Chau NobelHugo 2018

From Nobel to Hugo Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature
Author(s): Angie Chau

Source: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 1, Special Issue on Chinese
Literature as World Literature (SPRING, 2018), pp. 110-135
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
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From Nobel to Hugo: Reading
Chinese Science Fiction as World
Literature†
Angie Chau
†
Thanks to the undergraduate students On the eve of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, The New
in my “Chinese Literature as World
York Times interviewed Barack Obama; the transcript emphasizes the
Literature” course at Arizona State
University in the spring of 2017 for the transformative role of reading in Obama’s life, citing seminal texts written
lively discussions on this topic, as well
by world figures such as Lincoln, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. Surprisingly,
as to the participants of the MLA 2017
roundtable on Chinese science fiction Obama then brings up the importance of reading fiction to “exercise”
for their feedback, and to Ken Liu for his
his imagination muscles and describes the act as an escape route to “get
ongoing support.
out of my own head . . . just because you want to be someplace else”
(Kakutani 2017).
O: [T]here was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-

Body Problem” series—
K: Oh, Liu Cixin, who won the Hugo Award.
O: —which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting. It wasn’t
so much sort of character studies as it was just this sweeping—
K: It’s really about the fate of the universe.
O: Exactly. The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read,
partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly
petty—not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade.
[Laughter]
110 • From Nobel t o Hugo

In this exchange, Obama’s lighthearted remarks demonstrate the complexity
of science fiction. On the one hand, the genre is often dismissed as being
merely “fun to read” because of its “wildly imaginative” nature. On the
other hand, precisely because of its purported distance from our perceived
reality, science fiction (SF) makes earthly problems seem mundane,
affording the science fiction reader a unique perspective, in this case,
even presidential insight. Kakutani’s interview is also a testament to the
breadth and scope of Obama’s intellectual curiosity, his ability to compare
popular thrillers such as Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl to the gravitas of
presidential biographies. Furthermore, the dialogue between two leading
figures of American elite culture affirms the status of contemporary Chinese
literature. The interview’s underlying message—that Obama is so well read
in world literature that he knows the latest from China—is reinforced by
its inverse implication, that contemporary Chinese literature, or Chinese SF
at least, is good enough to be read by the American president.
Chinese literature’s position in the ambiguous category of world
literature has shifted dramatically since James Robert Hightower’s singular
insistence on its “literary value” (1953: 121). More than three decades later,
Wendy Larson and Richard Kraus speculated that if one of its writers won
the Nobel Prize in Literature, China could potentially “succeed in gaining
world attention for its literature, and in enlarging the emerging canon
of global literature to include Chinese works” (1989: 160). Indeed, when
Gao Xingjian (b. 1940) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, the
literary spotlight shone briefly on China, but the ensuing controversy was
focused less on Gao’s literature than on his national identity and ethnicity,
specifically, on the political significance of the disparity between his place
of birth (China) and his chosen place of citizenship (France), as highlighted
by the heated discussion among writers, intellectuals, and mainstream
media in China. Similarly, when Mo Yan (b. 1955) was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 2012, literary critics in and out of China questioned whether he
really deserved the prize, given his status as a writer working within the
Mo d e r n C h i n e se L i te ra tu re a n d C u l tu re • 1 1 1
system (Link 2012). Following both moments of ostensibly “global” literary
victories, there were tentative hints suggesting that this, finally, was
perhaps contemporary Chinese literature’s big debut.
Yet, as Yingjin Zhang (2015: 8) points out, the question of whether
China has finally “entered” world literature is complicated by the fact that
Chinese readers prefer to read popular forms of fiction, not just works of
international critical acclaim. Attempting to navigate the murky waters of
world literature, David Damrosch identifies the double process by which a
work enters into world literature: “first, by being read as literature; second,
by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural
point of origin” (2003: 6). In this essay, I argue that the current conditions of
the domestic book marketplace in China, combined with the international
impact of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (Santi, 2008) winning the
Hugo Award for best novel in 2015 and Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award for
her short story “Folding Beijing” (Beijing zhedie) in 2016, have produced
a timely opportunity for Chinese literature to enter world literature,
contingent precisely on the first step stipulated by Damrosch, that critics
and readers accept SF as literature. This proposed shift in perception of SF
must occur first within China, then, aided by the process of translation, in
its circulated form abroad.
I engage here with what Pascale Casanova calls littérisation: “any
operation—translation, self-translation, transcription, direct composition in
the dominant language—by means of which a text from a literarily deprived
country comes to be regarded as literary by the legitimate authorities”
(2004: 136). To return to Obama’s plug for The Three-Body Problem,
neither Kakutani nor Obama emphasized Three-Body’s Chinese origins,
which suggests that the literariness of the series lies in its universality, that
nothing is remarkable about its otherness, despite the proverbial elephant
in the room—that Liu Cixin’s work is the only translated work Obama
lists among mostly American and Western literary “greats.” The former
president’s enthusiastic endorsement of the trilogy is therefore another step

