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INTRODUCTION

COLONIAL MODERNITY AND CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION

This interdisciplinary cultural study of early 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 emerge.

In early Chinese SF, I identify prototypical versions of a number of metaphors that would go on to become central to the May Fourth reassessment of China’s cultural heritage, and traditionally associated with Lu Xun, that later were ensconced as central themes in modern Chinese literature in general. These metaphorical figurations already featured prominently in the work of late Qing authors and are visible in the very first works of Chinese-language SF. This observation is not intended to diminish the status of Lu Xun or to remove him from his canonical status as the father of modern Chinese literature. Rather, I intend to bring nuance to the understanding of Lu Xun’s work by demonstrating the ways in which it crystallized a set of already existing tropes rather than inventing them outright. These tropes included metaphors of illness and mental health as allegories of national strength; the imagery of cannibalism as the sign of a society in decline; metaphors of cultural suffocation and the iron house in the literary figuration of the prospects for national salvation; and extensive ruminations regarding the fraught relationship between the intelligentsia and the common man. In late Qing SF, many of the most salient metaphors of the May Fourth period, and of modern Chinese literature at large, were already prevalent.

While this crisis manifests itself metaphorically in Chinese SF through confrontations between the beasts of mythical tradition and modern machineries of warfare, it also manifests textually in the mode of representation chosen by authors. A wide range of stylistic and lexicographic modes is visible in the primary texts analyzed in this study. I argue that through rereading of Lu Xun’s early works and in our reading of early Chinese SF, and through a deepened understanding of how the most salient metaphors of May Fourth authors were already prevalent in late Qing fiction, we broaden our horizons on the transition from literary to vernacular writing. Thus, I hope not only to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between science and empire in the world of early twentieth-century Chinese letters, but also to contribute to an evolving view of the ways in which China’s New Culture Movement should be understood as part of an ongoing debate over the centrality of vernacular writing. Contemporaneous to this debate, early Chinese SF also offers a window on the labor pains of this mode of writing, as authors educated in the examination system struggled to articulate themselves in a new and evolving literary mode. Finally, this study contributes to the understanding of SF as a global media phenomenon.

I do not frame the emerging discourses through which Chinese intellectuals and eventually the reading public apprehended science and technology in the oversimplified terms of stimulus and response. An important aspect of the condition of colonial modernity is the extent to which these relationships constituted a feedback loop of mutually reinforcing conditions. Europe’s colonial efforts were made possible by a limited set of scientific and technological advantages, and these advantages became more significant as a result of the material and intellectual gains that colonial possessions enabled. Territorially and financially, possession and occupation of new land, labor, and capital holdings allowed for continued colonial expansion. Intellectually, this simultaneously necessitated and facilitated the creation of new networks and contexts of scientific discovery. In the realm of letters, the imagination of such territorial holdings and networks of scientific discovery led to the emergence of new genres like SF and the adventure novel, through which the desire for such expansion was expressed and engendered in the metropolitan population back home. In China, the crisis of consciousness was compounded by a pervasive understanding that internal cultural failings were as much to blame for the inability to resist semicolonial subjugation as foreign aggression was. This overdetermined sense of national peril was catalyzed by the impression that the only way to overcome foreign incursion was to take up the discursive and material arms of the enemy and the knowledge that doing so would be a signal of complicity with the imperial project. In other words, a central concern for this study and for the writers of early Chinese SF was whether Western science and SF could be co-opted to turn the knives of empire upon their wielders, and in so doing what issues inevitably arose.

Kexue Xiaoshuo

An anomaly of the emergence of science fiction in China is that while the genre itself saw its beginnings as a Western import through translation,⁷ the term “science fiction” (kexue xiaoshuo) began to appear regularly as a literary genre category associated with specific stories in publication in China (c. 1904) before it did in the English-language press.⁸ In China, the term kexue xiaoshuo was first used to describe a work of fiction in the table of contents of Liang Qichao’s⁹ magazine Xin xiaoshuo (New fiction), which began publication in Japan in November 1902. Like most genre labels, the term was not so much a taxonomically derived category as it was a label of marketing convenience for the budding urban publishing industry, and there was considerable overlap between this and other genres, especially fantasies, travel narratives, and futuristic utopias. Barring a few caveats, “science fiction” was arguably a concrete publishing category in China before it was in the West, even as it predominately featured translations of Western works.¹⁰ The term itself is a portmanteau of two neologisms imported via Japan. Kexue (Jp. kagaku) gradually supplanted gezhi, the “investigation of things and extension of knowledge,” as the Chinese equivalent of science, paralleling an intellectual shift from neo-Confucian positivism to categorical and experimentally verifiable data as the foundations of knowledge of the material world. At the same time, the prose category xiaoshuo (fiction) had begun to supersede poetry as the primary written mode of social and political critique. Thus, the Chinese translation of “science fiction,” kexue xiaoshuo, recapitulates two of the major intellectual developments of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history—the introduction of Western science and the growing importance of the novel.

