When CCTV, China’s largest state television broadcaster, tried to hold an interview series on the topic of science fiction, a hundred-plus studio audience members baffled the TV hosts by erupting into chants of: “Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!”, which is a quote from the Three Body Problem, a story about an alien invasion of earth written by Liu Cixin. This trilogy has become an internationally acclaimed work and a milestone for the resurgence in popularity of science fiction in China. In 2015 Liu Cixin was personally honored by vice president Li Yuanchao in a meeting at Zhongnanhai where he described Chinese science fiction as a “positive force”.
This, however, has not always been the case. After the founding of the People’s Republic, Chinese science fiction, as a branch of socialist literature, was handed the responsibility for popularizing scientific knowledge as well as describing a plan for the future and motivating society to achieve it. Paradoxically, as China actually modernized due to the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, these enthusiastic dreams of the future gradually disappeared from Chinese science fiction. Readers and writers seemed to fall out of romantic, idealistic utopias and back into reality (Xia Jia, 2014). Moreover, following the campaign to “eradicate spiritual pollution” in 1983–1984, where science fiction was categorized as one of the polluting elements, the ‘pseudo-science’ advocated by this genre was condemned.
Fifteen years on, in 1999 a topic for an essay in one of the gaokao exams in a rapidly changing China was “What if memory can be transferred?” This topic had been raised in a previous edition of Science Fiction World magazine. Thus, this essay proved the utility of knowledge disseminated via science fiction, and consequently led to a burst in popularity and the proliferation of science fiction magazines. In 1999, Liu Cixin started publishing short stories in these magazines. The influence in China of his trilogy the Three Body problem, and arguably the genre as a whole, is palpable in many different ways, varying from information technology entrepreneurs who discuss concepts taken from the books as metaphors for the cutthroat competition in their domain,[1] to the Chinese space program inviting science fiction authors for their council, a government spokesperson referring to “the dark forest” theory to describe actual geopolitical situations, and netizens voicing their discontent regarding online censorship by referring to a story written by a well-known science fiction author.[2]
[1] Terms taken from the trilogy include langxing (“wolf instinct,” as in The Wolf of Wall Street), yeman shengzhang (“savage growth,” as in, “That was savage, man!”) and jiangwei gongji (meaning a blow so powerful that it flattens your opponent from three dimensions to two dimensions).
[2] The last example refers to the short story “The City of Silence” by Ma Boyong, published in Science Fiction World in 2005, that describes an authoritarian state in 2046 where all communication is restricted to a ‘list of healthy words’. The story describes a secret ‘talking club’ where people come to converse freely.
