Longing for the Past, Gazing at the Stars
“The desire to revive the old ways seems to be matched in strength by the desire to reject reality … a popular wave of nostalgia is often the precursor to social change.”
Here’s a modern fairy tale. A teenage orphan, mistreated by her stepmother, leaves home in rural western China to begin a new life in the city. She moonlights as an electrician, a waitress, and a DJ. Having just started to make strides in her music career, she hears that her beloved grandmother is ill, and abandons her dreams and returns to the small village, where she finds fame and fortune as the world’s most successful “rural influencer.” This tale of reverse migration belongs to Li Ziqi, who has been making mesmerizing films about her “rural life” and uploading them to Weibo, Douyin, and YouTube since 2015. She tills the fields, shucks corn, and hacks and hauls bamboo to make furniture. She harvests silk from silkworms for quilts, tints her lips with rose petals, and prepares traditional homegrown delicacies in a basic kitchen—all without a hair out of place.
Li is the world’s most successful pioneer of a modern paradox: using social media to extoll the virtues of a life without modern technology. “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good,” Fredric Jameson said. And the majority of Li’s 50 million viewers are under no illusion that her rural idyll is real life. In fact, it evokes one of China’s most enduring literary fables, “The Peach Blossom Spring,” written in 421 by the poet Tao Yuanming, about a hidden agrarian utopia. “There’s no use telling outsiders,” warn the people who live there; the catch with any utopia or “no place,” is that you can’t find it in reality. Li Ziqi offers a way for urban youngsters to imagine how things should be by imagining how they once were, an idealized past and future forged in an imaginary present.
The “cottagecore” craze—known in China as fugu (“nostalgia for traditional ways”)—exploded all over the world during the 2020 lockdowns. As people sat in pokey apartments mainlining bucolic bliss on their smartphones, the urban dream lost its sheen. It might not seem to be what the Chinese government had in mind, having put all its weight behind urbanization and flipping the country in a matter of decades from a rural agrarian society to a metropolitan market economy, one in which 60 percent of the people now live in towns and cities. But Li Ziqi’s global appeal has been hailed as a dream come true for state propaganda. “Without a word commending China,” declared CCTV, “Li promotes Chinese culture in a good way and tells a good China story.”
The concept of the pastoral remains an incredibly powerful force in the Chinese imagination, as both political and literary fiction. The countryside is, of course, the locus of the Chinese Communist creed. Maoism was built upon the revolutionary potential of China’s largely agrarian society. Unlike Russia’s post-industrial proletarian revolution, Chinese propaganda posters foregrounded farmers driving a tractor with one hand and waving the Little Red Book in the other. Today, Xi Jinping’s own rural biography is integral to the Party’s national mythos, and devotional flocks of tourists make pilgrimages to the cave in which he lived for seven years. It was during his time as a “rusticated” youth in remote Shaanxi province that President Xi not only found his communist faith, but also his love of reading, when he famously made a nine-mile trip to borrow a copy of Goethe’s Faust. The countryside is a key staging post in the great leader’s origin story.
President Xi’s time in rural Shaanxi differs from much of the fiction and nonfiction written by fellow “rusticated” youths, for whom the destruction of the countryside—both as a result of Mao’s radical agricultural policies and the rapid industrialization of the last forty years—has become a pertinent allegory for the loss, rather than the discovery, of their communist ideals. However, unlike the European Romantics and American Transcendentalists who questioned the pervasive idea of man’s dominion over nature only when industrialization was in full swing, communion with the natural world—known as “harmony between heaven and humans”—has always been (with the exception of the Maoist era) the very essence of art in China. It was, and still is, the inspiration for China’s ink-and-wash paintings, calligraphy, and poetry. Even China’s ideographic writing system has an organic relationship with the natural world. “East 東,” for example, is an image of the sun in the trees to convey sunrise.
Widespread urbanization, even in rural areas, has also led to a physical and mental state of philosophical dislocation that writer Xu Zhiyuan describes as a “lost frame of mind.” He says that the “meaning behind old trees, flowing water, jueju* poems, moonlight, and temples has all vanished, to be replaced by tall buildings, neon lights, automobiles, glass, metal, cement, profits and earnings, and high interest rates. I do not know how to extract poetic meaning from those things.” He captures the widespread feeling of exile felt by people in China who long for the ancestral villages that they’ve never visited. It’s a sense of spiritual displacement that, ironically, reconnects writers and poets to their ancient literary heritage. Yearning for one’s native home is a beloved cliché in Chinese poetry, immortalized more than a thousand years ago by the Tang masters Li Bai and Du Fu. Two of their most famous poems, “Quiet Night Thought” and “Moonlit Night,” which are still memorized by schoolchildren, use the moon as a symbol of homesickness in exile.
