{"id":5761,"date":"2021-05-27T14:45:22","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T18:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/?p=5761"},"modified":"2023-04-07T09:17:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T13:17:57","slug":"chinese-sci-fi-viruses-politics-three-dystopian-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/2021\/china-currents\/20-1\/chinese-sci-fi-viruses-politics-three-dystopian-bodies\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Sci-fi, Viruses, Politics: Three Dystopian Bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last few years have been unsettling for Sino-American relations as administrations on both sides have steadily ratcheted up tensions \u2014 intentionally or unintentionally \u2014 with domestic politics taking a front seat, particularly since the onset of COVID-19. This coincided with my research on Chinese science fiction and preparation to teach a class on author Liu Cixin\u2019s \u5218\u6148\u6b23 internationally renowned sci-fi trilogy, The Three Body Problem<\/em> \u4e09\u4f53 (serialized 2006).1<\/a><\/sup> When I taught my new Chinese sci-fi class in the fall of 2020, it seemed fitting that we all stared hard at computer screens to see each other and discuss the language and literature of an increasingly dystopian Three Body <\/em>universe while simultaneously attempting to cope not so bravely with our own non-fictional new world of mostly isolating from social contact.<\/p>\n

As my class studied Liu Cixin\u2019s plot motivator, the cruel excesses of the idealistic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (circa 1965-1975), the U.S. administration was gearing up for a reelection campaign and determined not to \u201cpanic\u201d the population with fears of pandemic, thus choosing instead to ignore science and downplay its seriousness. The resulting millions of U.S. cases leading to more than 400,000 deaths by the time of the transition to the new administration in January 2021, in comparison to scientifically, socially, and politically adept places like Taiwan which effectively minimized the virus threat to about 976 cases and 10 deaths (as of March 9, 2021),2<\/a><\/sup> suggests a Cultural Revolution parallel in which political extremes result in the exact opposite of their intended purpose \u2013 a flip from idealized utopia to realized dystopia. Science was spun as fakery and conspiracy theories occupied the vacuum created by downplaying the situation. The previous administration staged a science fiction reality show that continues to afflict us despite cancellation of the show and the new administration\u2019s corrective course of action.<\/p>\n

These developments found me contemplating dystopia and confronting big questions about truth, fiction, reality, humanity, and how science fiction can help us navigate our reality. More specifically, what does science fiction tell us about the relationship between ideology and a dystopian world view?<\/p>\n

A look at the last century of science fiction in China facilitates exploration of this question. Science fiction came into China during the late Qing and early Republican eras introduced by Liang Qichao and Lu Xun.3<\/a><\/sup> Liang\u2019s 1902 magazine New Fiction\u00a0<\/em>\u65b0\u5c0f\u8bf4 \u201cextolled a genre he called \u2018philosophical science fiction\u2019\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> and Lu Xun\u2019s first published work was his translation of Jules Verne\u2019s 1865 novel De la Terre \u00e0 <\/em>la Lune<\/em> (From the Earth to the Moon <\/em>\u6708\u754c\u65c5\u884c)from Japanese in 1903.5<\/a><\/sup> Soon thereafter Chinese writers began publishing their own works of science fiction,6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span>but the genre didn\u2019t come to the fore in China until the 2000s, with the major exception of Hong Kong author Ni Kuang (1935 \u2013 present). In the following paragraphs, I briefly analyze three works of Chinese science fiction that provide clues to the propensity toward an ideologically driven dystopian \u201cfuture\u201d faced by humanity. First, I introduce the extreme satire in the form of socio-political allegory in the Republican Era Cat Country <\/em>\u732b\u57ce\u8bb0 (1933 by Lao She \u8001\u820d (1899-1966)), which is narrated by a character who crash-lands his spaceship on Mars and finds a cat person civilization even more vile than his own. Next, Ni Kuang\u2019s \u502a\u5321 Virus<\/em> \u75c5\u6bd2 (1995) researches the relationship between ideology and biology in search of an uninfected brain. Finally, Liu Cixin\u2019s Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em> extrapolates ideological excess to a (not so) future environmental and political dystopia to imaginative our harrowing destiny.<\/p>\n