Other magazines soon followed suit in their use of kexue xiaoshuo as a genre designation, appearing next to the stories’ title in the contents and on the first pages of stories in popular serial fiction magazines. Works labeled kexue xiaoshuo initially included translations and creative adaptations of English works, often based on Japanese translations of original texts like Jules Verne’s adventure stories or Camille Flammarion’s La fin du monde (1893; translated as Shijie mori ji, 1903). Within the broader prose category of xiaoshuo, a veritable explosion of genre designations emerged during the late Qing, all of them bearing clear allegiance to the cause of popular education and national renewal. In an article published in Xinmin congbao (New citizen), Liang listed ten genres of fiction: historical (lishi xiaoshuo); governmental (zhengzhi xiaoshuo); philosophic-scientific (zheli kexue xiaoshuo); military (junshi xiaoshuo); adventure (maoyan xiaoshuo); mystery (tanzhen xiaoshuo); romance (xieqing xiaoshuo); stories of the strange (yuguai xiaoshuo); diaries (zhajiti xiaoshuo); and tales of the marvelous (chuanqiti xiaoshuo) (Wu Xianya, 43). Liang was particularly inspired by the political novel, which he argued was a driving force in the modernization and political fortitude of countries like the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan, elsewhere arguing that literature had the power to elevate the reader to the level of the fictional heroes he read about (Lee, 146–147). In publication, a number of other genre labels were attached to titles in the contents of serial fiction like Yueyue xiaoshuo (The all story monthly), including nihilist (xuwu xiaoshuo), utopian (lixiang xiaoshuo), philosophical (zheli xiaoshuo), social (shehui xiaoshuo), national (guomin xiaoshuo), comical (huaji xiaoshuo), and short stories (duanpian xiaoshuo).¹¹ As specific as these distinctions may appear, the narrative and formal barriers between these categories were much less clear in the tumultuous intellectual terrain of China at the twilight of the Qing dynasty.

The Political Crisis of the Late Qing

By the early twentieth century, the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War had brought an end to the long-held local perception of China as the “Middle Kingdom,” presiding over a Pax Sinica,¹² and left the most economically, socially, and politically important regions of China subject to de facto foreign rule. A continuing crisis of political and epistemological consciousness saw the last remnants of political legitimacy slipping from the hands of the fiscally and militarily benighted Qing government. China was unable to repel foreign incursion; Confucianism, the examination system, traditional Chinese theories of political and social organization, and the very understanding of the world order and China’s position in it were shaken to the core. The long-term repercussions of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) were compounded by political strife following the Japanese victory in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), which was soon followed by the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and the ensuing indemnity China was forced to accede to as punishment, confirmed the overdetermined combination of political insolvency in the face of foreign incursion. In the wake of this series of foreign and domestic political failures, the Chinese intellectual framework seemed suddenly inadequate and incompatible with modern global politics. Weakened confidence in traditional philosophy indicated a necessity to grasp both the practice and spirit of science, which had enabled Western advances (Kwok, 6). So intense was the sense of peril that the governor of Hunan declared: “Our country can no longer survive in the world” (quoted in Murthy, 56). A succession of crises led to the conclusion that devotion to the study of Western science would be a critical element of China’s fate as a country (Reardon-Anderson, 9). The establishment of the republic in 1911 (which was soon followed by Yuan Shikai’s attempt to reestablish a monarchy) and the presentation of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands in 1915 illustrated once again that beyond political and material reform, Chinese society itself was in need of fundamental reorganization (Kwok, 8).

The need for social and political reorganization was part of a decades-long struggle with the paradox of reform: many perceived it to be the case that in order to stave off extirpation, China would have to transform itself in a manner so profound and radical that it would hardly resemble the object that intellectuals had set out to preserve in the first place. The disruption of the tribute system signaled China’s loss of status as the center of the Asian world and represented the emergence of a new world order. The Middle Kingdom had suddenly been shifted to the periphery as new networks of industrial production in Europe combined with related networks of economic and military power, engendering an entirely new set of institutional formations and relationships in a radically altered global environment. The late Qing crisis of reform brought about a radical shift to long-standing approaches to science and literature.

Two critical issues separate the engagement with European sciences at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the Ming and the rest of the late Qing: First, until the Qing defeat in the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War, Yangwu arguments justifying the importation of Western ideas and technology on the grounds that they were ultimately of Chinese origin were more or less sustainable, and Western science was not taken seriously until the last decade of the nineteenth century (Wright 1996, 2). The material advantages that are often mistaken for European superiority in the realm of scientific inquiry did not emerge until the industrial revolution. Chinese civilization, over the course of nearly half a millennia, had undergone a period of incorporation of foreign epistemology and a simultaneous reassessment of native tradition. After the first Sino-Japanese War, it became increasingly clear that regardless of the intellectual gymnastics it took to get there, the adoption of European science and technology, especially in the field of military armaments, was absolutely necessary. This change in perspective was precipitated by a sense that the nation was faced with a hitherto unseen moment of crisis, and that regardless of misgivings about science and technology, their adoption was a matter of life or death.