in littérisation, as science fiction gets elevated to the level of Shakespeare
and other masterpieces of world literature mentioned in the interview.
In contemporary Chinese SF, specifically regarding the award-winning
fiction by authors Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang that have been translated
from Chinese into English by the science-fiction writer Ken Liu, the
littérisation process holds further significance. The initial success of their
work may be a result of linguistic translation from Chinese into English and
other languages, but an additional layer of literary transmutation has taken
place: the English translations of these works facilitate a shift in perception
of SF from genre fiction to literary fiction. Attributing this transformation
simply to the literary prestige of the English language ignores the cultural
currency of contemporary Chinese literature as the most accurate lens
through which to view and truly understand China. My essay begins with
an introduction to the ongoing debates in modern China concerning
popular literature and cultural exportation, then explores how science
fiction as a literary genre is viewed in China, and, subsequently, how Ken
Liu’s translations of Chinese SF have been received outside China. Finally,
I discuss how global perceptions of China shape the way that Chinese SF
circulates abroad as literature.
“For What It Costs to Buy Wastepaper You Can Get Yourself a

Bundle of Classics!”
Asked in an interview about the reasons for SF’s sudden acclaim outside
China, Chen Qiufan, the author of The Waste Tide (Huangchao), speculates,
“I think the broader background is the rise of China as a whole, in politics,
the economy, and culture; it is playing an increasingly important role.
When its overall political and economic strength reaches a certain level,
a nation will usually seek out cultural exportation” (Sun 2017). Although
Chen is responding to the question of why SF is gaining global acclaim now,
his answer also highlights the motivation behind China’s push for Three-
Body’s circulation, and the larger movement to promote SF as a distinctly
Chinese literary offering, which can be traced to the long-standing desire
for Chinese literature to be considered on a par with Western literature.
Qian Zhongshu’s short story “Inspiration” (Linggan, 1944) describes a
fictional scenario in which the merit of a famous unnamed author’s work
in China is determined by “the standards and wisdom of the middle-
school student . . . the only ones willing to spend their money on books
and on subscriptions to magazines” (Qian 2011: 153). The satirical story
foreshadows the competing relationship between the popular demands of
the consumer book market and the elitist tendencies of the international
book prize culture that characterizes the twenty-first-century literary
sphere. Julia Lovell has convincingly linked China’s Nobel complex to what
C. T. Hsia called the “obsession with China” (Hsia 1999: 533), showing
that, in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding Gao Xingjian’s win
in 2000, the hope attributed to a Chinese writer winning the prestigious
literary prize reveals the “tensions inherent in China’s move toward
a ‘global’ culture in the modern era and neatly illustrates the degree
to which the responsibility for achieving this task has been laid on the
shoulders of literature” (Lovell 2002: 4). China’s efforts to make a name
for itself in cultural production on the international scale has so far failed
miserably in competition with Hollywood blockbuster films, K-pop music,
and Japanese anime, but now literature in the form of science fiction is
poised to accomplish this lofty goal.
Since the late 1980s, literary production in Mainland China has been
characterized by what Tao Dongfeng (2016: 110) calls “de-elitization”
(qu jingyinghua), or the literary trend of “vulgarization and anti-
spiritualization” that was initiated by “hooligan” (pizi) writer Wang Shuo, a
marked shift from the populism of the socialist period and the subsequent
elitization of Reform Era literature. The cultural turn persisted through
the rapid growth of Internet technology and rampant consumerism in
the 1990s, only to be exacerbated by China’s joining the World Trade
Organization in 2001. China’s growing role in the world economy has

