics itself—as they seek to reveal the grim underpinnings of both.

Take the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, for example.A scientist’s discovery of an interdimensional war at the heart of reality discloses that the entire universe operates according to a brutal fictional game-theory principle. Each book zooms further out in terms of its focus, bringing in the entire cosmos, past and future, into its gravitational pull. Liu’s “cosmic sublimes” appear awe-inspiring to us precisely because they are not described in allusive literary language, but rather through literal scientific discourse. The flatness of Liu’s language, according to Song, allows for the unadorned language of experimental physics to serve as the primary building block of fiction rather than its supplement, seducing us into a succession of bleak universes, not through poetry but via a series of improbable theorems and blueprints.

But to what end? What sort of political vision lurks at the heart of Liu’s pessimistic model of the universe? And what makes its overt nihilism so compelling to audiences with differing politics? It is surprising that, given his self-stated Foucauldian goal of reading science fiction vis-à-vis various regimes of power, Song largely avoids the topic of Liu’s political vision and its appeal to certain audiences. In recent years, Liu has been foregrounded as a spiritual leader of the right-wing cultural movement within China labeled by commentators as the “Prometheanists” (“gongye dang”—literally the “Industrial Party”). Largely from the booming business and tech sectors, these fans place their faith in China’s industrial capacities to “quickly surpass that of the West” and read Liu’s trilogy as allegorizing that struggle. The Prometheanists valorize the idea of a small technoscientific elite leading “the vast uneducated masses” into a starkly Sinocentric future world order. Defending him from his reactionary fanbase, Song sees the potential for redemption in Liu’s anti-utopias, arguing that, although the author describes “the worst possible universe, […] he also leaves us space to imagine the best.”

For some, this liberatory reading of Liu’s work, and the “dark truths” contained within, will appear incompatible with his politics. The author has not shied away in recent years from publicly endorsing his fans’ beliefs as well as Xi’s brutal mode of governance. His doomsday scenarios find the state, time and time again, transcending the rule of law and the demos in the name of collective survival. In both The Wandering Earth and The Three-Body Problem, the technoscientific Chinese elite are likened to martyrs, tasked with rescuing an unwilling, unwitting species from the precipice. More often than not, the means of planetary salvation involve a heavy human cost. In interviews, Liu, whose fictions (despite his frequent protestations) often reflect Chinese political reality, has accorded the repressive actions of Xi’s state the same ethical leeway, arguing for national survival and stability at any cost. In this analogy, duplicitous foreign actors (such as ethnic minorities and the West) play the role of “alien,” with the threat of far-flung planetary annihilation employed in-text to covertly reinforce an all-too-real repressive statist status quo.

In framing this “state of exception” as inevitable, the arc of history in Liu’s fictional universe itself bends towards techno-despotism. The darkness at the heart of his “cosmic sublime” is ultimately a manufactured one, meant to justify a cure for a disease the author has himself invented. In such a context, scientific discourse is used to obfuscate, not illuminate (as Song claims), naturalizing the author’s own political leanings as simply reflecting a harsh reality. The state stripped of its political connotations emerges as merely a necessary technology of social preservation, its most violent excesses deemed pragmatic and necessary. Ultimately, the most disappointing aspect of the mystery underlying Liu’s universe is its banality. Place your faith in a cold but self-assured technocracy or die in a cosmos that thirsts for your destruction. At the end of time lurks not an alien entity but a forlorn dream of perfect governmentality.

It is easy to see why, as Liu has been embraced by the regime, Han has often run afoul of the censors. His 2002 story “My Fatherland Does Not Dream”recasts China in the midst of its “economic miracle” as a nation of sleepwalkers controlled by microwave-emitting generators. These somnolent citizens produce, consume, and procreate blissfully unaware, while the Party elite, who supply the industrially produced stimulants everyone takes during the day, keeps watch.

Long a cult figure of profound influence in the science fiction scene, Han is currently in the process of a long overdue arrival on the international stage. The first two books of his Hospital trilogy were published last year in a prodigious translation by Michael Berry, with the final title Dead Souls, rendered into English by the same translator, to follow early next year. Abandoning Liu’s sense of cosmic grandeur, Han—a deputy director of the foreign news bureau at China’s official Xinhua News Agency—seems to take a certain wry ironyin setting his sprawling, phantasmagoric works in mundane, everyday public spaces.