Second, prior to the end of the nineteenth century, the imperial throne closely guarded any new knowledge introduced by European missionaries, seeing to it that this information remained a part of the theater of imperial power, used in the ritual demonstration of the relationship between the throne and heaven; this knowledge was not popularized, and there was little imperative to do so. In Europe, popularization of technical knowledge in the European industrial revolution occurred as a result of the material need for greater expertise in the processes of mass production—scientific education was not made accessible for its own sake, but for the sake of the vested interests of industrial capital. Moreover, in China, scientific knowledge was not popularized until it was apparent that local national/imperial interests could not be sustained without such an effort.

Science and Empire

For centuries Western science had found its way into China, often at the hands of Jesuit missionaries, destined to become a closely held instrument of political influence for the imperial throne. From the late Ming on, Jesuit mathematicians played an important role in helping to assist court mathematicians in correcting problems with mensuration and cartography. Ming and Qing rulers were quick to discern the scientific from the religious, and were adept at turning what was meant to be a symbol of papal and (Christian) divine power into symbols of Chinese (imperial) divine power. Jesuits introducing Gregorian calendrical reforms to China in the early seventeenth century offered a powerful predictive model of the universe, one that played a vital role in the maintenance of imperial power. Their teachings on the predictive power of mathematics, the sciences, and experimentally verifiable evidence were presented alongside the doctrine that the universe was the product of a divine creator and that only Christianity could render an understanding of the relationship between humankind and this creator. Jesuits who first came to China in the early seventeenth century found that their acceptance at the Ming and Qing courts was dependent largely upon their knowledge of astronomy and cartography and their calendrical acumen. The rise and fall of Jesuit influence was closely tied to the fate of the Qing dynasty. Favor bestowed upon the Jesuits by the Qing court resulted in their resentment by non-Manchu literati (Elman 2006, 63–149).¹³ These factors limited the scope of Jesuit influence, effectively curtailing the popularization of scientific knowledge.

For both the Ming and Qing courts, interest in knowledge of astronomy, cartography, and mensuration was a matter of their potential use as instruments of empire, particularly in terms of agricultural rituals defining the sovereign’s connection between heaven and man, and cartographic work defining geographic territory. The ability to predict cyclical occurrences related to agricultural production and less regular astronomical events was closely guarded by the imperial court and used as evidence that imperial rulers had the Mandate of Heaven (Elman 2006, 15–35). Missionaries like Matteo Ricci believed that the introduction of such principles as Euclidean mathematics “would prepare the Chinese for the higher truths of Christianity,” but Qing intellectuals were adept at separating the Christian and scientific content of the mathematical, astronomical, and cartographical skills that Jesuit priests had to offer (Elman 2006, 26, 107). Ricci’s clocks, maps, and globes aided him in securing permission to open a mission west of Canton, in his attempts to gradually move north to Beijing, and these clocks quickly supplanted indigenous Chinese timekeeping devices. These demonstrations of technological superiority were meant to be seen by imperial courts as a demonstration of the superiority of European technological and spiritual civilization (Landes, 40–45).¹⁴ Thus, science and technology were introduced to China with the specific objective of gaining a new flock of Christian believers and expanding the influence of the church. Science, as much as religion or the sword, was a tool of imperial expansion. Clockwork gears were part of Matteo Ricci’s arsenal of soft power.

Nevertheless, clocks came to embody an affront to China’s sense of self-regard, and timekeeping was one field among many where Chinese intellectuals began to argue for a Chinese origin to what had by then become a clearly superior European technology. Chinese scholars began to argue that Western clocks were derived from the Chinese clepsydra, and that such methods had since been lost to Chinese craftsmen. Others argued that clocks were merely playthings, and of no real intellectual or practical use. Despite such self-serving rhetoric, “timepieces were among the few Western artifacts the Chinese were ready to pay for” in the early nineteenth century, and such objects were one of the few goods that Chinese merchants were interested in trading for highly valued tea, porcelain, and other goods that brought the British Empire such extreme trade deficits in the run-up to the Opium Wars (Landes, 46–50). The introduction of timepieces, astronomical methodologies, and techniques of mensuration were understood by both sides of the exchange as tools of empire. Chinese rulers’ interest in science was aimed at using its predictive power to reaffirm the legitimacy of their own dominion by arguing that it was expressed in the natural world.