Broken Wings, the 2016 novel by China’s “peasant literati figurehead” Jia Pingwa offered (perhaps unwelcome) validation for all those migrants who have left the countryside—and a reality check for those urbanites who’ve never lived there. Since all the young women have fled to the city, Jia depicts “wifeless villages” as spiderwebs from which young men struggle to escape. Single men left behind are known as “bare branches,” and they consume “blood onions” (named for their deep crimson flesh) to boost their virility, only to suffer sexual frustration and long-term despair when they fail to find a partner. Latent violence and misogyny thrum just below the surface, breaking through when a migrant girl is kidnapped and sold to one of the men. She is locked up, married off, raped, and forced to bear a child. Jia never condones this kind of violent behavior or mindset, but urbanization is seen as the root cause of these problems, and the parasitic city feeds on every aspect of country life, albeit from afar. The “bare branches” that Jia refers to are not just men without a family, but rural villages without growth. “Today, the land that former generations of writers, and I myself, have written about, as well as the familiar countryside that gave us spiritual succour, has been transformed beyond recognition,” Jia said. “No matter how hard we look for it, it is gone for good; all our efforts to recapture it will just sound like delirious ravings.”
This warning has not stopped people from trying to build utopian communities in China’s countryside, via books. The Bishan Project in rural Anhui, launched by a group of intellectuals, called for people to permanently join a community of artists away from cities. Built around ideas of anarchism, communal living, and rural reconstruction, they renovated Bishan village’s ancient buildings, turning one into an exquisite bookshop and library, believing that if they build it, people would come.
And for a time, they did. So much so that it became a problem. Chinese authorities quickly shut down events and meetings at the rural commune. One of the intellectuals who started the Bishan Project, Ou Ning, an artist and founder of the literary magazine Chutzpah!, documented their constant struggles in his book subtitled How to Start Your Own Utopia. The moral of the story seems to be, sadly, that you can’t. At least, not now. Ou Ning, who remains disarmingly optimistic, also finds himself in urban exile from his rural Bishan home these days, and the village has instead become more of a gentrified weekend getaway for tourists.
Architecturally beautiful bookshops and libraries continue to pop up all over China in remote villages, as if books somehow herald the effort to resurrect a bygone idyll. An old clifftop house has been transformed into a bookshop in a tiny mountain village perched above the clouds in Chenjiapu, Zhejiang Province, surrounded by free-range chickens, open gullies, paddy fields, and croaking toads. All of its books, thousands upon thousands of them, were transported across vast distances before being carted by hand up the final hill. At the entrance, entire bookcases are dominated by Party-authorized titles—including Seven Years as an Educated Youth, a series of interviews with locals in rural Shaanxi Province about President Xi’s time there. The floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves frequently double as backdrops for dutiful boyfriends conducting their girlfriends’ social media photoshoots. It is hard not to feel that bookshops have become a mix of mausoleum and mirage in the inescapable digital age.
In cities, the future for bookshops hangs in the balance. They are everywhere, but only a few feel like the real deal. One Way Street in Beijing is an inspiring, homegrown cultural hub. It has its own dynamic quarterly literary magazine called Dandu, or “independent reader.” Nanjing’s Librairie Avant Garde, a converted underground carpark and bomb shelter, draws thousands of visitors through its cavernous entranceway via a huge, illuminated cross—books as a spiritual guide in the dark. Shenzhen, the city of migrants, has the largest bookshop in the world, but also the tiny and crammed Old Heaven Books staffed by eager young bookworms.
But elsewhere books are largely symbolic. In some urban spaces, they are not real at all. Inside Tianjin’s stunning Binhai Library, meticulously terraced books ripple from floor to ceiling into the shape of an eye. It is literature as art installation—the spines of the “books” are fake, mostly printed on aluminum plates. Similarly in Hangzhou’s XL-MUSE bookstore, a wall of mirrors gives the impression of never-ending bookshelves, an accidental homage to the Christopher Nolan science fiction blockbuster Interstellar, in which the infinite, floating library is a wormhole between the past and the future.
In the last fifteen years, Chinese science fiction has gone into overdrive. But the genre is hardly a new phenomenon, having become popular at the end of the Qing dynasty and the early Republican era, with Lao She’s 1932 Cat Country considered one of the earliest examples. A dystopian critique of the Nationalist government about a society of Martian Cat People hooked on opium-inspired “reverie leaves” and foreign ideas such as “Everybody Shareskyism,” Lao’s novel was seen as an allegory for Chinese civilization in decline, and one that became an even more accurate prediction of the brutality meted out during the early years of communism. Lao She’s prescience did not serve him well, however. Having been purged during the Cultural Revolution, he committed suicide.
