Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

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,