The shift that distinguished the nineteenth century from previous eras was the sense that Western science and technology were indeed superior and that an adequate response demanded their popularization. The increasingly undeniable superiority of Western science at the close of the nineteenth century¹⁵ and the social implications of Darwinian theories of evolution brought challenges not only to Chinese conceptions of time and their place in world, but also to the Chinese framework of cosmology and nature.¹⁶ A combination of factors contributed to an increasingly widening scientific and technological gap between Britain and France on the one hand and China on the other that emerged during the eighteenth century. This included Jesuit resistance to adopt Newtonian calculus into their mathematical repertoire, an information gap between Jesuits in China and their European counterparts, the diminished status of the Jesuit order in the eyes of the papacy, and an inward turn beginning during the Kangxi reign (Elman 2006, 169, 183–189). “The Newtonian revolution in physics and engineering in Britain and France was not transmitted to China until the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) via French engineers at the Fuzhou Shipyard and British machine workers at the Jiangnan Arsenal” (244).¹⁷ A simultaneous Jesuit “muddling” of Newtonian physics and a Qing turn inward prevented China from adapting the engineering and technological expertise that sparked off the industrial revolution in Europe.

At the same time, the eighteenth century saw a restoration of Chinese mathematical and medical classics and a diminished interest in foreign bodies of knowledge. In a familiar process of empire building, Qing rulers oversaw efforts to gather and assimilate the historical, literary, and scientific achievements of previous dynasties. For the Qing, this effort often entailed a process of reconstruction and extraction that attempted to discern Han and pre-Han texts from their Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholarly traditions (Elman 2006, 225–280). These restorative efforts eventually led to the Yangwu, or Foreign Affairs Movement, the argument that European technologies and scientific methods were derived from Chinese origins, a pervasive intellectual trend that saw its strongest expression in the years between 1860 and 1895.¹⁸ This argument played an important role both as a balm for China’s defeat at the hands of European powers and, as some have argued, as an explanation for why it was acceptable to adopt so-called foreign concepts. This term was at the center of an intellectual and political paradox—in order to survive as a nation, China would have to give up the epistemological system that defined it; or, in other words, in order to repel their Western aggressors, China would have to adopt a substantial portion of the Western worldview. Arguments in favor of the importation of Western technologies often had recourse to this notion, though it is unclear whether this was out of real conviction or political expediency. This idea arose as a response to a series of agonizing defeats at the hands of European colonial aggression, and in the words of Theodore Huters, “the relationship between domestic and foreign learning has been one of the most enduring issues in determining the intellectual direction of modern China” (Huters 2005, 23).

In “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China” (1995), Wang Hui argues that an instrumentalist orientation, focused on function and progress, with little interest in the idealist pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, defined late imperial Chinese approaches to science. For a period of centuries Chinese scientists, especially mathematicians and astronomers, were engaged in a process of engaging with Western science, technology, and theology. At the same time, they were engaged in a constant reassessment of their own traditions, among other things attempting to uncover the “true essence” of Han dynasty learning before it passed through the hands of Song scholars. The early to high Qing saw a renewed interest in Chinese mathematics and a reexamination of the universal principles of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian lixue (“teaching of the principle”). During the late nineteenth century, “science” in the Chinese context began a transition of both terminology and ideology. Originally, the term “science” was translated and understood using the vocabulary and philosophical orientation of the neo-Confucian interpretation of the “Greater Learning” (Daxue).¹⁹ “Investigation-extension” (gezhi), “investigation of things,” “the study of probing thoroughly the principle” (qiongli zhi xue), and “to investigate things so as to extend knowledge” (gewu zhizhi) all emphasize the importance of personal experience and cognition. Gezhi is an internal process of individual cultivation and cognition that leads to the subjective apprehension of knowledge and results in the capacity to bring universal order (Wang Hui, 2–14; Qiu Ruohong, 63–67; Yue, 13–17). Initially, the Chinese understanding of European sciences was characterized by an attempt to frame Western sciences in neo-Confucian terms. A parallel trend was the philological shift that saw a reassessment of Song textual studies and attempts to recover early Chinese textual traditions from exegetical traditions that emerged during and after the Song dynasty (Elman 1984). Vestiges of this mode of translation remain to this day: the Chinese term for physics, wuli, is an abbreviation of the term gewu qiongli, investigation of things and fathoming of principles, from the same section of the Greater Learning (Kioka and Suzuki, 35–51).

