Spirituality, Socialism and the new Space Race: Chinese Science Fiction

 

Way back in university, I was lucky enough to have a Chinese tutor who would wax lyrical about the breadth and depth of Chinese literature. He spoke about it so often, in fact, that I would eventually cave and start reading some on my own.

I started with the classics, as everyone says you should. I pushed through The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Heroes of the Marsh, and I struggled with Dream of the Red Chamber. I moved on to poetry, through to Lu Xun’s essays, and ended up doing a thesis on ‘scar literature’ and the translation of post-Maoist reactionary novels.

But throughout it all, nothing really piqued my interest in quite the same way as Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem.

It was a challenging text to read, but a rewarding one - and it was only after I was halfway through his second novel The Dark Forest that I found out Ken Liu had begun the important work of translating them into English.

By the time he’d finished translating them, I was hooked. I’d worked my way through Liu Cixin’s extensive catalogue of sardonic and witty short stories, and I was hungry for more Chinese science fiction - but I struggled to find much that was readily accessible.

Why?

Science fiction has had an interesting history in China, but it’s always been a fringe genre.

There was good news, however - the Golden Age of Science Fiction has returned, only this time it is not Asimov and Clarke: it’s Liu and Chen.

What makes Chinese science fiction different?

In an oft-cited essay, acclaimed author and Doctor of literature Xia Jia makes the argument that Chinese science fiction, particularly in its infancy, felt as through the question of “where is society going” had been answered. There was a clear trajectory - to catch up with the developed Western world.

Of course, now China leads the world economically. Rapid development and centralised power structures meant that the nation achieved its goal ahead of schedule. The dreams of the past century crystalised into reality, and hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens now live in gleaming urban centres of culture and commerce.

Chinese science fiction authors were now left with a quandary that had faced their Western counterparts for a while - but this time, there were added complexities.

The Western world had begun stalling - the rapid growth of the post-industrial gave way to the stagnation of the Cold War. The optimism that shone through in the Raygun Gothic era was slowly but inexorably overshadowed by the cynical and dystopian cyberpunk fiction of the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.

And now China stood at the precipice of the future, looking out over turbulent waters, while glancing behind at a century of strife and revolution, wondering: “what comes next?”

"Whether you put your hand on a Bible or an iPad, in the end you are praying to the same god.”     

- Chen Qiufan, The Coming of the Light

The Century of Humiliation and the failed communist experiment

China sits at the historical crossroads of three religions, two political ideologies, and three regional conflicts.

This makes for an at-times confusing environment for writers to navigate. Two authors, however, have been able to bring these disparate threads together masterfully: Liu Cixin and Chen Qiufan.

Chinese science fiction often deals with spirituality and the traditional ties to religion that endured, despite the oppressive regime that fell into place during the Cultural Revolution. Contemporary authors often draw inspiration from this interplay in the form of satire that plays on the “consumer Buddhism” that is bought into by superstitious and overtly traditional businessmen and corpocrats. Chen Qiufan’s The Coming of the Light is a prime example of this marriage of Buddhism, capitalism and technology. As one of the characters muses, “whether you put your hand on a Bible or an iPad, in the end you are praying to the same god”.

There’s also the dual forces of communist ideology and capitalist pragmatics at play. Authors try to navigate the two worlds with varying degrees of integration. For many years, critique of communist or socialist ideals was the final taboo.

These days, there’s more flexibility in regards to what gets published. The most common aspect of Chinese society to draw the ire of these authors, however, is the hypercapitalist consumerism that pervades the Tier 1 metropoles of the eastern seaboard.

Liu Cixin’s The Wages of Humanity is a brutal look at capitalism taken to its final, free-market-economy form against a backdrop of resources scarcity and monopoly. While many Western authors who deal with rampant capitalism, particularly through cyberpunk and its derivatives, look at those characters who struggle against it, Liu’s short story instead highlights with the hopeless acceptance of systems and rules far beyond the protagonist’s understanding or power.

As a late entrant into the Space Race, China does not have a long tradition of space operas. Instead, space travel and the mechanisms required for it are backdrops to stories about society and the conflicts that run along the baseline of human nature.

The Wandering Earth is probably Liu’s most influential works (outside of Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The premise is simple: Earth is threatened by a thermal flash from the sun within the next hundred years, and there is no way to build enough spaceships to evacuate all humanity into the stars. Our governments come up with a solution - we build thousands of massive thermonuclear reactor engines all over the surface of the Earth, and we turn our home planet into a colony ship, pushing it out of the solar system and deep into the void of interstellar space.

It’s a big idea, and it’s executed perfectly. The story does not waste time explaining orbital mechanics or thermodynamics beyond what is needed; it’s also not a character piece. It’s about the generational challenges faced by humans as we enter the unknown. It’s about the problems that have plagued us for centuries, rearing their ugly heads and threatening the future of our species.

Ultimately, it's about the essential humanity that we can't escape, no matter how far we run. 

This is a reflection of Liu's broader thesis - and in many ways, the contention of modern Chinese science fiction. The rules that have governed us, the systems that have driven us, the issues that have concerned us: these are all inescapable parts of what it means to be human, and technology won't change that.

The future of futurism

Now, with Ken Liu leading the charge, more and more Chinese science fiction is being translated into English.

There’s a growing international readership who are fascinated by the variety offered up by Chinese authors, and this is only compounded by rhetoric that names Liu Cixin as the inheritor of Asimov’s legacy.

In reading science fiction from China, we open our eyes to a different perspective on the future of humanity; a future written by a culture with five thousand years of history, and yet an insatiable appetite for high technology. These authors are now dealing with the social implications of a post-modern China that must now find a new identity for itself.

It’s this struggle for identity that breeds great thinkers - and in turn, great fiction.