I. Lao She<\/strong>\u2019s Cat Country<\/em> and the Transposition of Satire in the Solar System <\/strong><\/p>\n

Lao She\u2019s Cat Country<\/em> \u732b\u57ce\u8bb0 (1933) is a satirical allegory about life under political division and social upheaval in the early Republican period. In his sarcastic preface to the novel, Lao She states from the outset that \u201cCat Country<\/em> is a nightmare.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup> In response to complaints that the novel being too pessimistic he says that \u201ccat people are cat people, and they\u2019ve got nothing to do with us.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> The protagonist and first-person narrator of Cat Country<\/em> travels to Mars and finds a civilization of Cat People (maoren <\/em>\u732b\u4eba) whose social, political, and moral culture outstrips that of his native China. The story begins with a crash-landing, after which the narrator proceeds to explore and critique Cat Country culture from the point of view of a \u201cforeigner.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrator is hired by a wealthy landowner named Big Scorpion to protect his forest of drug-leafed trees (the only food Cat People eat). Big Scorpion\u2019s psyche represents Cat Country moral character (and Chinese warlordism) in a microcosm, summed up by his assertion: \u201cOur abilities to kill one another get better day by day, and our methods of killing are almost as marvelous as making poetry.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> The narrator befriends the landowner\u2019s enlightened son, Young Scorpion, who introduces him to and helps him understand society. Cat Country\u2019s social and political evils parallel those of Chinese society: drug addiction, warlordism, foreign influence and incursion, an irrational education system, generational divide, urban-rural divide, women\u2019s rights, concubinage and child sex slavery, environmental destruction, prostitution, famine, poverty, crime, corruption, sloth, filth, cowardice, disloyalty, and superciliousness.<\/p>\n

In the manner of a sociologist conducting field research, the narrator documents the deteriorating cat civilization while exploring the country. He checks off the ills in each segment of society from chapter to chapter. The narrator visits a government office, a school, a library, and a social organization. He talks with the locals, as he develops \u201ca diagnosis of Cat Country\u2019s illness.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> The narrator describes the chaos of a generationally and politically divided country in which young people and \u201cscholars of the new\u201d (xin xuezhe <\/em>\u65b0\u5b66\u8005) demonstrate their learning with foreign words that nobody understands, adding the nonsensical suffix fusiji <\/em>\u592b\u53f8\u57fa to their names and other ideas.11<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span>For example, the belief in revolutionary new ideas is \u201ceverybody-fusiji<\/em>-ism\u201d \u5927\u5bb6\u592b\u53f8\u57fa\u4e3b\u4e49 which the narrator notes is \u201can ideology that is really good at killing people.”12<\/a><\/sup> The problems are both societal and individual, and the narrator sticks with allegorical allusions using the highly charged contemporary Chinese code word \u201cpatient\u201d (bingfu<\/em> \u75c5\u592b) in describing the state of national essence, moral integrity, and revolution. Young Scorpion is too pessimistic, the narrator notes, \u201cbut naturally I\u2019m from peaceful, happy China, so I always thought Cat Country had hope; a person who isn\u2019t sick can\u2019t easily understand the reason a sick person (bingfu<\/em>) is pessimistic.” 13<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0The narrator speculates existentially:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know which god created this group of low-lives. They neither have the kind of ability that ants have nor the intelligence of humans. The god that created them is probably intentionally joking with them. They have schools but not education, they have politicians but not political process (government), they have people (ren <\/em>\u4eba) but not moral character (renge <\/em>\u4eba\u683c), they have face but not shame. This joke is just played way too extreme.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cimportant people\u201d among the revolutionaries have a simple solution: the equal division of drug leaves that are society\u2019s food, which is referred to as new \u201cism\u201d called \u201cdrug-leaf everybody fusiji-ism\u201d (miye dajia fusij zhuyi <\/em>\u8ff7\u53f6\u5927\u5bb6\u592b\u53f8\u57fa\u4e3b\u4e49).15<\/a><\/sup> Allusions to China\u2019s bleak internecine warfare continue right up to the end of the novel. Cat Country\u2019s self-annihilation (civil war) is facilitated with the help of foreign \u201cshort soldiers\u201d (Japanese invaders) who put the country\u2019s remaining two cat people in a cage and watch as they bite each other to death. The book closes with the narrator luckily escaping Mars and returning to his \u201cgreat, brilliant, and free China.” 16<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The issues and ills of Cat Country and Cat People that Lao She virtually catalogues could have been selected from the titles in New Youth<\/em> (Xin qingnian<\/em> \u65b0\u9752\u5e74) or New Tide <\/em>(Xin chao<\/em> \u65b0\u6f6e) magazines in the 1900s and 1920s. Topics include science, literature, women\u2019s issues, education, philosophy, labor, capitalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and even Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity and Freudian psychology. Through science fiction Lao She put his first-person narrator on Mars to critique the state of Chinese society which concludes, through extrapolation, with the self-annihilation of the Chinese people in his contemporary dystopian nightmare.<\/p>\n

II. Virus<\/em> (1996) and Ideological Metaphor<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Cat Country <\/em>critiqued the ideological illness of China\u2019s society and politics in the most obvious of satirical allegories, approximately 60 years later Ni Kuang\u2019s Virus<\/em> presented a subtler critique of the illness afflicting society. Virus<\/em> is one of some 150 novels in Ni Kuang\u2019s Wisely Series (Weisili xilie<\/em>\u536b\u65af\u7406\u7cfb\u5217) that take the name Wisely for the main character. It is number 89 in Ni Kuang\u2019s series of sci-fi novels published by Taiwan Crown Publishing.17<\/a><\/sup> The novel is focused on the hunt for a criminal who steals the heads of corpses and is thus termed Head Robber (rentou da dao<\/em> \u4eba\u5934\u5927\u76d7). The protagonist Wisely is a first-person narrator and detective who travels broadly, from Hong Kong to Europe to Singapore and elsewhere, as he investigates these mysterious crimes.<\/p>\n