In the words of one of Han’s characters, today’s China “is a land of specters.” Even as the newly minted technological powerhouse surges into the future, the unaddressed traumas of the past exert their own invisible gravity. This clash between techne and suppressed cultural memory is central to Han’s fiction, which is often populated by monstrous revenants. In his 2010 novel Subway (the first title in the Rails trilogy), undead Red Guards of Cultural Revolution fame (or infamy) stalk the tunnels of a futuristic Beijing metro, preying on the living. Red Sea,which came out in 2004, finds technologically modified posthumans doomed to recreate China’s dynastic history underwater in an unending cycle of evolution and devolution. Hospital continues this trend.

When 40-year-old bureaucrat and part-time corporate jingle writer Yang Wei visits C City, he finds himself kidnapped and forcibly committed to a hospital complex spanning the entirety of the nation, if not the universe. In the latter’s antiseptic halls and operating theaters, he soon discovers a monstrous experiment in algorithmic governmentality. In a world where “diseases, patients, and treatment” have been reduced to “numbers” and “transformed into parts of a larger algorithm,” the hospital has turned to forcibly enrolling citizens en masse into its Kafkaesque “game” of treatment for treatment’s sake.

As the trilogy progresses, a bewildered Yang traverses land, sea, and space, cycling through the hospital’s various incarnations, as past and future, fact and fiction, unspool around him in the guise of a singular, demented Möbius strip. Albert Einstein, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Misty Poets share diegetic space with Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso manga. Chapter titles recall the poems of Song dynasty poet Su Shi, while elsewhere spacefaring vignettes are interspersed with delirious scenes of doctors and proletarianized patients restaging the Long March and the Cultural Revolution on hospital grounds. Yang Wei himself increasingly mirrors the text’s collapsing temporal bounds: presented as alternatively prematurely aged and preternaturally young, he appears in the third book as a monstrous synthesis, a 14-year-old with early onset dementia. Yang’s body serves as a perfect metaphor for a nation in which the past and future have become hopelessly intagliated, pairing rapid technologization with cultural amnesia.

What separates Han’s science fiction from Liu’s is their contrasting visions of statecraft. Liu’s characters engage in the noble struggle against disorder and entropy, pining for a vision of a homeostatic civilization among the stars. Han’s cast of fools know in advance that such a struggle is pointless. His labyrinthine texts survey the varied recursive, automated loops through which power operates and eventually self-parasitizes in today’s world. Hospital is a narrative of institutional (and national) suicide, not an elegy to their perfect maintenance. Instead of offering us platitudes about the arc of cosmic history as Liu would, Han leaves us with a transcription of ideological contagion, bureaucratic madness, and white noise—what better portrait of our overloaded networked age could we ask for?

The Hospital trilogy makes explicit reference to contemporary Chinese political reality. In the second book of the saga_, Exorcism_,our everyman finds himself relocated from C City to a gargantuan ship modeled on the real Daishan Dao, or “Peace Ark”—a Chinese military ship turned hospital. Floating on an ocean infested with predatory sentient blood-red algae, the book’s ship is overseen by a malfunctioning AI “deity” (called Siming) whose increasingly erratic policies have inspired the ire of the ship’s medical elite.

In a pitch-black satirical recreation of Chinese state politics, Yang finds himself witness to struggle sessions, galas, and absurdist debates as varied factions jockey for control onboard the ship, culminating in the Exorcism Congress (modeled directly on the CCP’s National Congress). Clutching copies of Principles of Hospital Engineering (their version of the Little Red Book), hospital bureaucrats seek to challenge Siming’s authority. In doing so, they restage the recurring debates around technocracy that have plagued Chinese politics since 1957, when Mao first questioned the societal role of “red and expert” engineers—a term referring to individuals who were both politically reliable (“red”) and technically competent (“expert”).