been well documented, and the deleterious effects of pop culture and
global consumerism often lamented. In literature, cultural deterioration
manifested most obviously in the form of the best-seller in the 1990s. As
Shuyu Kong (2005: 4) puts it: “After four decades during which literature
was treated as noble spiritual food to nourish the young or as a rigid
ideological tool to mobilize the people—something far removed from the
dirty and avaricious capitalist world—the Chinese had suddenly discovered
that books, even literary works, could be treated as commodities to be
mass produced, advertised, and sold for profit.”
This kind of nostalgic yearning for a “noble spiritual” past in which
literature played a meaningful social role is echoed by authors such as Yu
Hua (b. 1960), who in his essay “Reading” describes the scene at a book
signing where booksellers try to get rid of their merchandise like farmers’
market vendors: “No sooner did one salesman yell, ‘Bundle of books for
20 yuan,’ than another would counter with an even more attractive deal:
‘Rock-bottom prices! Classics for 10 yuan a bundle!’ Even the book vendors
found this a bit unbelievable. ‘What kind of bookselling is this?’ they said
to themselves. ‘We might as well be selling wastepaper!’ So their sales
pitch would take a different line: ‘Come and get it! For what it costs to
buy wastepaper you can get yourself a bundle of classics!’” (Yu 2011: 57).
Yu Hua’s essay highlights the stark contrast between the illicit thrill of
reading banned books during the Cultural Revolution and the apathy of
readers awash in excess in present-day China, but his anecdote about the
book fair at Beijing’s Ditan Park is also a dig at the way books have been
commodified and relegated to the status of household goods.
One of the most highly publicized debates over the commodification
of literature took place online in March 2006 between the literary critic Bai
Ye and the novelist-blogger Han Han. Bai Ye, as a representative voice of
the wentan (official literary circle), posted a cautionary essay on his blog
and used “the post-80s” as a derogatory term to designate the younger
generation of writers born after 1980. Referring to best-selling authors
such as Guo Jingming, Zhang Yueran, and Han Han, Bai Ye voices a concern
that being ensnared within the market means being creatively restricted to
consumer demands. Reading Bai Ye’s essay more than a decade later makes
his disdain for Guo Jingming laughable: “From what I can see, it would be
extremely difficult for Guo Jingming to escape the market within which
he has been ensnared” (Bai 2006). Why would Guo, currently the head
of China’s largest youth literature publisher, Zui Culture (Zuishi wenhua),
and director of the blockbuster film series Tiny Times (Xiao shidai), ever
1
Guo Jingming’s Zui Culture is the pub- want to “escape” the market?1 Han Han responded in 2006 with a typically
lishing house behind Chen Qiufan’s The
caustic counterattack, arguing that how well a book sells is unrelated to its
Waste Tide, Ken Liu’s English translation
of which is being published in 2019, and status as literature, and truly “pure literature” is free from the intellectual
has just been bought for film adapta-
constraints of hypocrisy and pretension: “Many bestselling authors only
tion.
write pure literature because no matter what they write someone will
pay them, so they don’t need to consider their readers or the demands of
the market, they just write whatever they please. On the flipside, some
books written by ‘pure literature’ authors don’t sell well, so those writers
often need to consider, what can I add to draw the reader in” (Han 2006).
The crux of the Bai-Han debate lies in the two divergent definitions of
literature. Bai Ye locates his literature in the tradition of Reform Era avant-
garde elitist literature (pure literature, neither necessarily marketable
nor comprehensible), set apart from its predecessor and counterpart,
the socially responsible “enlightenment literature” (qimeng wenxue) of
the late 1970s to late 1980s (Tao 2016: 99–100). However, the apparent
opposition between wentan and market is not as clear-cut as both sides
believe; rather, there is a “dissimulated process of attraction and mutual
exploitation between a literary establishment trying to preserve the power
of its official institutions and a culture industry wishing to transform
literature into harmless commercialized entertainment” (Fumian 2009:
155). Applying Fumian’s analysis to the case of SF in China, where its social
value and literary status remain unresolved, highlights the genre’s greatest
strength—its ability to circumvent the high versus low culture debate.

Gauging Science Fiction’s Popularity in China
In 2016, China’s State Council (2016) announced a four-year plan for
promoting scientific literacy among its citizens, including a step-by-step
process for popularizing science through the production of SF: “Aggressively
develop science fiction, comics, videos, games and creation of other works
of popular science [kepu] etc. Promote the establishment of policy to
support the production of science fiction, promote the development of
popular science games, increase the dissemination of popular science
games, strengthen popular science production’s international flow and
cooperation.” This push would mean setting up a special fund for creating
works of popular science, with specific emphasis on providing financial
support for writing SF, and establishing a national SF literary prize and
a Chinese SF holiday (CAST 2016). In theory, these types of initiatives
promising official support for the production of Chinese SF seem auspicious
for the literary form; already, compared to the seventy-five new science
fiction books published in 2015, there was a dramatic increase to 104 new
titles published in 2016 (Cheung 2017). However, SF writers are encouraged
to use their skills not only to popularize scientific learning and to contribute
to China’s status as a world technology power, but also to use their “quality
works to inspire teenagers” (Xinhua 2016).
SF is not a new genre in China; the term kexue xiaoshuo (science
fiction) was first used in the early twentieth century by writers such as Liang
Qichao, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun, three writers who translated and wrote
science fiction as part of the larger utopian project for national rejuvenation
(Wang 1997: 252–312; Isaacson 2017). Its development over the last century
experienced erratic periods of growth alternating with stagnation: it
flourished in the late Qing, but virtually disappeared during the socialist
period; it was suppressed during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign of
the mid-1980s, and then made a resurgence in the post-1989 cultural sphere.
In a 2013 interview, the writer Fei Dao attributes SF’s popularity among
young readers to the sheer number of middle school and university students
reading Science Fiction World (Kehuan shijie, circulation 130,000), the
most widely read SF publication in the world, which serialized Three-Body
before it was published in book form: “[A]fter people graduate and start
to work, most people don’t read science fiction. They think it’s just youth
literature and that grown-ups should read more mature stuff, not childish
stuff” (Ash 2013). Yet regarding extracurricular reading, young readers are
more familiar with xuanhuan, the fantasy subgenre made popular by the
TV series adaptation of Huang Yi’s time-travel narratives such as A Step into
the Past (Xun Qin ji, 2001), and the term used for science fiction, kehuan,
2
For various subgenres such as qihuan which is short for kexue huanxiang (science fantasy).2
(Western-style fantasy), xuanhuan
Wu Yan (2011: 4) observes that the different ways in which fantasy
(Eastern-style fantasy), wuxia (martial
arts), and kehuan (science fiction), see and SF are evaluated in China can be traced back to a “deep-rooted taste
Immortal Mountain’s glossary at https://
for fantasy” stemming from elements in late imperial Chinese fiction such
immortalmountain.wordpress.com/glos-
sary/wuxia-xianxia-xuanhuan-terms/. as Journey to the West. Chinese Web literature (wangwen) is being read
on websites such as the US-based wuxiaworld.com at the incredible rate
of nearly 373 million page views a day. Online content, mostly time travel,
tomb-raiding, fantasy, mystery, and court drama narratives (not SF), is
frequently translated into English for free by the fan community, and the
most successful series have been adapted into TV series, films, and video
games. In this context, Chinese SF, with the exception of Three-Body, may
not be as popular as the headlines proclaim. As recently as 2000, Chinese
SF was considered “still a fairly marginal phenomenon” (Huss 2000: 92),
and even in 2010, Fei Dao compared Chinese SF to a “lonely hidden
army” (Song 2016: 546). Mingwei Song (2016) argues persuasively that as
a marginalized genre, Chinese SF is uniquely positioned to challenge the
center or dominant ideology, resonating with Wu Yan’s claim that SF’s
legitimacy arises from its marginality (2011). In his discussion of the “Big
Three” writers—Wang Jinkang, Liu Cixin, and Han Song—Mingwei Song
writes that the new generation of SF writers represents “the complexity,
ambiguity, and uncertainties of both the fantasy and reality of China’s
changes, or the world’s, in their own ways that transgress the mainstream