Nineteenth-century Atlantic trade networks were not as significant in terms of financial and capital accumulation as they were for their role in expanding Europe’s limited supply of land and energy. Europe of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century was indeed Europe, the Americas, and colonial Africa (Pomeranz, 23–24, 264–297). The development of European science and technology was inextricably intertwined with the expansion of European empire. Fa-ti Fan refers to the negotiations between various interest groups, aesthetic principles, horticultural practices, natural history, folk knowledge, and Sinology that occurred in colonial contact zones in coastal China and helped drive the development of British natural history from the second half of the nineteenth century onward as “scientific imperialism,” noting the “symbiotic, even integral relationship between scientific and imperialist enterprises” (Fan, 4; see also Secord, 37). From the sixteenth century on, European exploration and the expansion of scientific knowledge were often dependent on one another. Scientific institutions played a major role in the dissemination of “energy, manpower and capital on a worldwide basis and an unprecedented scale” (Brockway, 6). Botanical knowledge of economically valuable plants helped aid the expansion of empire by assisting colonial entrepreneurs in the establishment of new plantations with raw materials and knowledge necessary for those plantations to succeed. Rubber and cinchona (used to make quinine) were two key products, transplanted from one colonial holding to another, which played a key role in European penetration into South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Both of these products were necessary war matériel in such military efforts.²⁰ In tropical colonial holdings, the material and knowledge-oriented capital met with relatively abundant labor, in various forms of servitude and at low cost to entrepreneurs.

Global commercial networks made use of diffuse access to local knowledge to make local observations in building universal understandings of fields as diverse as astronomy and gravitation, in efforts to catalog the natural world, and in the formation of Darwin’s theories of evolution. Darwin’s work on natural selection was enabled by a global network of collaborators, connected first through the postal system, steamships, and print culture and later through the telegraph (Secord, 32–37). Merchant ships did not only carry goods; they also carried people devoted to the production of knowledge, and in many cases the merchants aboard these ships were themselves involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge (Delbourgo and Dew, 7). In other words, the expansion of our scientific understanding of the world, the expansion of Atlantic and Asian trade networks, and the expansion of empire were simultaneous and mutually reinforcing processes, often occurring aboard the same oceangoing vessels and at the same colonial outposts. These developments resulted from cooperative efforts of colonial administrators and local collaborators. Recognition of the reciprocal nature of these intellectual and material exchanges offers the opportunity to move beyond both the impact-response and China-centered approaches to China’s intellectual history, understanding history in terms of global relationships (Fa-ti Fan, 5).

Colonial Modernity

Chinese SF is arguably best geographically and culturally contextualized in terms of Tani Barlow’s “colonial modernity.” This critical framework approaches the changes of the early twentieth century in terms of the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture engendered by the expansion of European colonialism. This heuristic perspective elucidates the relationship between local developments and global exchanges, acknowledging the pervasive influence of colonialism upon these exchanges. In Barlow’s words,

“Colonial modernity” can be grasped as a speculative frame for investigating the infinitely pervasive discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to the globalizing impulses of capitalism. Because it is a way of posing a historical question about how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape, colonial modernity can also suggest that historical context is not a matter of positively defined, elemental, or discrete units—nation states, stages of development, or civilizations, for instance—but rather a complex field of relationships or threads of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed from specific sites. (Barlow, 6)

Critiques of colonial modernity bring to light the uneven terrain in which the economic and intellectual relationships that emerged in the colonial context were established, and the cultural hybridity that these exchanges engendered.

Labeling China’s position in the global political sphere, especially in a way that recognizes the cultural uniqueness of port cities like Shanghai that found themselves at the vanguard of colonial modernity, is no easy task. While coastal cities relevant to global trade were incorporated into the European colonial project, much of the Chinese interior remained under Chinese rule. Meng Yue notes that one might identify Shanghai as a peripheral city in Wallerstein’s “world systems” (1989), feeding the European core with labor and resources. Yue imagines Hardt and Negri (2000) labeling Shanghai as a “node” in the global “empire of capital.” As a counterpoint, Yue suggests that Andre Gunder Frank (1998), Hamashita Takeshi and Kawakatsu Heita (1991), or Peter Perdue (2005), with their competing visions of an Asian-oriented world economy, might have emphasized the degree to which Shanghai was in many ways a global core city, especially in terms of late imperial China’s relationship to central and Southeast Asia prior to the rise of European and Japanese colonial empires, ultimately concluding that “Shanghai is found somewhere between semi-colonialism and cosmopolitanism” (Yue, viii–xi).

A complex web of relationships among China, Japan, Europe, and the United States, colonial modernity resulted in an eclectic and often contradictory array of responses to the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture that characterized coastal Chinese cities in the late Qing. Both Lydia Liu and Wang Hui have devoted critical attention to the question of how this unevenness played out in the translation of notions of individualism, science, literature, and modernity into the Chinese lexicon, often via the distorting lens of Meiji Japan.²¹ Colonial modernity was a global phenomenon characterized by transnational exchanges in the context of imperial expansion, the colonial presence, and its accompanying economic and sociological discourses, which resulted in widely variegated local responses that often shared similar core features.²² These responses were in turn conditioned by changing historical and social conditions, by varying levels of wealth and education, by conflicting and occasionally opposing ideological and philosophical approaches, and in many cases by creative misunderstandings, misreading, and artistic license.