In his brief preface, Ni Kuang alludes to the allegorical scope of the novel as well as the ideological component of a virus, almost giving away the plot that is about to unfold over some 200 pages:<\/p>\n

[Some people] consider that the view of the main character of the story who believes herself to be \u2018humanity\u2019s public enemy\u2019 (renlei gongdi<\/em>\u4eba\u7c7b\u516c\u654c) is too extreme. Well, please try to tell those who call themselves \u201cpeople\u2019s saviors\u201d (renmin jiuxing <\/em>\u4eba\u6c11\u6551\u661f) that they have been inflicted by an extreme virus and are traitors to humanity (renjian <\/em>\u4eba\u5978) and don\u2019t know it themselves. What would be the result? Would those afflicted with the virus consider you an enemy or friend?<\/p>\n

Or tell those who\u2019ve secretly had contact with criminals that they should face facts and not be harmed by an ‘ignorance virus’ (wuzhi bingdu <\/em>\u65e0\u77e5\u75c5\u6bd2) or a ‘shamelessness virus’ (buyaolian bingdu <\/em>\u4e0d\u8981\u8138\u75c5\u6bd2). Would they consider you an enemy or a friend?<\/p>\n

Viruses run rampant. How about the true faces of humans?18<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story starts with Wisely at a biology conference where he is contacted by a Scotland Yard acquaintance who informs him of the disappearance of heads from recently deceased people in funeral homes all over Europe. Upon returning home, presumably in England, Wisely finds a group of women visiting. He knows these women from a magical sect that practices the \u201cfalling head technique\u201d (jiangtou shu <\/em>\u964d\u5934\u672f), which is of unclear purpose but seems to involve mysticism about separating the consciousness from the body. These sorceresses ask for his help solving the death of their famous grandmaster the Guess King (Cai wang dashi<\/em> \u731c\u738b\u5927\u5e08), who also turns up headless after a magical regimen. The allegorical nature of the technique and the mystery here is directly indicated by this nomenclature. Wisely agrees to help find the murderer. The grandmaster is connected to a princess of Asian extraction at an unnamed Royal Palace. The princess is also a scientist doing research on how viruses affect people\u2019s minds and thus their behavior and actions. The plot slowly builds the concept of ideology as virus as Wisely investigates, facilitated by the introduction of one of the princess\u2019 collaborators, a scientist named Tian Huo who has separately been exploring this virus theory without knowledge that the princess is also a sorceress:<\/p>\n

There are all kinds of bacterial viruses that harm people in today\u2019s earth. They are all called pests (haichong <\/em>\u5bb3\u866b), but they aren\u2019t what humanity recognizes as low-level life forms. It\u2019s just that their bodies are small. But they are actually a high-level form of life. What he means is: a high-level life form with thought (sixiang <\/em>\u601d\u60f3).\u00a019<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This explanation is framed as a war between humanity and bacterial viruses, driven by the biologically founded fear that \u201cwhile both sides suffer huge losses, bacterial viruses adapt no matter what weapons humans attack them with and nobody knows from where they originate.\u201d20<\/a><\/sup> Tian Huo has two possible conclusions: \u201cFirst, they [viruses] are being directed by some kind of power and acting on the orders of this kind of power.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> Tian Huo notes another option: \u201cThe second possibility is that there isn\u2019t a power leading them, but rather bacterial viruses organize themselves, group together and form a giant army and do battle with humanity.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> This is an insinuation that viruses might be a non-human alien power in which the virus resembles an alien species, thus subtly justifying the sci-fi designation of what at first glance appears to be a detective novel.<\/p>\n

The second sci-fi element of Virus<\/em> is the \u201cmagic\u201d used by the grandmaster sorcerer and his female disciples. Through conversations with Tian Huo, who believes Wisely is a sympathizer, Wisely zeroes in on the princess, eventually meeting her in the palace. It turns out that she is also one of the grandmaster\u2019s disciples, unbeknownst to the others, and has been working with him to hunt for one uninfected brain in all humanity (besides the grandmaster and herself). The goal of their search for a virus-free brain is to establish a baseline against which to measure other brains for degree of infection in their attempt to prove their theory of viruses. Although they steal the heads of famous people and thinkers from funeral parlors throughout Europe, none of them appears uninfected.<\/p>\n

