Reimagining Utopia in Post-Utopian China: Chinese Science Fiction and the Reinvention of Cultural Tradition
Abstract
Despite the end of China’s socialist dream in the late 1970s, utopian expressions about the nation’s rise and progress have continued to emerge in official and popular imaginaries. These expressions find an outlet in the newly popularized sci-fi genre, and especially in literary experiments that evoke cultural resources ranging from premodern and early modern historical and literary records of scientific achievements to figures, tropes, and myths in classical tales, vernacular novels, and ethnic traditions. These experiments at times validate and support, and at times challenge and subvert the nationalist, progressive, and utopian narratives of the state. This dissertation investigates the ways in which cultural tradition is (re)invented through the medium of sci-fi to reflect and shape new utopian desires as a response to the ideological and socio-economic realities of the post-1978 decades, what I shall call post-utopian times. This term captures the shift in utopian thinking from totalizing master narratives in socialist China to expressions of desires in post-socialist China. By observing that cultural resources can be claimed by different agents to feed into various desires related to China’s trajectory of modernity, I demonstrate that this type of sci-fi experimentation exposes the conscripting discourses of modernization (chapter 2), makes visible structural crises and center-periphery tensions (chapter 3), and explores ecotopias of sustainable human-nature relationship (chapter 4). While what is articulated as Chinese cultural tradition is always already an invention, these inventions deserve a critical examination, for they serve pluralistic desires and attempt to uncover utopian visions from the past. I argue that after the end of socialist utopia, the continual surfacing of utopian impulses through the retrieval of uncharted implications of the past has made possible the science fictional reinvention of cultural tradition.