Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson
the other that must be silenced is as often China’s own indigenous tradition as it is an alien invader. In the same moment that Chinese SF authors attempted to assert the imperial strengths of embattled antiquity, they also struggled to bring other aspects of Chinese antiquity into the interpretive framework of scientific explanation. The impulse to resuscitate antiquity also necessitated choosing which version of antiquity would be restored or reinterpreted, and which would be silenced. Such a response also engendered competing impulses between explanations of science in the context of Chinese tradition and explanations of Chinese tradition in the context of science. This is part and parcel of the schizophrenic response to foreign incursion wherein the binaries of traditional/modern and native/foreign appeared equally nonviable. In Chinese SF, the other is a hydra whose heads are competing versions of tradition and modernity. Time is one aspect through which this study examines the question of narrative and empire from the other side of the colonial equation that the Chinese authors grappled with in attempting to answer the question of whether they themselves could overturn the epistemological realities born of European empire and Western science. Chinese authors were conscious of the contradictions and pitfalls inherent in attempting to use an imperialist genre in the effort to overturn such discourses. As with many Western works of SF that enact critiques of empire, it can be argued that even those authors whose work was highly critical of the world system that empire strove for were unable to envision its absence. At the same time, Chinese SF evinces a competing and contradictory impulse in the often-unconscious desire to expand China’s own empire beyond its late Qing borders. Turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectuals often wrote through the lens of a false dichotomy of besieged nation and foreign empire.
Rieder’s definition of the functions and emergence of SF has profound implications for the intellectual and literary ground of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Shanghai. Shanghai was one of the locations where the artificial line between civilization and savagery, and between tradition and modernity, was drawn, and where the deleterious effects of colonial capitalism naturalized the difference between conquerors and conquered. It was also a city where the decentering of Europe appeared not as a side effect of an evolving vision of the world, but as an imperative project in the mission of China’s own national salvation. Rieder’s contention that misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the causes and effects of global disparities in wealth and power are plainly visible in early SF and that SF has the potential to work against such ethnocentrism is of central concern to this study as well. Global disparities in wealth and power, the relations that produced them and the veracity of scientific theories that explain them, are a salient concern of early Chinese SF. The line between civilization and barbarity, and whether this line is drawn by might or right, is a leitmotif in the writing of a number of late Qing SF novels. Furthermore, an explicit point of contention in Chinese discourses on science and in SF was not the question of whether ethnocentrism was a tenable notion, but which ethnic/cultural system deserved to be at the center, and how one could come to be there.
SF against the Empire
In order to assess the particularities of SF in the Chinese context, this study takes late Qing authors such as Lu Xun and Wu Jianren as models for the construction of a local poetics of the tradition. These two authors demonstrate the unique ways in which Kerslake and Rieder’s theories of colonialism and imperialism are reflected in Chinese SF. An understanding of the local inflections of these discourses that emerge in analysis of Lu Xun and Wu Jianren will in turn serve as a theoretical springboard for the rest of this work. Lu Xun, positioned between the worlds of medicine and literature, and firmly ensconced in canonical literary historiography as the father of modern Chinese literature, serves as a theoretical linchpin both for understanding attitudes toward science in early twentieth-century China and for understanding the form and function of SF. Wu Jianren, whose multi-genre New Story of the Stone contains many of the hallmarks of SF, serves as a second example of local iterations of SF in the late Qing and of the matrix of anxieties that I intend to explore throughout the modern period. In their SF works, both authors evince the utopian “sense of wonder” that Suvin identifies as a hallmark of the genre. This sense of wonder is expressed as a focus on scientific advancement and a deep faith in the transcendental possibilities of technology. This utopian wonder is tempered by a profound ambivalence, which I understand in terms of Lu Xun’s iconic iron house metaphor—while both men produced fiction aimed at awakening China’s benighted populace, inky shadows of doubt loom large in their work. Both express concern with China’s incorporation of Western epistemologies and the process of reconciling these fields of knowledge with Chinese philosophical and political traditions. In many cases, this incorporation is an out-and-out physical confrontation, reflective of the influence of colonialism and imperialism.
For Chinese writers of SF, the question that emerged and that they openly grappled with in their writing was whether a genre that they clearly understood to be imbricated with Orientalism and scientism could be turned against its wielders. While SF was used in attempts to unmask, resist, and subvert Orientalism, such efforts often proved to be futile. On other occasions, these narratives repeated the discourse of imperial domination, finding their own fictional others to depict. Just as often, these narratives were characterized by a dialectic of native tradition and modernity, meaning that the confrontation was not between China and another civilization but between China and its own past.
Furthermore, in Chinese SF, China’s cultural totems become representatives of the totality of its history. This reappropriation of Orientalist depictions of China as frozen in history is fraught with uncertainty regarding the power of native tradition and its relationship to Western epistemology. In works like Tales of the Moon Colony, “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio,” The New Era (Xin jiyuan, 1906), and New China (Xin zhongguo, 1910), time is central to anxieties of social and moral decay, to the reordering of the modern world and the decentering of China, and to the relationship between the power to name the year and the relationship between East and West. In other words, can we set our clocks to an hour other than Greenwich Mean Time, and can we set our calendars to a year other than the Gregorian year? If not or if so, what are the implications of both?
In the case of China, I demonstrate what fraught territory such discourse could be, as late Qing and early Republican intellectuals sought both to overturn the balance of power between China, Japan, and Europe, and to express their own desires for supranational hegemony. In most instances, Chinese SF is concerned with the confrontation between an imperial aggressor and a unified Chinese national body. While this is a false equivalency—the Qing Manchu rulers and the Republican government alike could be understood as imperial systems—the dominant perception was one of a confrontation between European empire and Chinese nation. These narratives reveal a kaleidoscopic response to empire that is seldom as simple as dialectical inversion of its discourses.
This existential crisis shared many of the traits of double consciousness as described by Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois,9 causing authors and intellectuals to see themselves from the perspective of both the oppressed and the oppressor, to desire an end of imperial expansion and in the same moment seek to reclaim and reinvigorate China’s own imperial mission. However, this response was more multifaceted than the simple binary opposition of master and slave. The sum total of this series of false dichotomies—empire-nation, self-other, modernity-tradition, science-humanism, and so on—is a kaleidoscopic response, fraught with ambivalence. One dialectical encounter becomes many, and no clear synthesis emerges. Conrad’s failure of imagination was one in which he could not conceive of a world absent of empire; for late Qing writers of SF, the failure of imagination entailed the inability to imagine a world absent of European empire. The narrative failure to figure alternatives becomes a de facto assertion of the supremacy of the status quo.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, China resembled the European sphere in the material conditions that Rieder identifies as having given birth to the readership for SF. China was unique in this regard in being the subject, rather than the beneficiary, of colonial and imperial incursion. The anxieties accompanying science also took on “Chinese characteristics”—as not merely anxieties about the destructive potential of science, but also anxieties regarding the inherent foreignness of science—and also differentiate China from the European context in question in Kerslake’s and Rieder’s analyses. Finally, I would like to argue that China exhibited