Wisely\u2019s meeting with the princess provides the final narration of the motivations and events that created this mysterious case. The princess seeks to save humanity but laments being labeled as \u201chumanity\u2019s public enemy.\u201d Moreover, the princess and grandmaster are faced with failure to prove that humanity\u2019s afflictions are caused by viruses, which are not recognized by science itself. People are zombies (xingshi zourou <\/em>\u884c\u5c38\u8d70\u8089) and diseases such as cancer and even a person\u2019s longevity, as well as all kinds of abnormalities in their thinking \u2013 greed, cruelty, cowardice, and slavishness \u2013 are caused by viruses.23<\/a><\/sup> Their theory views viruses as creating thought (sixiang<\/em> \u601d\u60f3) and the virus manifests thought as abnormal (bingtai <\/em>\u75c5\u6001), although this is unrecognizable to its human carriers.24<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0The princess concludes: \u201cIf you want to cure this illness you must first know you\u2019re sick. And virtually all of humanity is sick, controlled by viruses.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> The worst virus is termed \u201cslave\/slavishness virus\u201d (nuxing bingdu\u00a0<\/em>\u5974\u6027\u75c5\u6bd2) that manifests in the afflicted slave who will \u201ckneel down and lick the toes of the powerful (qiangquanzhe <\/em>\u5f3a\u6743\u8005).\u201d26<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/a>Those powerful leaders have what the princess calls a \u201ctraitor to humanity virus\u201d (renjian bingdu <\/em>\u4eba\u5978\u75c5\u6bd2) and act in common \u201cto help the virus harm humanity.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Unable to find an uninfected brain, the grandmaster and princess conclude that besides the princess herself, the only healthy brain to be found is that of the grandmaster sorcerer himself, who thereupon donates his own head to \u201cscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Readers learn that \u201cinvisible\u201d viruses are so infinitely small they are undetectable by any measuring instruments but produce infected thought \u2013 a metaphor for ideology. There is a collaboration between viruses and political leadership wherein the powerful use viruses as a weapon to wield power against humanity. Enlightenment in the form of recognizing this theory and the act of proving the theory by locating uninfected brains is apparently possible, but a steep uphill battle especially as leadership is culpable in the \u201ccrimes.\u201d Ni Kuang\u2019s critique of ideology and power\u00a0through the virus metaphor indicates that the infection afflicts all of humanity (quan renlei<\/em>\u00a0\u5168\u4eba\u7c7b). Power virus-infected political leadership are traitors to humanity and operate to cause immeasurable destruction that is simultaneously invisible to humans and science \u2013 a dystopia in which we all live. It is a small leap to see this idea replicated in 21st century conspiracy theories. Is there even an infinitesimal hope of humanity\u2019s survival? The dystopian pessimism of Virus <\/em>continues in extremis<\/em> in Liu Cixin\u2019s three-volume epic, The Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em>.<\/p>\n

III. The Three Body<\/em><\/strong> Problem<\/em> (2006) and the Fatal Ideological Nature of Humanity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cat Country <\/em>author Lao She died by his own hand during the Cultural Revolution, a fact noted by Liu Cixin in The Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em> when he lists the prominent intellectuals who chose to commit suicide rather than suffer the ignominy of public political persecution in mass struggle sessions during China\u2019s \u201ccontinued revolution.\u201d Liu uses detailed description of struggle sessions that pit children against their parents, wives against husbands, and students against teachers to depict the atrocity of the Cultural Revolution to set up the psychological rationale to justify his main character Ye Wenjie\u2019s appeal to an alien civilization for help: \u201cCome here, I\u2019ll help you obtain this world. Our civilization is already powerless to solve its own problems and needs your power to intervene.\u201d28<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Technology changes from the 1930s to the 1990s to the 2020s, but human ideological issues appear to stay the same. Cat Country<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>Mars traveling narrator, who chronicles the final stage of dissolution of Cat People civilization, is replaced by the international detective in Ni Kuang\u2019s Virus<\/em> who searches out head hunters trying to free humanity from ideology infection. The homicide continues in Liu Cixin\u2019s epic depiction of a global catastrophe facing humanity in The Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em>. Ni Kuang\u2019s theoretical narrative metaphor of ideology is replaced by ideological practice depicted throughout the broad sweep of metanarrative in The Three Body Problem<\/em> and its sequels. Socio-political critique in The Three Body Problem<\/em> is even bleaker than Virus<\/em> and transcends even the malevolence of stealing brains from corpses for \u201cscientific\u201d research. Politics and political movements inspire tragic action that begets greater tragedy as humanity is depicted as an infinitesimally small species in a universe inherently eviler than any biological agent participating in a meta-Darwinian struggle for survival.<\/p>\n

The Three Body Problem<\/em> depicts the wholesale reorientation of the world due to the breakdown of social norms over the last thousands of years of so-called \u201ccivilization.\u201d The basis of this threat is narrated partly through the genius of the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie \u53f6\u6587\u6d01 who knowingly initiates the global crisis in to take revenge on Chinese society for the devastation visited upon her family and society in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (circa 1966-1976). As a university student she witnessed the brutal murder of her famous scientist\/professor father at the hands of the Red Guards in a struggle session. She herself is almost killed a couple years later as the political machinations of the Cultural Revolution leadership reach into her remote work camp in the northeastern Greater Khingan Range (Da xingan ling\u00a0<\/em>\u5927\u5174\u5b89\u5cad) and a political faction attempts to gather crucial incriminating material to leverage against its powerful enemies (her father was peripherally related to the development of China\u2019s atomic and hydrogen bombs). Science is always subservient to ideology as proven in Liu Cixin\u2019s depiction of persecution of many scientists and their families for their adherence to so-called \u201creactionary\u201d scientific theories, standards, rules of protocol, evidence, logic, and reason in their research.<\/p>\n

