Telling the China Story: The Rise and Rise of Chinese

Science Fiction
Gautham Shenoy (https://archive.factordaily.com/author/shenoy/) January 12, 2019
10 min
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“Science Cction is as rare as unicorn horns, which shows in a way the intellectual
poverty of our times”, wrote Lu Xun, one of China’s most towering and revered
literary Cgures, writing about science Cction literature in China in his preface to his
1903 translation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.
116 years later, science Cction in – and from – the People’s Republic of China has
come a long way since then, to become what is arguably the most popular genre
of literature in China and with translations of Chinese science Cction picking up
pace and Cnding a ready and eager audience – to the extent that some have even
referred to it China’s greatest cultural export since kung fu – one can safely say
that Chinese SF’s journey to the west (and elsewhere) has only just begun, with its
star showing no signs of diminishing. But it wasn’t always so.

The beginnings of modern Chinese science Cction Crst took root during the period
of the Late Qing Dynasty, not just through translations of western science Cction
but also with Chinese authors such as the scholar and reformist, Liang Qichao’s
1902 futuristic tale, The Future of New China, which was set in 1962 and depicted
a world in which Shanghai hosts the World’s Fair, and a geopolitically dominant
China has developed a multi-party system and westerners study Chinese in hopes
of improving their life. The other signiCcant science Cction story that is considered
by many to be ‘Chinas Crst true science Cction story’ was Colony of the Moon by
an anonymous author, known only by his pseudonym, Huangjiang Diaosou. The
purpose of all these stories of those times was simple, to popularise science and
spark imagination and critical thinking. As Lu Xun wrote in the aforementioned
preface, “More often than not ordinary people feel bored at the tedious statements
of science. Readers will doze over such works before they can Cnish reading…Only
by resorting to a Cctional presentation and dressing them up in literary clothing
can works of science avoid their tediousness while retaining rational analysis and
profound theories.”

War, cultural upheaval, political upheaval would all contribute soon enough to
pause such noble endeavours, with the only notable work SF of that time being Cat
Country – the 1932 work of science Cction by another signiCcant Cgure of
twentieth-century Chinese literature, Lao She – in which the author satirises China
of the time, through the story of a taikonaut who crash lands on Mars and
stumbles upon a race of cat people, a feline society whose foundations and values
have eroded with time and opium (‘reverie leaves’) are all they truly care about
now.

It wasn’t until the 1950s – after the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China in 1949 – that science Cction would see a resurgence, albeit for a brief
period. And then too written primarily for children, or to popularise science, as a
vehicle for propaganda, and with a lot of translations of Russian books and
inluenced heavily by science Cction from the Soviet Union before the relationship
soured. Notable works of Chinese science Cction by Chinese authors from this
period are A Tour of the Solar System by Zhang Ren and the adventure tale of
three Chinese children stealing a spaceship to go off on an adventure, From Earth
to Mars as also the space-colonisation story, Builders of Mars by Zheng
Wenguang, an author who would fall out of favour with the establishment during
the Cultural Revolution and exiled, much like the genre itself, with anything
remotely suspected of bearing a similarity to ‘western culture’, not least capitalism,
being regarded as harmful.

Once again, it wasn’t till years later – in the late 1970s – that science Cction would
lower again in China during the early years of Deng Xiaoping. And once again, for
a brief period.

But brief through this period may have been – lasting just a few short years until
hitting its Crst roadblock in the form of the Communist Party’s Anti-Spiritual
Pollution Campaign, for being a foreign-inluenced indulgence – a large body of SF
emerged during this period, most notably Ye Yonglie’s Little Know-It-all Travels the
Future, archaeologist and anthropologist Tong Enzheng’s Death Ray on a Coral
Island and Zheng Wenguang’s Flying to Sagittarius (also translated as Forward
Sagittarius).

More importantly, this period also saw the foundation laid for the success of
contemporary Chinese science Cction in the form of the establishment and growth
of many science Cction fan clubs and SF magazines, chief amongst them being
Science Literature which Crst came out in 1979, continued to publish during the
campaign against spiritual pollution and continues to this day under the name of
Science Fiction World.

The ‘3 generals of Chinese science Cction’: Wang Jiankang, Liu Cixin and Han Song

It was only to be in the early 1990s when Chinese science Cction would enter an
uninterrupted golden age, and leading the charge would be writers who’ve lived
through the Cultural Revolution, being born just before or during it, the ‘three
generals of Chinese science Cction’: Wang Jiankang, Han Song and the name most
familiar to non-Chinese science Cction fans, Liu Cixin, the author of The Three-
Body Problem (https://archive.factordaily.com/culture-sciC-three-body-problem-
cixin-liu/), the novel that was instrumental in opening the loodgates of Chinese SF
to the English-speaking (and reading) world and the writer of The Wandering Earth,
on which the Clm billed as China’s breakout sci-C blockbuster
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcghUzzQCg) is based on. A name most
often added to this list is that of He Xi, the pseudonym of an as-yet-anonymous
author, to make it the ‘Big 4’ of Chinese science Cction.

Left & Right: Books 1 & 3 of the Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy,
translated by Ken Liu (centre) with his Hugo Award for Best Novel.