Back then science fiction was pioneered as a way to help people “wake up from their 5,000-year-old dream of being an ancient civilization,” says Xia Jia, a young writer celebrated for her “porridge sci-fi,” a term she coined to capture the melding of science, folklore, and fantasy. And Bao Shu (who started out writing Liu Cixin fan fiction), has warned against a future that repeats the damage of China’s recent revolutionary past. His story “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear,” named after a Pushkin poem, marches backward through the last sixty years of Chinese history as if it is heading into the future, and, faced with the prospect of the Cultural Revolution returning, warns against the false allure of nostalgia if it prevents society from moving forward. Both Bao Shu and his protagonist are on thin ice: The narrator befriends dissident Lu Xiaobo, exposes the caprice of the Communist Party, and openly names specific politicians and policies. It’s one of the few science fiction stories that has been banned, along with another of his called “Songs of Ancient Earth.”
Science fiction usually flies above the political turbulence that agitates other genres of fiction. But writers like Han Song, considered one of the “three generals” of Chinese science fiction, often uses science fiction to critique technological progress itself. “Science, technology, and modernization are not inherent in Chinese culture,” he says. “They are like alien entities. If we buy into them, we turn ourselves into monsters.”
This anxious link between industrialization and science fiction can be traced back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley, Han Song takes pity on the monsters that rampant new technologies have thoughtlessly created, seeking out their vestigial humanity, and even beauty. In “Submarines,” the children of migrant workers, who live on polluted, twinkling canals surrounding the city, have evolved amphibious bodies, much to the fascination of wealthier urban children. In one of his most famous stories, “Regenerated Bricks,” rubble containing the human remains of the thousands of people killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is recycled into “intelligent” bricks that are used for space colonization, leaving the universe haunted by the ghosts of the earthquake’s victims. People are required to shift or shed their physical form, becoming ghosts in the machine. Human physiology is another outdated piece of hardware in need of an upgrade.
Transhumanism, or the symbiotic pairing of a mind with a computer, which renders the body obsolete, is a recurring theme in Chinese science fiction, and is often used as a metaphor for the way in which an inhuman system constructs and shapes people’s narratives. In Nian Yu’s story, “In Search of Your Memories,” a middle-ranking civil servant lives as a disembodied transhuman whose happiness is overseen by a jobbing administrator. Without his own physical muscle memory, he is left haunted by the feeling that something is missing, which turns out to be true. A careless edit has irretrievably removed memories of his twin, who died when they were young, leaving him confused and inexplicably bereft. It’s up to readers to decide whether this is a criticism of systemic amnesia among Chinese civil servants, or a broader observation that individuals are routinely at the mercy of impersonal, unaccountable algorithms.
Many writers are genuinely concerned about humanity’s relentlessly self-centered instincts. In Hao Jinfang’s “The Loneliest Ward,” people lie in bed being drip-fed positive feedback until they die, while in Xin Xinyu’s “Farewell, Adam,” they surrender their youth to become part of an amalgamated personality for a teen idol. In the ironically titled “The Path to Freedom,” by Tang Fei, a family that quarantines in the hope of surviving environmental apocalypse outside discovers, too late, that by avoiding biohazardous air, they have failed to evolve the gills and yellow pus required to survive it.
There is sometimes an almost providential form of evolutionary class justice in which the most vulnerable and exploited members of society become its survivors, if not its saviors. In Chen Qiufan’s eco-science fiction novel The Waste Tide, migrants live on a garbage island, sorting through electronic scrap piles filled with the world’s discarded prosthetics, phones, and sex toys. All the while the workers are exposed to horrendous levels of pollution, and their blood becomes more and more contaminated with heavy metals. When one girl is infected with a virus that manipulates the metal in her blood, however, she is suddenly able to commune with, and then mobilize, the collective consciousness of her oppressed fellow waste workers, albeit with tragic consequences for her own well-being. Forging a damning link between global markets and the outsourcing of environmental degradation, the novel suggests, maybe even demands, that there should be a future reckoning for the inequity of the present. And this connection between internal human desolation and environmental decay recurs in Chen’s work. In a story called “The Smog Society,” he even proposes that it is in fact our own unhappiness, a product of consumerism and greed, that is polluting Earth’s atmosphere.
If the future only contains people who are either destroyed or destructive, it is perhaps no surprise that caring would be outsourced to automata. This is rarely presented as something to fear, however, and many science fiction writers seem genuinely excited and unusually optimistic about the potential gains of a post-humanist future. Far kinder than their human creators, robots provide tender, filial care to the elderly in “Tongtong’s Summer,” written by Xia Jia, and therapy for the depressed and suicidal in “Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Commit Suicide Tonight,” written by A Que. In Chen Hongyu’s “Western Heaven,”a science fictional reworking of the Chinese literary classic, Journey to the West, a troupe of robots set out to find their human creators, who, hundreds of years after plundering and then abandoning Earth, are now in a faraway universe but just as mercenary and self-serving as ever. The robots arrive back on Earth to find it once again a verdant paradise. The story’s hero is a robot created by an aging (human) artist who, wishing to immortalize human art before the Exodus, stored thousands of songs, poems, artworks, and pieces of music in the robot’s memory. The sad plight for this abandoned, artistic little machine is that, surrounded by robots that were built for entirely practical uses, he alone struggles to understand his purpose.