The pivotal Chapter 7, titled \u201cA Crazy Era\u201d (fengkuang niandai <\/em>\u75af\u72c2\u5e74\u4ee3), has special significance for the author since \u201cthe Cultural Revolution had torn Liu Cixin\u2019s family apart,\u201d29<\/a><\/sup> along with the families of many other Chinese at the time. Liu originally wanted to start the Chinese version of the novel with the Cultural Revolution but reportedly buried it in flashbacks instead of giving it up-front prominence. The English translator, Ken Liu, suggested moving the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the story from its seventh chapter location in order to clarify why Ye Wenjie welcomed an alien invasion for English readers.30<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Political persecution against academic intellectuals through struggle sessions was particularly intense during the early part of the Cultural Revolution, as expressly described by the narrator of The Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Compared with other evildoers, reactionary academic authority figures have a special characteristic: when they were first attacked, they were always arrogant and stubborn. This is also the phase when their death rate was highest. In the capital, over forty days\u00a0 more than 1,700 objects of struggle that were beaten to death. Even more people chose an even faster channel to escape the craziness. Lao She, Wu Han, Ge Bozan, Fu Lei, Zhao Jiuzhang, Yi Qun, Wen Jie, Hai Mo and others, all ended their own seriously respectable lives.31<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ye Wenjie\u2019s father was one of the survivors of this \u201cfirst stage\u201d of struggle against the \u201creactionary academic authority figures:\u201d<\/p>\n

Ye Zhetai lived from the start of the Cultural Revolution until now, and furthermore was always stuck in phase one. He didn\u2019t confess, didn\u2019t commit suicide, and wasn\u2019t numbed either. When this physics professor walked onto the criticism stage, his spiritual air clearly said: let me bear an even heavier cross!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Professor Ye\u2019s uncompromising righteousness made his brutal public murder even more cruel. Ye Wenjie\u2019s personal experience of such cruelty imbued her with deep pessimism about ideology and human nature. Liu Cixin describes his interest in using sci-fi to explore the extremes of good and evil in terms of near addiction that led to his use of the Cultural Revolution as a plot device:<\/p>\n

A true turning point [in my development of sci-fi] originated in a discovery. I saw a peculiar function of science fiction literature: In the real world a parallel for kind of evil can be found in the world design of science fiction and can be normalized and justified. The opposite is also the same, in the orthodox and unorthodox, the good and evil of science fiction, there is only meaning in the corresponding world. This discovery fascinated me and I sunk into it unable to extract myself, having derived a kind of evil pleasure in it.32<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Liu explores the limits of that evil in the first book of the trilogy primarily through Ye Wenjie. A few years after her father\u2019s death, Ye Wenjie is saved from near death at her work camp by a researcher at the nearby top-secret space research center, Radar Peak, who was one of her father\u2019s former students. The secret purpose of the so-called radar facility, however, is to make contact with alien life in the cosmos and thereby garner glory for the revolution and nation through a shocking \u201cfirst\u201d in human history, an implied follow-up to the glory attributed to China\u2019s 1964 nuclear development successes. It turns out that Ye Wenjie is the only one brilliant enough to accomplish this tremendous feat.<\/p>\n

Ye Wenjie has her own motivations \u2013 to find a far grander solution to the reality of human depravity. She is driven by extreme disillusion with the morality of her fellow humans. She figures out how to use the sun to amplify the signal of Radar Peak\u2019s cosmic antenna and penetrate the depths of the universe, resulting in a response from a Trisolaran listening post. There are \u201cgood\u201d aliens it seems, as a particular listening post worker warns her not to ever respond again because doing so would result in his own people coming to colonize Earth and exterminate all its people. Unfortunately, Ye is traumatized and welcomes wholesale human genocide because it is better than the unending catastrophes brought down upon humans by fellow humans over the course of thousands of years of \u201ccivilization.\u201d Here we find echoes of modern Chinese literature\u2019s leading voice, Lu Xun \u9c81\u8fc5 [1881-1936], whose critique of the Chinese civilization and culture as \u201ccannibalism\u201d \u5403\u4eba through the moon-gazing figure of the madman from his 1918 masterpiece short story \u201cDiary of a Madman\u201d \u72c2\u4eba\u65e5\u8bb0. \u201cA Crazy Era\u201d directly indicts the inhumanity of her compatriots and also nods toward allegorical association with Lu Xun\u2019s moon-gazing \u201cmadman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lu Xun\u2019s caustic critique analyzes the maliciousness of traditional Chinees culture which doctrinarily enables persecution and humiliation of its members. The direct allegory of \u201cDiary of a Madman\u201d is bracketed by the madman\u2019s mental illness when he recorded his diary and satirical \u201crecovery\u201d from it thereafter. The irony in \u201cDiary of a Madman\u201d and Lu Xun\u2019s critique of national character through the 1926 novella \u201cThe True Story of Ah Q\u201d \u963f Q \u6b63\u4f20 are given new voice by Liu Cixin through flashbacks to the events of the Cultural Revolution as well as jumps into the future of Earth when the Trisolaran aliens prepare to invade. Liu Cixin\u2019s trilogy delineates 450 years of Earth future events through the use of time travel enabled by cryogenics. Liu\u2019s sci-fi plot explores the \u201cDark Forest\u201d paradigm (also the title of volume 2 of the trilogy Hei<\/em>\u2019an senlin <\/em>\u9ed1\u6697\u68ee\u6797 [2008]) that elucidates the dangers of making one\u2019s own civilization accessible to aliens.<\/p>\n