literary realism and official political discourse” (2016: 547). Song’s argument
raises the question of whether the genre’s critical potential diminishes as its
visibility in contemporary Chinese literature increases, a likely consequence
given the convergence of heightened official and commercial notice.
In the rare case that a work of Chinese SF is a commercial success in
China, it entails, according to Liu Cixin (2013: 31), “garnering interest from
readers outside of the genre.” Each of the three volumes of Three-Body
sold more than 500,000 copies upon publication beginning in 2006, and
by 2015 had totaled more than 2.1 million volumes (Xinhua 2015). This
is a significant figure for SF, but for the sake of perspective, consider the 3
According to an industry report on the
collection of short love stories by Zhang Jiajia, I Belonged to You (Cong Chinese book market, total domestic
retail sales in 2015 increased by 12.8%
ni de quan shijie luguo), published in 2013: the book sold 2 million copies from 2014, totaling about $9.4B (German
after six months, with sales figures eventually exceeding 10 million volumes, Book Office Beijing 2016).
and was adapted into film in 2016, with a box office revenue of $121.5M
(Dangdang.com).3 By comparison, the Three-Body trilogy’s popularity seems
modest: it succeeded in confounding genre expectations by extending
its reader demographic beyond the typical young fan base to reach Web
professionals, scientists, and engineers. The trilogy’s last volume, Death’s
End (Si shen yongsheng), fit Liu Cixin’s personal preference for “pure” SF
and was the “most attuned to sf fandom,” an approach he initially thought
would deter readers and thus “considered very unlikely to win over ‘non-
science fiction’ readers by insiders of the genre” (Liu 2016: 362). Surprisingly,
this last book has turned out to be the most popular volume in China.
Whether SF is truly popular in China is, in a way, irrelevant for its
afterlife in circulation outside China because its commercial potential is
indisputable. Science fiction as a consumer concept has appeared in Chinese
mainstream news media as the term “SF industry” (Li 2017), used most
recently in the publicity surrounding the Fourth International SF Conference,
Figure 1: Event flier posted on November
which took place in Chengdu in November 2017 (fig. 1). Looking back to 8, 2017 by 科幻世界 SFW’s WeChat
account to promote the 4th International
the turn of the twenty-first century, when new media technologies had
SF Conference in Chengdu in November
yet to see drastic changes, the idea that literary production would actively 2017.
seek out multimedia channels such as TV and film was already viewed as an
inevitable outcome. Shuyu Kong proposes that the then-new concept of
“multidimensional literary products” (duowei chanpin) would be “a natural
outgrowth of the commercializing reforms to literary production over the
past two decades” (2005: 171). Leading intellectual Wang Xiaoming (2011)
confirmed these changes in the literary landscape a few years later, pointing
out the simultaneous impact of Internet technology and the entrance of big
business, citing Shanghai-based Shanda (Shengda) Corporation’s foray into
the online gaming industry in July 2008 as a crucial point in the large-scale
industrialization of literature. As a genre of popular fiction, SF has always
relied on its readers and fans, whose relationship with the market is now
more tightly intertwined than ever: “We must rely on the appraisal of our
readers or, even worse, rely on the judgment of the market. Therefore
it is unavoidable that the spark at the heart of science fiction will often
be hidden behind the shroud of commercialization” (Liu 2013: 32–33).
Liu Cixin’s complaint fits with Andrew Milner’s conceptualization of the
contemporary SF cultural field as “located not in some different space from
the globalised general literary field” (2012: 45), as in Casanova’s “world
literary space,” but as a site of production that is included within it. If the
State Council and CAST’s agenda are any indication, the more value SF can
provide for China’s advancement in industrial development and global
recognition, the better. For contemporary Chinese literature, the same
commercial shroud that obscures the core of fundamental SF may ironically
be its protective shell as it travels abroad in translation.
Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