The role and value of art is always put to the test by technological advances and political imperatives. But just as governmental strictures often lead to experimental new forms in literature, so many Chinese science fiction writers seem commendably intrigued by the opportunities and challenges that the intersection of technology and literature may bring. Xia Jia imagines a dispiriting future in which the artistic criteria for good poetry are reprogrammed in order to prove that machines are more poetic than humans in her story “The Psychology Game.” And yet, such is the dizzying pace of change in contemporary China that this has already happened in real life.
In 2018 a literature competition was set up using an “AI judge” to compare thousands of stories that had appeared in China’s literary journals. Originally the AI program had been created to hunt for new TV and film adaptation ideas by “reading” China’s millions of online novels, many of which are themselves millions of words long. The bot had pretty good taste: A short story by Mo Yan placed second and Chen Qiufan’s “The State of Trance” took first prize. The catch is that Chen had written his story, in part, with the use of a deep-learning program. In other words, the algorithm “liked” algorithmic fiction the most, which included sentences like this:
But this begins with the turn of the real mathematical power, it is very hard to lose the afterward, to change the future’s website, as well as assisting the surface of ceremony, pretending that it is somewhere concealed, but can only face crowds.
An authentic tumor.
The gibberish was spoken to a man who just wanted to return a library book. “You stop trying to understand,” says the narrator. “Profoundly meaningful, brilliantly insightful, totally incomprehensible dialogues.”
It is testament to the tenacity of fiction as a medium that Chen, who studied literature at the prestigious Peking University before working in integrating marketing communications at Google and Baidu, and so many Chinese scientists, astrophysicists, engineers, and coders, are moonlighting as writers. After graduating from university, Liu Cixin, China’s bestselling, Hugo award-winning science fiction author, worked as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi into his late forties, long after his novels had become blockbusters. His day job served as a foundation for fiction that is rooted in “hard” science like particle physics, quantum mechanics, and computational mathematics. Liu Cixin’s in-depth scientific knowledge makes his noticeably infectious optimism about the future and the role of individual agency within in it all the more beguiling. In his story “Moonlight,” Liu simply imagines a man phoning himself from the future with the technology to prevent the destruction of our planet from fossil fuels.
Despite the epic ideas that power most of his stories, there is often an intimacy, even a romance, to Liu’s work; an infectious, Carl Sagan–like sense of wonder pervades his writing and characters. In “Sun of China,” a migrant worker, who drives tiny tractors that polish the surface of a vast artificial sun, built to change the climate of our parched planet, falls in love with his quiet view of the universe. Once Earth is restored, he elects to sail the retired “sun” into space, knowing he’ll never come back. In Liu’s hands, this decision is far from bleak. Passing up the chance to return home is a small price to pay for the chance to explore the stars. “I have a horrible dystopia in my mind,” Liu once said. “In that future of our inward-looking civilization, the ecology of the earth will be restored. You will have reforestation and the best ecological surface of the world. But across this world, you will not be able to see any single human individual. Instead, there will only be a huge cave, in which you have a supercomputer. Within that supercomputer, there are 10 billion human beings. And these 10 billion human beings are happy. For me this happiness is horrible.”
The “horrible happiness” offered by synthetic experiences also extends to synthetic art—it can be technically perfect but, without a human source, it is soulless. In “The Poetry Cloud,” a scrawny thirty-year-old man is forced to somehow prove the value of human poetry in order to avoid being tossed into an incinerator. It’s a showdown between David and Goliath, art and science. The lowly human is a teacher of classical Chinese poetry on a feedlot that breeds humans for dinosaur consumption; these futuristic “dinosaurs,” having discovered that a peaceful mind makes human meat taste better, use poetry teachers to tranquilize the minds of human cattle and, therefore, tenderize their flesh. The human’s judge is an omnipotent, arrogant God who floats around as an immaterial geometric shape because it likes “to be concise.” But when the teacher shows the God a poem by China’s own master of concision, Li Bai, the God is so impressed by its deceptive simplicity that he clones Li Bai to write “every possible poem.” This will prove technology is mightier than art. The problem is that the God—and his Li Bai clone, having created an almost infinite number of linguistic combinations, can’t figure out which poems are any good. The clone can’t write Li Bai’s poems because art is expressed through a singular perspective making finite choices, rather than a universal processor making infinite computations. It is proof that, as readers, and as food for dinosaurs, humans raised on literature do indeed have better taste. They may even have a more meaningful future.
* A four-line poem popular in the Tang dynasty (618–907).