An outline of the entire trilogy and its multitude of intriguing characters is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that Liu Cixin draws upon his own abundant sci-fi imagination informed by the likes of Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation <\/em>series (1951), who is cited by name in the text, to depict the factors that cause his nation\u2019s people to turn on one another during the Cultural Revolution. Liu further explores the consequences of such ideological fanaticism and political struggle as it informs the thinking (eventual fascism) of the international community as the tragedy is extended to a global scale in response to imminent Trisolaran invasion. Various other sci-fi story elements include spaceship battles and the scientific pursuit of travel near or at light speed which the author employs in his endeavor to imagine the implications of an intergalactic struggle for survival. When all humans are rounded up and packed into concentrations camps in Australia prior to being sent to colonies on Mars, the reader is certain that Liu has accomplished his purpose of imagining the extreme consequences of evil. But this measure of extremity lasts only briefly. By the end of the trilogy the annihilation of civilization is surpassed through the process of intergalactic Darwinian struggle into dimensions unrecognizable to humans and aliens, resulting in eventual obliteration of the universe. Dystopia in extremis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

VI. Contemporary Virus Politics<\/strong><\/p>\n

The U.S. experience with the coronavirus pandemic that emerged under the Trump administration mirrors the undermining of reality that ideology brought to the sci-fi novels analyzed above. The alternate ideological positions and interpretation of reality of competing political parties that manifested during the Trump years and continue today have produced a cloud of disorientation. The politics of anti-science and anti-reason during the Cultural Revolution are analogous to the socially irresponsible rejection of science in public health reflected by persecution of doctors for warning about the coronavirus danger, or an administration whose leadership contended that face masks and social distancing were not necessary and that the virus would \u201cmagically disappear\u201d and cases would go down to zero.<\/p>\n

Extreme ideological spin in socio-political discourse served a national leadership deeply insecure about its own legitimacy. Campaign chants of \u201cFire Fauci\u201d two days before the 2020 election amount to an ironic public eulogy for the hundreds of thousands dead at the hand of anti-science fanatics as if ideology has the fire power to defeat the virus. Politics over science actually amounted to unilateral disarmament in the battle against the virus. It appears that Ni Kuang\u2019s ironic critique that viruses are ideological organisms that cause moral character abnormalities is prescient. This unilateral disarmament in the war against the coronavirus is true to form for the former U.S. administration, which had already chalked up an impressive list of retreat from strategic initiatives designed to hold the battle lines against Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other international competitors, as demonstrated by withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, the World Health Organization, the Iran Nuclear Treaty, and starting a trade war with China that could be \u201cwon\u201d only by accepting defeat measured in the loss of more jobs than it created,33<\/a><\/sup> and renegotiation of the NAFTA treaty that was \u201cwon\u201d by simple tweaking of the terms which do nothing to bring back manufacturing to rust belt states such as Michigan.<\/p>\n

The Cultural Revolution chapters set the story up for this metanarrative through depiction of ideological weaponry exposed in practice by Red Guard factions and their use of dialectical materialism (weiwu zhuyi <\/em>\u552f\u7269\u4e3b\u4e49) to battle reactionary idealism (weixin zhuyi <\/em>\u552f\u5fc3\u4e3b\u4e49) in persecution (struggle) sessions. While the 10-year Cultural Revolution turns out to be a \u201cblip\u201d of history in comparison to the 450 years it took for the Trisolaran invasion to arrive, the ideological battle of how society is organized and governed is consequential, especially considering that 450 years seems \u201cinsignificant\u201d in comparison to 100 million years later when the entire cosmos is vaporized at the end of volume three, Death<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s End<\/em> (2010), for which a literal translation of the title may be more appropriate: \u201cthe god of death lives forever\u201d (Sishen yongsheng <\/em>\u6b7b\u795e\u6c38\u751f).<\/p>\n

Here we are today in a coronavirus-infected world where deaths are in the millions globally, and where the first reaction of supposedly competent governments is to protect their own images and lie to their people in order to protect them from panic, even to the extent of persecuting those who would bring the truth out, be they physicians in Wuhan or leaders of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda. This is an international, intercultural phenomenon that engulfs the world, from Brazil to Iran, whose science denial and news suppression subsequently made them competitive in the race to top infection rates. Think of a White House that tried desperately to keep the stock market from tanking by fighting the virus with a rosy public relations campaign and lies that became clear as authorized recordings of the president acknowledging the seriousness of the situation surfaced more than half a year later in Bob Woodward\u2019s book Rage<\/em> (Simon & Schuster, 2020).<\/p>\n