Han’s worlds are densely layered and refractive, forcing us to share in Yang Wei’s confusion as we attempt to “differentiate between what is real and what is merely a reflection on the screen.” Each book after the first offers the readers a soft reset, discounting the events of the preceding volume as a hallucinatory fantasy induced as part of Yang’s “narrative” treatment at the hospital. In a postmodern sleight of hand worthy of Thomas Pynchon, when Yang Wei explores the depths of the floating hospital complex in Exorcism and discovers that the last 70 years of the global liberal consensus have been an elaborate lie—the byproduct of “narrative” cognitive implants employed by the Allies since the 1940s. Not only has history not ended (as Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed) but World War II still rages on the red sea, the combatants battling on the intracellular level via biological weapons. Whether this is the truth, or simply another one of Siming’s simulations, is left open-ended.

At the end of the second book, the AI, who dreams of being reincarnated as the Warring States–period poet Qu Yuan (acclaimed author of the verse anthology The Songs of the South), fails in its attempt to craft a grand “narrative” out of the chaotic events transpiring onboard the ship, and commits suicide, just like Qu Yuan. A distraught Yang Wei leaps overboard and drowns, only for the third book, Dead Souls (a nod to Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished 1842 magnum opus), to bring him and Siming back, kicking and screaming, to face the cycle of reincarnation anew (albeit this time on a hospital on Mars). For Han, history is a nightmare of recurrence with no easy exits.

To read Han is often a psychologically grueling process. His reluctant, craven protagonists often inspire revulsion (Yang Wei’s name is a sly homonym for the Chinese characters for impotence). Suspended between madness and stupefying grief, Han’s characters careen through an illusory word of suffering, as the wheel of saṃsāra spins at full throttle. In the process of supplying a through line for his sprawling trilogy, Han weaves a complex Buddhist metanarrative, featuring cosmos-faring bodhisattvas, fearsome yakshas, and cyborg peacocks. This framing recasts the hell realm of the hospital (and the present-day Chinese state it represents) as an interlude en route to Yang’s—and the universe’s—eventual enlightenment. However, the route toward achieving the cessation of all desire, and thus escaping “outside of history,” is anything but linear.

Moments of spiritual insight in the trilogy are interspersed with graphic scenes of incest, rape, and bodily decomposition that recall the Marquis de Sade and Pierre Guyotat in their unabashed intensity. However, these grotesqueries maintain an emetic, expiatory quality. The third book’s opening epigraph (by Ci Cheng) notably promises that for any “person” who “can make peace with their past memories […] all shall be released.” To read Hospital is to take part in a literary purge of our shared, haunted world. Particularly illuminating are the moments when the narration slips from third to second person, making Yang’s despair and illumination our own. We are, in Han’s own words, all “patients” in his hospital. We all suffer from the same fatal disease—that fevered delirium that James Joyce once diagnosed as history. By exorcizing the monstrous revenants of the past, Han clears a space for the future, in all its unknowable contingency, to finally emerge.

The vast scope of references and narrative techniques showcased in Han’s work make it difficult to pin down his influences. His backward-flowing, pessimistic science fiction has garnered comparisons domestically to the early period work of legendary post-realist writer Yu Hua, whose breakthrough 1992 work To Live (incidentally also translated into English by Berry), sought to showcase the entire warp and weft of the PRC’s history through an experimental, absurdist lens. Kafka’s influence is also clearly felt, due to Han’s fascination with the bleak, often comedic logic that blinds and binds institutions to human suffering. The Russians—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol—are also referenced and leave a whiff of existential ennui, panoramic scope, and heightened, parodic characterization respectively over the proceedings.

Additional connections can be made to some of Han’s older contemporaries who share a similar fascination for history and postmodernist framing techniques. Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), for example, finds a distorted echo in Han’s recurring motif of cyclical reincarnation. More lightheartedly, Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films, and anime in general, serve as recurring reference points for some of the more surreal imagery, with the beautiful, deranged denouement of the third book—involving Yang Wei’s suicidal teenage son in space, his deified mother, and a sea of crucifixes—seemingly echoing Hideaki Anno’s 1997 film End of Evangelion.