When the lifestyle blog shanghaiist.com announced Hao Jingfang’s Hugo
win for Best Novelette for “Folding Beijing” in August 2016, declaring
drily, “Another year, another Hugo Award-winning Chinese sci-fi writer”
(Linder 2016), the reporter was alluding to Liu Cixin’s Best Novel win for
Three-Body in the previous year. Well before the 2014 publication of Ken

Liu’s English translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin
was awarded China’s Galaxy Science Fiction Award (Yinhe jiang) nine times,
in consecutive years from 1999 to 2006 and again in 2010. In 2010 and
2011, Liu Cixin also received China’s Nebula (Xingyun) Award. Despite his
lengthy list of domestic awards and extensive publication of novels and
short-story collections, Liu Cixin did not receive global attention until the
publication of the English translation of Three-Body, which proved a critical
success abroad. As of February 2016, the English edition of Three-Body has
sold over 110,000 copies, with global sales revenue exceeding $2M (CCTV
2016). The commercial and critical success of the English translations of the
three volumes are tied to the international literary prize circuit, which has
played an integral role in promoting the literary reputation of Chinese SF
outside China.
The translator Ken Liu, who was born in Lanzhou in 1976 and
immigrated to the United States in 1987, is a ubiquitous presence in recent
discussions about Chinese SF. In making Chinese SF visible to Anglophone
readers and promoting its circulation through translation, Ken Liu is
uniquely qualified: beyond his obvious bilingualism, his legitimacy is
further bolstered by his being an award-winning science fiction author
who writes in English. Because of the critical acclaim his English translations
have received, he is a hot commodity among young science fiction writers
in China. As Chen Qiufan recalls, “When I was in Japan one time talking
with Japanese SF writers, they told me that they were jealous of us, and
wished they had their own ‘Ken Liu.’ But they didn’t have such a figure”
(Sun 2017). Ken Liu also serves as a genre mediator, addressing the issue
of cultural translation in his short stories and novels and forcing readers to
think about questions of language and how culture is transmitted. “The
Paper Menagerie,” one of Ken Liu’s earliest stories and winner of a Hugo
Award for best short story in 2012, is read and taught primarily as a work
of SF. However, the story also features many of the conventions of Asian
American literature, including the narrator’s search for cultural belonging
and identity and his struggle to understand his family’s immigration
history. Perhaps his greatest strength as a translator, then, is related to
this consciousness of the cultural imbalance in translating from Chinese to
English: “Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about
all the Chinese references—history, language, culture, all this stuff—but to
be well-versed in Western references as well. A Chinese reader can decode
an American work with far greater facility than an American reader can
decode a Chinese work, on average” (Pandell 2016). The main deterrent for
non-Chinese readers in reading Chinese literature is precisely this obsessive
belief that one must understand Chinese culture and history to understand
its literature, but this has not significantly affected the global reception
of Three-Body. Ken Liu’s translation of Death’s End, the third and most
successful volume of the trilogy, was nominated for the 2017 Hugo Award
for Best Novel, although it did not end up winning.
At first glance, the Nobel Prize in Literature seems to have little in
common with the Hugo Award for SF. For one, the shortlist for the Nobel
Prize is selected and voted on by the eighteen members of the Swedish
Academy, an elite institution consisting primarily of literature professors
4
For instance, the press release an- and writers who serve as committee members for life. The Hugo Awards,
nouncing Gao Xingjian’s 2000 win reads,
by contrast, are fan based, which means that annual members of Worldcon
“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000
goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian (short for the World Science Fiction Convention) administer and vote for
‘for an oeuvre of universal validity,
individual authors or works in the various categories. But although the
bitter insights and linguistic ingenu-
ity, which has opened new paths for Nobel Prize in Literature may represent elite notions of literary merit
the Chinese novel and drama.’” The
versus the popular orientation of the Hugo Award, the two prizes play an
FAQ page of the Hugo Awards website
states that “Any work is eligible, regard- undeniably crucial role in promoting literary translation and emphasizing
less of its place or language of publica-
the appeal of a global author.4 Casanova identifies three stages in the
tion.” See http://www.thehugoawards.
org/hugo-faq/. Despite the award’s Nobel Prize’s history in establishing “explicit standards of universality”:
claims to worldliness, its website ad-
criteria based on (1) the concept of “supreme artistic value” in its early
mits, “the vast majority of Hugo voters
currently come from English-speaking years, as stated in Alfred Nobel’s will; (2) an emphasis on political neutrality,
countries” and a large proportion of the
in which “national character was neither too pronounced nor too much
people who submit nominations for the
Hugo Awards reside in the US. insisted upon; and most recently, (3) “the public reception of a work” (2004:

148–150). According to Casanova, this last criterion supports the notion
that a Nobel-worthy work should be accessible to the broadest possible
audience; Bob Dylan’s controversial win in 2016 for his song lyrics is the
latest iteration of the push for accessibility by enlarging the boundaries
of the category of literature, a move bemoaned and ridiculed by some
critics (Richardson 2016), but indicative that the system finally recognizes
a connection between universality and popular opinion.
Despite the Hugo award system’s long-standing premise of
democratization, in recent years issues of racism and misogyny in the
selection process have come to light. In the 2015 award season, the same
year Three-Body won for Best Novel, the genre’s cultural imbalance came
to a head in the battle referred to as Puppygate. Calling for SF to go back
to its “roots,” the Sad Puppies, a voting bloc started in 2013 by three
white men disgruntled with the “politicization of a genre they love”
(Wallace 2015), were accused by their detractors of sexism, racism, and
homophobia. This widely publicized episode underscores the cultural
hurdles that Three-Body had to overcome to be the first translated novel
in Hugo history to win Best Novel. Viewed from another angle, the fact
that Vox Day, leader of another voting bloc called Rabid Puppies, suggested
Three-Body for first place demonstrates the extent to which Liu Cixin’s
novel fulfilled generic SF conventions. Regardless of the scandal’s overall
effect on the final winner, Puppygate also emphasizes a crucial difference
between the Nobel and Hugo: the potential influence, in the case of the
Hugo, that a collective of writers, fans, editors, publishers, and scholars
can exert over genre formation, recalling John Rieder’s proposition that
“attribution of the identity of sf to a text constitutes an active intervention
in its distribution and reception” (2010: 193). Rieder’s definition of genres
as categories “wielded by communities of practice” (2010: 206) explains
why the genre-based Hugo has a considerable advantage over the Nobel
Prize in reshaping the cultural mediascape.
Global Perceptions of China
Up to now, China has been largely absent in discussions about SF production
regarding core, periphery, and semiperiphery in the world-literary system
(Milner 2012: 155–177). However, because SF plays a formative role in
the broader discourses of modernization and globalization, it reveals the
ways in which technology operates as a “mode of awareness” (Csicsery-
Ronay 2003: 243). Novelist Ning Ken has used the notion of “ultra-unreal”
(chaohuan) to describe the “compound eye” through which the Chinese
fiction writer looks at the world. Ning concludes that “at the present
moment, only literature can understand China. No other method will
work. The biggest question on the planet now might be, ‘Whither China?’
It is possible that the only way we can address this question is through
literature” (Ning 2016). As a way of making China comprehensible, the
ultra-unreal lines up with the genre conventions of SF, leading Chen
Qiufan to observe: “There is something very science fictional and fantastic
about this very drastic social transformation. At the foundation, the soil
of rural China is still there, not thoroughly washed away. This has led to
the co-existence of many different layers of society, which science fiction
is best suited to present” (in Sun 2017). This sentiment is used in attention-
grabbing headlines about Chinese SF: for instance, “Want to understand
China? Read its best science fiction,” which identifies the “terrors haunting
Chinese authors,” including GDP obsession, collective amnesia, hukou
hell, youth unemployment, and air pollution (Huang 2017). Claims about
contemporary Chinese fiction overlap in their tension between, on the
one hand, insistence on verisimilitude to the absurdities of contemporary
reality and national specificity to the Chinese condition and, on the other
hand, universal applicability and allegorical significance that extend beyond
national borders to encompass global trends, such as concerns about
environmental degradation and the implications of automation.
This negotiation between verisimilitude and universality can be
seen in “Folding Beijing” The story’s protagonist, Lao Dao, a lowly