Empire, science, and the fictional imagination that propelled imperial expansion were inextricably intertwined. Asia and the Americas provided both material resources and networks for scientific research that played a vital role in the creation of modern Europe.²³ The Western world was “only able to create the great transformation of the nineteenth century in a context also shaped by Europe’s privileged access to overseas resources” (Pomeranz, 4). Europe was not the “unshaped shaper of everything else” (Pomeranz, 10); the geopolitical shifts of early modernity through the twentieth century, though unequal, were nevertheless mutual.

The ways in which Western science and technology were appropriated and acculturated are as multifaceted as the ways in which indigenous Chinese culture and intellectual life were modified, reimagined, and often reinvented. Charlotte Furth also adds that the transformations engendered by this encounter were far from unilateral: “One danger of the concept [of a Chinese ‘response to the West’], however, is its tendency to suggest that the process was one of linear substitution of ‘Western’ ideas for native ones; and that Chinese played an intellectually passive role” (Furth 2002, 15).

The challenges of European military hegemony most certainly provided a stimulus to the intellectual field of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, but the response was far more complex than a matter of dialectical antithesis. In other words, colonial modernity enabled a repertoire of linguistic, symbolic, and cultural practices that may be deployed in formulating perspectives on one’s self and society. These often included the internalization or repetition of Orientalist discourse, but also encompassed strategies of appropriation, resistance, subversion, and filtration that were both consciously and unconsciously deployed, to varying degrees of success. Likewise, the resulting short- and long-term outcomes have proven to be much more complex than simple replacement or synthesis. Thus, there are conceivably as many iterations of modernity as there are individuals, or perhaps more. As a socially contingent phenomenon, local iterations of colonial modernity are often constructed around shared experiences or understandings; however, they are neither essentialized nor universal. The parallels and intersections visible in the experiences of modernization, urbanization, and the response to Westernization common to China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam should by no means mask the vast historical and individual differences in these countries’ encounters with these forces.

Colonial modernity is the hybrid offspring of the encounter between margin and periphery in the context of imperial expansion. Hardt and Negri define empire as the exercise of virtual forces of control at the margins, intervening in “breakdowns in the system” (38–39). I contend that it is at these marginal locations where the influence of empire is experienced most immediately, in the form of the constant presence of the colonial order. For China, the imperial form also had already taken on the diffuse character that Hardt and Negri argue contemporary techno-scientific empire is destined for, as power executed through international treaties. The military defeats of the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War were, historically speaking, relatively short-lived, but their ongoing consequences—the “lease” of Hong Kong and other treaty ports, and the annexation of Taiwan—were felt as ongoing effects of the war, and produced hybridizing exchanges of knowledge and technology, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Shanghai. Meng Yue argues that Shanghai was a space between both “overlapping territories” and “overlapping temporalities” whose rise was in many ways facilitated by the domestic and international failures of the Qing Empire (Yue, vii–xxix).

The introduction of Western science to China was inextricably intertwined with the rising tide of European and Japanese empire. In exchanges between Jesuits and the Ming and Qing courts prior to the Sino-Japanese War, the first forays into popular scientific publication, the production and distribution of new material goods, pictorial representations of science and technology, and in the creation of scientific institutions, empire was a ubiquitous and vexing consideration. Terms like science, civilization, technology, empire, the West, and notions like civic involvement, political involvement, evolution, and social Darwinism, were often understood as “foreign imports,” in a nebulous cluster of overlapping associations. These associations clustered around the nucleus of the discourse of national peril, and the mutually reinforcing vocabulary of national salvation. Western science, as much as SF, was rightly understood to be a body of knowledge that helped to produce and was produced by Orientalist discourse. In the words of Qin Shao, I examine the manners in which “in the West science was mainly driven by industrial development, commercial profits, military conquest and intellectual curiosity, [while] in other parts of the world, Western science was ‘legitimized’ largely by imperialism. It became a measure of one’s strength and success in the modern world order” (Qin Shao, 694).

