Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

twentieth-century Chinese popular science writing and science fiction (hereafter SF)¹ and its relationship to the colonial project and industrial modernity traces the development of the genre in China from its early history in the late Qing dynasty through the decade after the New Culture Movement (roughly 1904–1934). The emergence of Chinese SF was a product of the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture that was engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China’s economic and political centers. In particular, I argue that the relationship between SF and Orientalist discourse is a defining feature of the genre in early twentieth-century China. Through readings of historical accounts of the introduction and institutionalization of science in China, pictorial representations of real and imagined scientific and technological innovations, writing on the role of science in the quest for national renewal, and a number of original works of Chinese SF, I demonstrate that late Qing and Republican period intellectuals through the 1930s were preoccupied with the question of the relationship between science, fiction, and empire. In the context of the colonial threat, a profound pessimism emerged about China’s fate as a nation, and this pessimism permeates discourses on science and works of SF from this period.

      I engage with a number of fields, principally modern Chinese literary studies, modern Chinese intellectual history, postcolonial studies, SF studies, and utopian studies. For China scholars, especially cultural and intellectual historians and literary scholars, I provide a survey of the relationship between the emergence of Chinese-language SF and the emergence of modern Chinese literature. For scholars of SF studies, I demonstrate how a previously neglected subset of the SF tradition has been influenced by the legacy of empire and expand the geographic scope of global SF studies. In order to make this work more accessible to those unfamiliar with early twentieth-century China’s intellectual history and its more long-standing historical resonances, I provide biographical notes and citations of accessible English-language studies whenever possible.

      This study parallels other emerging work examining the role of genre fiction in the history of modern Chinese literature and its relationship to an ongoing project of moral and political education through fiction. SF has occupied and continues to hold a unique position in China’s literary scene, as a tool of popularization of scientific knowledge, a vehicle for expressing anxieties and hopes for modernization and globalization, and a medium of social and historical critique. Related to the problems and questions that arise in attempting to define SF as a genre is the question the genealogy of SF in China: while some scholars see prototypical examples of SF in premodern Chinese genres such as fantasy and “stories of the strange” (zhiguai), others have argued variously that SF did not appear in China until the 1930s, 1950s, and even the post-Mao period. I demonstrate that SF emerged as the product of two converging factors during the late Qing: first, the crisis of epistemological consciousness brought about by China’s semicolonial subjugation to European powers, and second, the imperialist imagination of global exchanges and conquest that led to the emergence of the genre in the West and its translation into Chinese via Japan. Writers and readers of SF drew upon China’s tradition of fantastic writing in terms of thematic content and in borrowing many of the formal features of premodern fiction genres. In many cases, late Qing SF also borrowed from the classical tradition in the search for interpretive and epistemological frameworks for European science.

      In my reading of early Chinese SF, I identify a deep-seated anxiety about the emancipatory potential of a genre closely associated with the colonial effort. Late Qing and early Republican Chinese authors were ambivalent about the question of whether the discursive knives of genres associated with empire could be successfully turned against their wielders, and if so, what the implications of adopting such discourse were. One might anticipate Occidentalism²—a dialectical inversion of Orientalism—as a likely response to such bodies of discourse, and this study explores the extent to which this was the case, finding that the response to Orientalism visible in reportage, political discourse, fiction, and visual culture associated with science was far more complex. Orientalism was (and is) a self-generating process, creating and created by the geopolitical realities of the modern world. As Edward Said observed, Orientalism produced knowledge about the East and the West, but this was often simultaneous with or even subsequent to the existence of the political and economic imbalances inherent in the colonial project—Orientalism did not merely represent reality but was in many ways constitutive of it (Said 1979, 13). This impact was so far-reaching and profound that while counter-discourses and acts of subversion were a possibility, fictional discourses of Eastern superiority could not overcome their contextual reality.

      The political reality of Orientalism visibly contradicted what few Occidentalist fictions there were. Efforts to come to grips with Orientalism and the often vain attempts to create counter-discourses and imagine alternate historical trajectories for Chinese and Asian history are at the center of visual and print representations of science emerging in China during this period, but rarely, even in fiction, were they able to overcome the realities of an expanding military and economic European empire. In the context of expanding European and Japanese empire, the perturbing nature of essentialized discourses between East and West proved difficult to counter or surmount, and the prospect of national extinction seemed a palpable threat for many Chinese writers. In the search for lasting solutions, a vexing and perennial issue was what the relationship between Chinese and Western epistemologies would be.

      In broad strokes, the findings and implications of this study are principally concerned with the ways in which Orientalist discourse and the specter of social Darwinism played a critical role in intellectual and popular discourses on modernization and national metamorphosis of the early twentieth century. Some authors tried to carve out spaces in which both would stand on equal footing, while others argued for the superiority of native systems of knowledge. Still others attempted to postulate the terms by which an instrumentalist approach to the material world could work in symmetry with Chinese metaphysical and moral philosophy. In many cases, the perceived binaries between modernity and tradition, East and West, civilization and barbarity, erupted into a kaleidoscopic fractal where long-term solutions were difficult to perceive.

      Many of the metaphors, motifs, and linguistic concerns of the works of SF that I examine are familiar figures in the history of modern Chinese literature at large. One of the most salient images in modern Chinese literature is the iron house (tie wuzi) metaphor of Lu Xun (1881–1936) in his introduction to A Call to Arms (Nahan, 1923), where he describes Chinese society as “an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers—all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?” (Lu Xun quanji [hereafter LXQJ], 1: 437).³

      The figure of the intellectual who is cognizant of the crisis at hand but finds himself unable to intervene appears again in “New Year’s Sacrifice” (“Zhu fu,” 1924) when the I-narrator is unable to offer any solace to the beleaguered widow Xianglin Sao,⁴ also appears throughout the work of Lu Xun. Prior to Lu Xun’s adoption of this narrative persona, this character was also a common protagonist of early Chinese SF, where he most often takes on the role of a traveler, viewing allegorical representations of China through the eyes of an outsider. Emerging in these narratives is a pseudo-ethnographic mapping of the collision of internal and external pressures that faced Chinese society in the early decades of the twentieth century. The similarity of the ethnographic discovery of a benighted populace unaware of their impending doom, for whom salvation appears unlikely, often extends to the image of suffocation itself. Beset by such a sense of crisis, Utopia/Eutopia, I argue, was an unlikely spatio-temporal mode of representation: transcending the iron house as a mode of fantastic writing did not emerge as a characteristic of early Chinese SF. Which is to say, where both Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin have attempted to elucidate the isomorphisms between SF and utopian narrative, I argue that the genres rarely overlapped in the late Qing.⁵ Furthermore, this same sense of crisis and unavailing struggle is often figured in terms of bodily metaphors of illness and medicinal cures—again, seminal metaphors associated with Lu Xun that would go on to become some of the most salient imagery of modern Chinese literature.⁶ A parallel concern is the relationship between past and present, or tradition and modernity, through which similar crises of figuration