waste-processing-plant worker from Third Space, travels to First Space
to deliver a love letter from a Second Space graduate student. The piece
is grounded in concrete realist details about the Beijing cityscape, from
street vendors hawking noodles to references to Xidan and the Sixth Ring
Road; but “Folding Beijing” also approaches the issue of social inequality
as a universal problem, depicting a futuristic version of the city that
segregates its inhabitants into three spaces based on social class. The
author, Hao Jingfang, who has a Ph.D. in economics and works at the China
Development Research Foundation think tank, has explained: “I wrote
a story about inequality, and it has won some recognition and praise. I
suppose you can say this is some sign that inequality resonates across the
globe. Indeed, inequality is a troubling problem” (Hao 2016). In fact, her
story, first published in 2012, resurfaced in late November 2017 in articles
reporting on the mass demolition of rural migrant neighborhoods in the
outskirts of Beijing (Goldkorn 2017).
In Three-Body, the historical specificity of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976) provides the novel’s setting in both the English translation and
the original manuscript. Chapter 1, entitled “The Madness Years,” takes
place in 1967 at a Red Guard struggle session during which a professor is
publicly murdered by four teenage girls. A few years later, the professor’s
daughter, an astrophysicist and a survivor of the Cultural Revolution named
Ye Wenjie, is responsible for sending out the first interstellar message, which
is received by the Trisolarans. Ye’s act of planetary and species betrayal is
traced back to the “spiritual crisis” inflicted by historical trauma: “Ye had
the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget. Rather, she
looked with a rational gaze on the madness and hatred that had harmed
her” (Liu 2014: 269). In chapter 26, “No One Repents,” the narrator describes
Ye’s attempt to listen to her father’s murderers repent, but instead, faced
with these women, who have been similarly traumatized by the recent past,
Ye loses all hope for society: “Her tiny sense of doubt about her supreme
act of betrayal had also disappeared without a trace. Ye finally had her
unshakable ideal: to bring superior civilization from elsewhere in the
universe into the human world” (302). For Liu Cixin, the Cultural Revolution
is the “only episode in modern Chinese history” that could realistically
generate a protagonist “who gave up all hope in humanity and human
5
In an interview with Sinica Podcast, nature” (Grassmann 2016).5 This kind of local-universal tension is common
Ken Liu addresses the different chapter
throughout Liu Cixin’s short stories, such as the depiction of rural life in “The
orders in the Chinese version and the
English translation: he reveals that Liu Village Schoolteacher” (Xiangcun jiaoshi, 2001) and the plight of migrant
Cixin’s original manuscript was the basis
workers in “The Weight of Memories” (Rensheng, 2003). Because of the
for the English translation, but because
the Chinese version was published increased interest in contemporary China, literature that “travels well” in
in 2006, the anniversary year for the
translation features narratives that strike a fine balance between social
end of the Cultural Revolution, there
was concern over opening the novel consciousness grounded in the material world and the universal human
with “The Madness Years” and “Silent
condition, a task that SF is exceptionally well suited to take on.
Spring.” Consequently, out of caution,
these chapters were moved to later
in the Chinese novel, as flashbacks,
Conclusion: Awaiting the Death of SF
and the Chinese version opens instead
with “The Frontiers of Science” (Kuo/ As a scholar of modern Chinese literature, I rarely hear people around me
Goldkorn 2017); “The Madness Years”
appears as chapter 7, followed by “Si- discuss the literature that I think, write, and teach about. Last year, an
lent Spring” as chapter 8. Another major exchange between two former classmates appeared on my Facebook feed
difference between the English and
Chinese versions is that “The Madness discussing Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie.” Both friends are Americanists,
Years” ends with Ye Wenjie discovering who were initially drawn to Liu’s work because of his Hugo credentials
the body of her close friend Professor
Ruan Wen, who has committed suicide, and translation of Three-Body. Imagine my further surprise when multiple
but this scene does not appear in the colleagues at Arizona State University told me they had not only heard of
Chinese version.
Liu Cixin but had also read Ken Liu’s translation. Liu Cixin proposes that
SF is the most global literature “because it deals with issues relevant to
all races,” adding that he prefers Anglophone science fiction fans to read
his books “because it’s science fiction, not because it’s ‘Chinese’ science
fiction” (Slaughter 2016). In the introduction to his 2016 collected volume,
Invisible Planets, Ken Liu expresses a similar sentiment in the form of
questioning what kind of meaningful purpose the label of “Chinese science
fiction” can serve, given the incredible diversity of the works and their
authors. As SF writers, Liu Cixin and Ken Liu are invested in promoting
the genre of SF, at the same time that they dissuade readers from the

notion that there is something inherently “Chinese” about their writing.
Despite the shortcomings of applying an essentialist nationalistic reading
to contemporary Chinese SF, the Chinese label combined with the genre
conventions of SF is one way to draw in readers who would otherwise not
read contemporary Chinese literature.
Three-Body is currently undergoing another process of repackaging,
a kind of reverse literary transmutation, what Casanova might call de-
littérisation. The long-awaited film adaptation directed by Panpan Zhang,
with an estimated budget of around $30 million, initially had a release
date of 2016, but is still in postproduction. There is an incredible amount
of pressure on this project to succeed, as Liu Cixin acknowledges: “This
will be the first big-budget sci-fi film in China. Many people hold high
expectations for it, hoping that it will become China’s 2001: Space Odyssey
[sic] or Star Wars. But personally I feel that such an expectation for the first
attempt of the nation’s film industry might be unrealistic” (Barnett 2016).
In the summer of 2017, the Beijing subway system displayed numerous
ads depicting the Forbidden City’s familiar Meridian Gate at the bottom
of a poster promoting the 3D stage musical drama performance version
of Three-Body (fig. 2). “Folding Beijing” has also been picked up for film
Figure 2: Photo of Beijing subway
adaptation, to be directed by Josh Kim.
advertisement for the multimedia
The potential of SF as a genre to bypass the high versus low divide dramatic performance of Three-Body in
June 2017. Source: author’s photo.
is also related to the growing dialogue between science studies and the
humanities, and the work of writers such as Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, and Hao
Jingfang can speak across a wide range of disciplines, including ethnic
studies, critical race theory, ecocriticism, media studies, and disability
studies. Further, science fiction is worth reading because, as STEM
education initiatives inform students and parents alike, human existence
and prosperity depend on the development of science and technology.
My essay has demonstrated the flexibility of the Chinese SF genre to
navigate the elite/popular divide and, as Hugo Award winners Three-
Body and “Folding Beijing” exemplify, to successfully sidestep the derision
directed at popular culture hits such as Tiny Times. If all it takes for Chinese
literature to enter world literature at this point is for Chinese SF to be read,
critiqued, consumed, and received as literature, the reception of Three-
Body domestically in China and globally in translation has confirmed this
long-awaited step.