Mingwei Song adds Republican-era writer Lu Xun, the premier modernist writer of despair and a household name in China, to the mix. His fragmented dark classic “Diary of a Madman” (1918), which details one man’s incredulous discovery that China is a land populated by cannibals, is the first to thoroughly blend science fictional elements with the foundational tenets of realism. For Song, Lu Xun’s madman and his “dark consciousness” rise up out of “the depth of history” to provide the covert genesis point from which Han Song, and the entire new wave, eventually emerges. There is a speculative thrill to this alternative genealogy, since “Diary of a Madman” is not typically placed into sci-fi lineages. But the comparison between Lu Xun and Han is more than apt, and not just because the former started his literary career translating Jules Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon (1865)into Chinese. Both narratives center on “madmen” whose alienating discoveries reveal the darkness at the heart of modernity itself.

Song’s dazzling capacity to connect disparate literary and temporal regimes makes Fear of Seeing an engrossing read, with the book’s true strength lying in the kaleidoscopic breadth of its references. The conceptual framing, on the other hand—arguing that all science fiction discloses the visibility/invisibility binary through which power operates—is great on paper but often (as in the case of Liu) uneven in practice. As the book progresses past its aging main cast to younger authors, the Foucauldian “masterplot” begins to increasingly feel overstretched and out of place, a state of affairs that Song tries to alleviate by introducing a secondary queer through line about genre and gender that doesn’t quite land. Nevertheless, some of the most fascinating sections of Fear of Seeing detail the development of a new strand of posthumanist, queer sci-fi. Notably, Song’s lyrically inflected analysis of Shuangchimu, a writer who self-reportedly shares his fascination with Leibnizian infinity and the Baroque period, stands out as the strongest subject of this second theoretical arc. Elsewhere, Song’s analysis of this “new” science fictional universe forgoes precise coordinates, and instead settles for impassioned, if all too impressionistic, reportage. These sections come to read like a tantalizing postscript, brimming with a potential that ends up, especially toward the end, feeling undertheorized. In particular, Song’s overreliance on “nonbinary” as not only a descriptor of trans identity but also a sort of catchall conceptual paradigm feels dated. One wonders what could have been had Song allowed this section to breathe, or else restructured the book to focus predominantly on this younger generation—it is clear from the tone of his writing that they are where his true allegiance lies.

A central theme that seems to bind the younger generation’s output is a preoccupation with the unpredictable contingency of the natural world as the ultimate subversion to totalizing frameworks of state power and techno-futurism. For instance, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, which details a labor revolt on an island in the South China Sea made out of literal trash, upsets dominant tropes of ecocritical literature. Chen proposes an alternative vision where the organic and the artificial collude in a conception of capitalist waste itself as an ambivalent prophylactic to the current environmental crisis.

Meanwhile, Gu Shi’s City of Choice features an urban planner attempting to out-design rising sea levels and grapples with the hard limits of AI governance when faced with questions of climate justice. Seeking solace in contingency, the dense, often fluorescent spaces envisioned by such young female authors as Shuang Chimu and Chi Hui foster a poetics of kinship between climate-stricken posthuman subjects that extends beyond the aestheticized, illuminating despair supplied by Han Song and Liu Cixin.

China, as Song points out, has always needed science fiction to “become whole.” Though Song argues that the model of hard science fiction embodied by Liu creates a “fold to destabilize our sense of reality” to the point where all visions of political and technological determinism are made void, Liu’s recent co-optation by the state-sponsored culture industry appears to hint otherwise. All that was required to turn the blockbuster epic Wandering Earth from the story of a doomed cosmic voyage into a spectacular paean for the Chinese state was a couple days in the editing room. As Liu’s own personal politics drift rightward, his texts increasingly exude a bias for order over disorder (2003’s Supernova Era) and for the rule of the technocratic elite over self-governance by the uneducated demos (2000’s Wandering Earth).

There is a growing danger that, instead of peering back at “the gaze of power,” the initial vision of these writers will recede to project a future in line with official dogma—to consolidate, rather than undermine, state control. Sinotopia, Song’s text warns, is ultimately an ambivalent space. It can either reveal the shadow image of the Chinese dream or cast its own long shadow by taking part in “telling the good China story.” One can only hope that this newest generation, in which Song places so much hope, will continue to peer into the darkness to illuminate the night.