History was made at the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015, when Ken
Liu – SF/F author and award-winning writer of The Paper Menagerie
(https://archive.factordaily.com/ken-lius-the-paper-menagerie/) – stepped on
stage to accept the Hugo Award for Best Novel, for The Three-Body Problem, the
Crst translated book ever and the Crst novel from Asia to win this prestigious
award. By this time, science Cction in China had seen its longest uninterrupted run
as a popular genre with professional SF magazines, fanzines and fan clubs
thriving. And one of the chief reasons behind this Chinese science Cction
renaissance is the same that in the previous century prevented the genre from
reaching its fullest potential – the Chinese government. So, what changed?

A big clue comes from the author Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-Cction essays,
The View from the Cheap Seats, where he relates an anecdote from the time he
attended the 2007 China SF/Fantasy Conference in Chengdu:

“A few years ago, in 2007, I went to China for the Crst-ever, I believe, state-
sponsored science Cction convention, and at some point I remember talking to a
party orcial who was there and I said, ‘Up until now I have read in Locus that your
lot disapprove of science Cction and you disapprove of science Cction conventions
and these things have not been deliberately encouraged. What’s changed? Why did
you permit this thing? Why are we here?’

‘And he said, ‘Oh you know for years, we’ve been making wonderful things. We
make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but
we don’t come up with any of these ideas. So we went on a tour of America talking
to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions
about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered they all read
science Cction… so we think maybe it’s a good thing.”
 L-R: The cover of the forthcoming Waste Tide by Chen Quifan, Chan KoonChung’s
The Fat Years and Wang Jinkang’s Pathological.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Lu Xun in 1903 had
written that ‘science Cction could play a crucial role in the advancement of the
Chinese nation’ and 104 years later, the purpose of the 2007 Chengdu SF/F
Conference seems to have been no different for it was described
(http://www.china.org.cn/english/photo/222094.htm) as ‘an ambitious Chinese
effort designed to inspire public creativity toward future scientiCc and
technological development as well as promote national insight for scientiCc
exploration’. A laudable step towards sparking the imagination and fostering
innovation, but the state support of science Cction is also about advancing China’s
soft power. As the writer Chen Quifan said
(https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/07/fantastic-truth-about-china/) in a
speech (co-written by the organisers) at the eighth Chinese Nebula Awards in
November 2017, saying that the purpose of Chinese science Cction was to,
“advance the establishment of the power of the international spread of the culture
of socialism with Chinese characteristics, in order to tell the China story.”

L-R: Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia and Chen Quifan, from the new generation of
contemporary Chinese science Cction writers

That said, the stories that Chen Quifan, described as ‘China’s William Gibson’,
himself tells is not one of a socialist paradise or a utopian world highlighting as he
does the inequality that racks China today, at a time when the country is at its
most prosperous since the time of the Ming dynasty. While he may write about
uncomfortable truths, with science Cction stories that are perhaps not the ideal
story that the state would like him to tell, Chen Quifan is not alone because he
displays the same characteristics of the new generation of Chinese science Cction
writers who don’t shy away from tackling the dirculties of being born into a ‘torn
generation’ (as Han Song terms it) that is global in its outlook yet grappling with its
place in its society and tradition given the rapid technological progress and
societal transitions that this generation has had to go through, one that includes
SF writers such as Xia Jia (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/xia_02_12/), Ma
Boyong, Bao Shu, Zhang Ran, Tang Fei, and Ho Jingfang, who was the second
Chinese writer and the Crst Chinese woman to win a Hugo Award (for Best
Novelette) for her story, Folding Beijing
(http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/).

L-R: Covers of three anthologies of Chinese Science Fiction – Invisible Planets, The
Reincarnated Giant and the forthcoming Broken Stars

What then, are the differentiating characteristics of Chinese science Cction? What
are the common traits of science Cction written by Chinese authors? The only
reason I bring up these questions is to highlight that that they are the wrong
questions to ask. The short stories and novels that get categorised as Chinese
science Cction – by virtue of being from the PRC, a country of more than billion
people with a culture that goes back thousands of years – defy easy labels.
Depending on the author and – even then – when the story was written, they span
the entire spectrum of convenient labels. But where then, does one begin to dip
one’s toes into science Cction from China and explore stories born of a different
culture and tradition that we are familiar with, and descended from a different
literary ancestor?

Here then are a few recommended books available in English: Invisible Planets –
Edited and Translated by Ken Liu and The Reincarnated Giant – Edited by Mingwei
Song and Theodore Huters (both anthologies of contemporary Chinese SF), The
Fat Years by Chan Koonchung (banned in China and described as the Chinese
1984), The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Cat Country by Lao She. Happy
reading, and Live Long and Prosper!

Further reading (via tor.com / all articles translated by Ken Liu)

Xia Jia – What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?

(https://www.tor.com/2014/07/22/what-makes-chinese-science-Cction-
chinese/)Cixin Liu – The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All
Possible Earths: Three Body and Chinese Science Fiction
(https://www.tor.com/2014/10/30/repost-the-worst-of-all-possible-universes-and-
the-best-of-all-possible-earths-three-body-and-chinese-science-Cction/)Chen
Qiufan – The Torn Generation: Chinese Science Fiction in a Culture in Transition
(https://www.tor.com/2014/05/15/the-torn-generation-chinese-science-Cction-in-
a-culture-in-transition/)
 Lead Image: Screengrab from the trailer of Wandering Earth (via Youtube)

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brief.

Updated at 11:08 pm on January 13, 2019 to add the names of Zhang Ran and Tang Fei
to the list of Chinese sci C writers.

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