Natural and social sciences were in turn the products of a series of institutional formations that were part and parcel of the imperial project, and these institutions also helped to cement the ontological assertions of Orientalism. As Said notes, modern sciences were among the blades of the ideological arsenal that sprang from the material reality of colonialism.²⁴

Overview

Chapter 1, “Genre Trouble,” begins with an inquiry into scholarly dating of the emergence of the genre, both in China and the West, examining some key debates and recent developments in academic approaches to SF. Genres are normative heuristic tools, often constructed long after the literary forms that they attempt to define and rarely constitute clearly delineated descriptive categories. To this end, I find many of the questions asked in the chapter headings of Andrew Milner’s Locating Science Fiction (2012) to be particularly useful in coming to terms with the emergence of SF in late Qing China. In brief, I find Milner’s work arguing that SF is a selective tradition, defining a whole field of cultural products best defined by their shared tropes and topoi rather than their formal qualities, to be useful in understanding the constituent elements of early Chinese SF.²⁵ The question “Where Was Science Fiction?” is answered, as in Milner, in turning toward world systems theory and the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti; but I also find Tani Barlow, Meng Yue, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and a number of others who have oriented China’s recent history in terms of a dynamic global political economy to be informative in specifying where Chinese science fiction originated. I find Milner’s response to the question “When Was Science Fiction?”—that in the nineteenth century “the Industrial Revolution decisively and definitively redefined science into an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies, in the everyday rather than the Heideggerian sense” (Milner 2012, 139)—and John Rieder’s analysis of the relationship between industrial modernity, colonialism, and early science fiction to be similarly applicable to the emergence of the genre in China, even though attitudes toward science and technology were markedly different. Finally, I also follow Milner’s “The Uses of Science Fiction” as it examines the ways in which SF has been “politically or morally effective” and, to this end, how it is “socially useful” (Milner 2012, 18) in the Chinese case. The features, functions, and forms identified in sketching the limits of a genre are subject to shifting ideological and aesthetic trends. Exploring the intersections between genres and the material and social circumstances that produced them has the potential to contribute to the question of canon formation in the national and transnational perspective.

In their essay “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” Sheryl Vint and Mark Bould likewise argue that SF has never been a single, clearly delineated body of work but is instead the result of various cultural forces by which the meaning of SF is constantly subject to negotiation. However, they trenchantly note that it is impossible to come to a full understanding of SF “without simultaneously acknowledging its erasures of women and indigenous people and its suppression of the human costs of colonization” (Vint and Bould, 48). Recent work by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2003), Patricia Kerslake (2007), and John Rieder (2008) elucidates the relationship between SF and imperial discourse, and these works are especially informative when applied to the case of early Chinese SF, given its emergence in the context of colonial modernity. SF is one of many genres for which specific definitions are elusive, despite readers’ and critics’ certitude that they know it when they see it. SF encompasses a wide range of literary forms; while features such as technology as a central device to the development and resolution of plot are common, I contend that they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. It is for this reason that I argue in favor of a functional definition of the genre, one that reads SF as intimately concerned with the ideologies and discourses of empire. Drawing upon this work, I propose that Chinese SF be examined through the same lens. In so doing, this work contributes to the critique of colonial modernity writ large, adds nuance to a promising avenue of inquiry for SF studies, and seeks to understand how Orientalist discourse is apprehended from the perspective of the other.

Chapter 2, “Lu Xun, Science, Fiction,” demonstrates how Lu Xun’s essays on science and SF, and his translations of Jules Verne, serve as a useful point of departure in understanding intellectual approaches to scientific knowledge, the written word, and the role of SF in the wide spectrum of experimental genres popularized during the late Qing. I argue that Lu Xun’s early work can be understood in part in terms of the “knowledge industry,” as an effort to write an encyclopedic history of Western thought. Historical developments in the knowledge industry that soon followed illustrate the ways in which Lu Xun was representative of China’s cultural zeitgeist. Like previous literary historians, I share the attitude that Lu Xun is one of the most significant Chinese authors of the twentieth century, if not the most important, and that his work is representative of a number of key transitions and literary themes of modern Chinese literature. However, it is imperative that this understanding of Lu Xun expand its focus in two principal ways. First, I demonstrate that Lu Xun’s critique of China’s national character, and many of the most vivid metaphors of this critique, can be identified as already prevalent in the work of other prominent late Qing writers. This is by no means intended to diminish the status of Lu Xun; rather, in understanding the ways in which he was working with a set of tropes that could already be seen in wide circulation in popular media, we may come to view Lu Xun as having aggregated and articulated a series of concerns that were already prominent in the popular imagination. As such, Lu Xun’s status as the representative of a generation is reinforced, rather than diminished. Second, I show that Lu Xun’s work prior to the publication of “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) in 1918, especially his early essays on science and evolution, is also vitally important and deserves greater attention. This body of work helps us both to uncover the labor pains associated with the emergence of vernacular literature, and to understand more clearly the relationship between science and the intellectual formulations of twentieth-century China.