In the U.S. the virus has split the population into madmen engaging in \u201ccultural wars\u201d with a political divide between science and ideology. Those afflicted with Ni Kuang\u2019s \u201ctraitor to humanity virus\u201d and \u201cslavishness virus\u201d spend time \u201clicking the toes\u201d of the power leadership, perhaps exemplified by the racism of an administration that leveraged linguistic tropes to assign blame for the virus and deflect its own bungling of a response and attempted to spin 400,000 virus deaths into a \u201csuccess\u201d [think \u201cOperation Warp Speed\u201d]. Would Liu Cixin be surprised that such political dystopianism has divided the country and even families into political extremes, even as members of those same fragmented families are dying? Virus politics creates a severe challenge to the political system and undermines beliefs in democracy by pitting mysticism against scientific practice and reasoning, a state of affairs that would surprise neither Lao She or Ni Kuang. It seems we\u2019re back to idealism versus materialism. In the context of the U.S. presidential election of 2020, the writer Roxane Gay takes a similarly bleak view of humanity:<\/p>\n

I expect to hear a lot of frenzied political discourse over the next several months. I imagine pundits will try to understand how the 2020 election panned out and why. Too many white liberals will obsess over early exit polls indicating that 20 percent of Black men and a significant number of the overly broad categories of Latinos and Asians voted for Mr. Trump. They\u2019ll do this instead of reckoning with how more white women voted for the president this time around and how white men remain the most significant demographic of his base. They will say that once more, Black women saved America from itself, which of course, we did, even though some things don\u2019t deserve salvation.34<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cSome things don\u2019t deserve salvation\u201d recalls Professor Ye Wenjie\u2019s decision to invite the Trisolarans to invade Earth, as cited above: \u201cCome here. I will help you obtain this world. Our civilization is powerless to solve its own problems and needs your power to intervene.”35<\/a><\/sup> These lines point to the idea that Liu Cixin and Roxane Gay are trying to make the audience think about the values we propagate.<\/p>\n

Dr. Anthony Fauci was sidelined by the previous administration, and here in Atlanta many epidemiologists warned that the threat wasn\u2019t going away soon. The high-level political appointee from the Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps an ironic designation of the time, ranting on Facebook about the threat of medical scientists (and their calculators?) to the president\u2019s reelection is a good example of cult power transcending science. Those who don\u2019t view the virus as a \u201choax,\u201d however, needed to help prepare their social circles, and their students, to cope with a deadly health crisis until vaccines were delivered.<\/p>\n

Taking a lesson from Ni Kuang\u2019s Virus<\/em>, we are not only fighting a deadly pathogen but also fighting the invisible effects of ideology, something the U.S. shares with Brazilian, Chinese, and Iranian victims of politics and radicalism over the eons. Ni Kuang and Liu Cixin have rightly, albeit obliquely, analyzed the political reality, and although Western sci-fi filmmakers typically find \u201cheroes\u201d among the milieu who appear to save the world, Liu Cixin\u2019s dystopian ending should be a reality check to such imagined Hollywood happy endings. Science says that even vaccines are not going to help the U.S. out of coronavirus dystopia until the poorer countries of the world are also vaccinated. Can a happy ending be achieved at the current rate of virus mutation?<\/p>\n

A happy ending lie is not requisite in every culture\u2019s literary enterprise. Depressingly, Liu Cixin\u2019s sci-fi world manifests unimaginable human suffering, concentration camps in Australia holding the world\u2019s population as they wait to ferry to Mars colony, and allied international starships turning on one another even as the Trisolarans wipe out the human race. Projecting this logic, the lies of our illustrious leaders will come back to haunt us despite the eventual defeat of the virus. \u201cWho could have known\u201d how bad the virus would hit us and that it could be transmitted asymptomatically? Probably Liu Cixin and Anthony Fauci, but certainly not political leaders who sold their stock and invested after insider briefings on the forecast extent of the coronavirus at the same time they and the president were downplaying it. The next few months and years of political strife in the U.S. and worldwide may prove The Three Body<\/em> Problem<\/em> an apt allegory for these times, especially as Netflix prepares for a television adaptation produced by the producers of The Game of Thrones<\/em>.36<\/a><\/sup> Fiction is less strange than true life, again, an example of the invisible \u201cvirus of ideology.\u201d Consider the calls by Georgia Republican senators for the Republican Georgia Secretary of State to resign after the election, asserting \u201cmismanagement and lack of transparency\u201d and \u201cembarrassment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t you know it, those senators had to head to a runoff in January 2021 because they didn\u2019t win 50% +1 vote on election day, and thus doubled down on their propaganda games, which meant licking toes (thanks to Ni Kuang for the metaphor). But the Secretary of State fired back: \u201cThe facts are the facts, regardless of outcomes,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cIn this state, this time, this election on Election Day was an amazing success.\u201d37<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Although we\u2019ve been \u201csafe\u201d in our isolated studies, facing students in the classroom through masks and plexiglass, our hybrid world of physical and virtual classrooms are two new types of \u201cspaceships\u201d designed for hygiene and carrying us toward a new normalcy. Dystopia is as dystopia does and creates meaningful metaphors in the process. If the \u201creal\u201d world suddenly resembles science fiction dystopia, can this literary genre act as a roadmap to help us navigate our reality? The struggle between truth and fiction highlights a reality that not only resembles but potentially surpasses science fiction. Or perhaps better put by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat<\/em>\u2019s Cradle<\/em>, \u201cAll of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brancaccio, David, Nova Safo, and Alex Schroeder. \u201cHas Trump kept his promises to U.S. manufacturing and Carrier?\u201d Marketplace Morning Report, November 2, 2020. https:\/\/www.marketplace.org\/2020\/11\/02\/trump-carrier-manufacturing-jobs-indiana-china-tariffs-factories-steelworkers\/, accessed March 14, 2021.<\/p>\n