Glossary
chaohuan 超幻
Chen Qiufan 陈楸帆
Cong ni de quan shijie luguo 从你的全世界路过
duowei chanpin 多维产品
Fei Dao 飞氘
Gao Xingjian 高行健
Guo Jingming 郭敬明
Han Song 韩松
Huang Yi 黄易
hukou 户口
kehuan 科幻
Kehuan shijie 科幻世界
kepu 科普
kexue huanxiang 科学幻想
kexue xiaoshuo 科学小说
Lao Dao 老刀
Liang Qichao 梁启超
Liu Cixin 刘慈欣
Lu Xun 鲁迅
Mao Dun 茅盾
Mo Yan 莫言
pizi 痞子
qihuan 奇幻
qimeng wenxue 启蒙文学
qu jingyinghua 去精英化
Rensheng 人生
Santi 三体
Shengda 盛大
Shengda wenxue 盛大文学
Si Shen yongshen 死神永生
Xiangcun jiaoshi 乡村教师
Wang Jinkang 王晋康
Wang Shuo 王朔
wangwen 网文
wentan 文坛
wuxia 武侠
Xiao shidai 小时代
Xingyun 星云
Xun Qin ji 寻秦记
xuanhuan 玄幻
Yinhe jiang 银河奖
Zhang Jiajia 张嘉佳
Zhang Yueran 张悦然
Zuishi wenhua 最世文化
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From Nobel to Hugo Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature

Author(s): Angie Chau

O: [T]here was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-

110 • From Nobel t o Hugo

112 • From Nobel t o Hugo

“For What It Costs to Buy Wastepaper You Can Get Yourself a

114 • From Nobel t o Hugo

116 • From Nobel t o Hugo

118 • From Nobel t o Hugo

Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

120 • From Nobel t o Hugo

122 • From Nobel t o Hugo

124 • From Nobel t o Hugo

126 • From Nobel t o Hugo

128 • From Nobel t o Hugo

Bai Ye 白烨. 2006. “80 hou de xianzhuang yu weilai” 80后的现状与未来

Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Tr. M. B. DeBevoise.

130 • From Nobel t o Hugo

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. 2003. “Science Fiction and Empire.” Science

Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Dangdang.com. Search result for Cong ni de quan shijie luguo 从你的全世

Goldkorn, Jeremy. 2017. “The Week of Low-End Population.” SupChina

Grassmann, Preston. 2016. “The Three-Body Problem and Beyond—A Q&A

Hightower, James Robert. 1953. “Chinese Literature in the Context of World

Hsia, C. T. 1999. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. 3rd ed. Bloomington:

Isaacson, Nathaniel. 2017. Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese

Kakutani, Michiko. 2017. “Transcript: President Obama on What Books

Kong, Shuyu. 2005. Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the

Li Xiaodong 李晓东. 2017. “Yongbao kehuan chanye fazhan xinshidai” 拥

132 • From Nobel t o Hugo

Milner, Andrew. 2012. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool

Pandell, Lexi. 2016. “WIRED Book Club: Is Three-Body Problem’s Translation

Qian Zhongshu [钱钟书]. 2011. “Inspiration” [Linggan” 灵感]. Tr. Dennis

Richardson, Valerie. 2016. “Critics Mock Nobel Committee for Handing

Song, Mingwei. 2016. “Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science

Wang, David Der-wei. 1997. Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities

Wang Xiaoming 王晓明. 2011. “Liufen tianxia: Jintian de zhongguo

Wu Yan 吴岩. 2011. Kehuan wenxue lungang 科幻文学论纲 (Essentials of

134 • From Nobel t o Hugo

———. 2016. “Chinese VP Calls for Better Science Fiction.” Xinhua

Yu Hua [余华]. 2011. China in Ten Words [Shige cihui li de Zhongguo 十个

Zhang, Yingjin. 2015. “Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature.”

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