Chapter 3, “Wu Jianren and Late Qing SF,” presents an extended, close reading of Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji). While this work was not the first work of SF to be produced by a Chinese author, it is both one of the most comprehensive visions of late Qing society and one of the most complete visions of a Chinese utopia. Furthermore, as it is one of the most widely read and analyzed texts of the late Qing, a rereading of New Stone permits me to frame my analysis of the thematic content of late Qing SF in the context of a familiar work. I argue that both the first half of the novel, which takes place in Shanghai at the turn of the century, and the second half of the novel are marked by a sense of estrangement that has been identified as a key component of SF. One prominent theme of the novel is the pervasive sense of crisis and the inability to imagine lasting solutions to China’s semicolonial subjugation. Another leitmotif is a confrontation with China’s own past and its mythical tradition, and I examine the implications of an encounter with the alien other when that beast is one’s own tradition. The tropes relevant to Lu Xun’s work both before and after the publication of A Call to Arms (Nahan, 1922) and those that appear in New Stone serve as the critical and theoretical foundation that I deploy in my analysis of subsequent works of Chinese SF throughout the twentieth century. This sense of crisis, the confrontation with the past, and the prefiguration of many of Lu Xun’s most damning images of Chinese society are features of New Stone that appear regularly throughout the entire body of early twentieth-century SF from China.

Chapter 4, “SF for the Nation,” examines the leitmotif of colonial incursion in Huangjiang Diaosou’s Tales of the Moon Colony (Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo), and the relationship between early Chinese SF and canonical modern Chinese literature. The anxieties associated with utopianism, nationalism, and Occidentalism visible in early Chinese SF prefigure a number of tropes of canonical Chinese fiction and Lu Xun’s metaphors of a sick national body and a cannibalistic society. The most prominent tropes of this early work remain relevant to the modern literary canon, demonstrating that while SF has waxed and waned in popularity, its thematic concerns and imagery remain central to modern Chinese literature.

In chapter 5, “Making Room for Science,” through an examination of Xu Nianci’s “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (“Xin faluo xiansheng tan,” 1904), I demonstrate how late Qing intellectuals envisioned the usurpation of scientific knowledge, and what limitations on overturning Western epistemologies emerged in his work. As a sequel to a translation of a translation, the story is a case study in the linguistic negotiations central to Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice. The story depicts the contested intellectual ground of the late Qing as a case of double consciousness through which the narrator’s body and soul explore alternate versions of evolution and scientific knowledge. Thematically and linguistically, the text offers up a number of potential points of resistance to Western epistemology, attempting to fit scientific knowledge within the ken of Daoist cosmology. Especially prominent in “Mr. Braggadocio” is the degree to which the narrator’s resistance of Western science contrasts with his ready appropriation of the tenets of capitalist accumulation of wealth, as his success in perfecting the techniques of “brain electricity” ultimately lead to a global economic collapse and to the author’s own demise.

In chapter 6, “Lao She’s City of Cats,” I examine the ways in which the concerns of late Qing SF authors continued to be relevant in SF writing of the Republican period. In the wake of World War I and in the buildup to the second Sino-Japanese War, Lao She’s allegory for Chinese society set on a Martian landscape reiterates many of the themes explored in earlier chapters but with an even greater sense of urgency and futility. Lao She addressed a now decades-long sense of crisis with the familiar metaphors of physical illness and failed cures. Like its late Qing counterparts, Lao She’s narrative is an allegorical presentation of China’s tradition and attempts to come to terms with Western epistemology. This allegorical vision is enabled through the device of the (crashed) spaceship, allowing the narrator to see China at an estranged distance. Paralleling Wu Jianren, the story paints Chinese tradition with a revealing and deeply critical ethnographic brush, depicting almost every cultural institution as a resounding failure. At the same time, the story presents attempts to adapt new ideas and technologies as an equally resounding failure.

Chapter 7, “Whither SF / Wither SF,” diverges from the analysis of works of fiction in earlier chapters in order to argue that adequately periodizing and theorizing Chinese SF necessitates accounting for the relationship between the genre and preexisting literary forms. A vexing problem for scholars of Chinese SF is the fact that the genre has weathered a number of high and low tides, and that many of the lowest tides for Chinese SF have come during moments of revolutionary utopian political change. Previous studies have attempted to show the relationship between SF and premodern fantastic tropes but have largely ignored the question of literary form. In my examination of scientific images appearing in the late Qing pictorial Dianshizhai huabao, I argue that accounts of science both real and fictional drew on premodern genres from the biji and zhiguai tradition. I examine the ways in which left-wing intellectuals of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements were engaged in a reassessment of the goals, means, and content of scientific popularization. In the popular science publications of the period, and in contemporaneous critical examinations of such writing, emphasis shifted from natural to social sciences, and from the production and publication of specialized expertise to the dissemination of more readily accessible explanations of the science of everyday life. Just like their late Qing predecessors, writers of the twenties and thirties were ambivalent about the resurrection of old forms and literary styles. Leftist advocates of popular education in the social sciences championed repurposing the xiaopin essay, arguing that a formerly elite genre of private appreciation could be adopted to serve the purpose of popular education. The utopian focus of nonfiction popular science writing from this period stands in stark contrast to Lao She’s Cat Country.