Friedlander, Peter. \u201cInternational best-seller ‘The Three Body Problem’ to be adapted as a Netflix original series.\u201d September 1, 2020. https:\/\/about.netflix.com\/en\/news\/the-three-body-problem-netflix-original-series, accessed October 1, 2020.<\/p>\n

Liu Cixin \u5218\u6148\u6b23. Santi<\/em>\u300a\u4e09\u4f53\u300b[The Three Body problem]. Chongqing: Chongqing chu ban she \u91cd\u5e86: \u91cd\u5e86\u51fa\u7248\u793e, 2008.<\/p>\n

Liu Cixin \u5218\u6148\u6b23. \u201cChongfan Yidian yuan \u2013 kehuan chuangzuo shinian huigu\u201d \u91cd\u8fd4\u4f0a\u7538\u56ed\u2014\u2014\u79d1\u5e7b\u521b\u4f5c\u5341\u5e74\u56de\u987e[Returning to the Garden of Eden \u2013 a look back on ten years of science fiction works]. Nanfang wentan \u5357\u65b9\u6587\u575b[Southern cultural forum], Issue 6 (November 15, 2010). Reprint in Xianggang shangbao wang<\/em> \u9999\u6e2f\u5546\u62a5\u7f51(August 24, 2015). https:\/\/www.hkcd.com\/content\/2015-08\/24\/content_953575.html, accessed March 14, 2021.<\/p>\n

Ni Kuang \u502a\u5321. Bingdu: Ni Kuang kehuan xiaoshuo 89\u00a0 <\/em>\u75c5\u6bd2\uff1a\u502a\u5321\u79d1\u5e7b\u7a7a\u95f4 89 [Virus<\/em>: Ni Kuang science fiction 89]. 1995. Taibei: Huangguan wenxue chubanshe, 1996.<\/p>\n

Rojas, Rick and Richard Fausset. \u201cGeorgia Senators Ask Election Official to Resign in G.O.P. Squabble.\u201d New York Times. November 10, 2020. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/11\/09\/us\/kelly-loeffler-david-perdue-raffensperger.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage, accessed November 10, 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cSanti<\/em> (Liu Cixin zhu kehuan xiaoshuo)\u201d \u4e09\u4f53 (\u5218\u6148\u6b23\u8457\u79d1\u5e7b\u5c0f\u8bf4). https:\/\/baike.baidu.com\/item\/\u4e09\u4f53\/5739303, accessed May 13, 2021.<\/p>\n

Wang Jiashui \u738b\u52a0\u6c34. \u201c Wo guo jindai xuezhe\u00a0 dui kexue xiaoshuo de tansuo\u201d \u6211\u56fd\u8fd1\u4ee3\u5b66\u8005\u5bf9\u79d1\u5b66\u5c0f\u8bf4\u7684\u63a2\u7d22 (Our modern scholars\u2019 investigations into science fiction), Science Times<\/em> \u79d1\u5b66\u65f6\u62a5 (August 2008), http:\/\/news.sciencenet.cn\/sbhtmlnews\/2007815234459373187063.html?id=187063<\/a>, accessed March 10, 2021<\/p>\n

Wu Yan, Yao Jianbin & Andrea Lingenfelter (Translator). \u201cA Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction,\u201d Chinese Literature Today<\/em>, 7:1 (June 29, 2018), 44-53.<\/p>\n

\u201cZhongguo kehuan xiaoshuo tuijian top20 <\/em>\u4e2d\u56fd\u79d1\u5e7b\u5c0f\u8bf4\u63a8\u8350top20 [Top 20 recommended works of Chinese science fiction], https:\/\/www.douban.com\/doulist\/1595565\/, accessed February 6, 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction The last few years have been unsettling for Sino-American relations as administrations on both sides have steadily ratcheted up tensions \u2014 intentionally or unintentionally \u2014 with domestic politics taking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":5762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[982],"tags":[],"topic":[],"journal-year":[1067],"coauthors":[167],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChinese Sci-fi, Viruses, Politics: Three Dystopian Bodies | China Research Center<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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