Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

      Lu Xun’s preface to A Call to Arms relates his apoplexy upon viewing the image of a Chinese man being executed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the apathetic countenances of the surrounding crowd, and how this moment in a lecture hall in Sendai in 1905 led him to abandon the study of medicine and turn toward the “spiritual cure” of literature. This moment is ripe material for scholars of Chinese literature and film in search of a single traumatic rupture to represent the inception of modern Chinese literature.¹ His father’s succumbing to tuberculosis had led Lu Xun to Japan to study medicine, where he was then exposed to what he determined to be China’s spiritual illness. The young man determined that he could do more to save China with the spiritual elixir of the written word than with the curative properties of medicine. Over the course of the twentieth century, he became the emblem of the era, the patron saint of modern Chinese literature. Part of the universe that Lu Xun wanted to bring home was science, and he saw fiction as an apt vehicle for its introduction. Many years before the seminal preface to A Call to Arms, the young Lu Xun’s translation and writing represent a liminal moment in which his commitment to science began to shift to literature. Lu Xun is an instructive figure for understanding attitudes toward science in early twentieth-century China, for examining the form and function of late Qing SF, and for understanding the relationship between the genre and canonical literature.

      Many of the themes identifiable in Chinese SF are central to modern Chinese literature as a whole. Lu Xun’s most prominent themes, especially the vision of a sick society and “crisis of figuration” (Huters 2005, 254–279) expressed most forcefully in his short stories “Diary of a Madman” and “Medicine” (“Yao,” 1919, LXQJ, 1:463–472), are emblematic of the pervasiveness of pharmacological metaphor in popular literature at large. Prior to Lu Xun’s adoption of these metaphors, the “sick man of Asia” (dongya bingfu) was already a prominent trope in a number of late Qing works, including SF.² The anxieties and motifs crystallized in Lu Xun’s oeuvre were visible prior to the literary revolution of 1917–1919 and became pervasive in the wake of his lionization as the father of modern Chinese literature.

      Lu Xun’s essays on science and SF, and his translations of Jules Verne (1903), serve as a useful point of departure in understanding late Qing approaches to scientific knowledge and the emergent role of SF in the multi-genre fiction of the late Qing.³ Lu Xun’s characteristic ambivalence, visible even in his early essays on science and his translations of SF, would become a defining feature of early Chinese SF at large.

      Lu Xun heralded the translation of SF, arguing in the preface to his translation of Verne’s De la terre à la lune that Chinese SF, while “as rare as unicorn horns,” possessed the potential to educate the public in the otherwise tedious subject of science, and he encouraged concerted efforts in translation of science fiction (Wu and Murphy, xiii). In the same year, Bao Tianxiao,⁴ in his preface to Tie Shijie (lit. “Iron world”), the translation of Verne’s Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum, wrote, “Science fiction is the vanguard of the civilized world,” adding that “there are those in the world who don’t like to study, but there are none who don’t appreciate SF, thus it is an adroit mechanism of importing civilized thought, and its seeds quickly bear fruit.”⁵ Haitian Duxiaozi (b. ?) wrote in a similar vein, noting the existence “in our country today, [of] the tide of imported Western knowledge, and books volume upon volume to fill a library to the rafters. To get twice the result with half the effort, what might we choose to make popular throughout the land? I implore you to begin with science fiction.”⁶ Lu Xun and his contemporaries saw in SF the opportunity to disseminate empirical knowledge through the media of popular culture. To this end, Liang Qichao and Xu Nianci produced translations of SF, while the Confucian utopia presented in Kang Youwei’s⁷ Book of the Great Unity (Datong shu, 1901) evinced the clear influence of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Chen and Xia 1997, 47–48), demonstrating the central role that SF and the utopian imagination played in the formation of modern Chinese literature. This vision of literary purpose would be adopted by May Fourth literati, and its echoes continue to reverberate in the contemporary period. One of these demands was the popularization of scientific knowledge.

       The Language of Science and the Language of Fiction

      “Science” (kexue) was part of the problematic glossary of related and conflated terms associated with what Lydia Liu has termed the “translingual practice” of the late Qing. Much like the concept of modernity, which is firmly rooted in a Weberian/Marxist model that privileges the development of European institutions and economic systems as a teleological historical standard and allows little room for alternatives, the term “science” is rarely associated with its original meaning as simple “knowledge” and is instead tied to the European Enlightenment’s scientific method and a limited field of knowledge production. Likewise, the term “civilization” (wenming) was transplanted from Japanese, its meaning often conflated with notions of modernity and Westernization. This is demonstrated trenchantly in Lu Xun’s early essay “On Imbalanced Cultural Development” (“Wenhua pianzhi lun,” 1907), when he asks, “Shall we be instructed to abandon all our past institutions along with the accomplishments of the olden days, and speak only of Western culture as ‘civilization’?” (LXQJ, 1:47). Wang Hui has shown how understandings of science were further clouded by association with classical Chinese terms. This confusion of terminologies produced a specific and highly paradoxical form of knowledge, one that suggested familiarity through adoption of classical Chinese vocabulary but was often understood to be entirely non-Chinese.⁸

      Like the hegemonic narrative of Said’s “universalizing historicism,” civilization was also a concept associated with the imagination of a single historical trajectory and a universal valuation of cultural worth. The West was understood to be at the leading edge of evolutionary time: the geographical home of civilization. Logically, if the vanguard of evolution and modernity was in the West, if science was the property of the West, and if civilization was the culmination of Western cultural and scientific achievement on a universal evolutionary scale, then science had to be an indispensable component of civilizational achievement. Theodore Huters and Marsten Anderson have argued that in the literary realm of the late Qing, “modernism” and “realism” were closely associated with one another (Anderson, 27–37; Huters 1993, 147–173). To modernize meant both to cast off the past and the static indigenous tradition that was modernity’s other, and to adopt realist modes of narrative representation in writing. Understood as the most viable alternative to a failing imperial system, material modernization and the adoption of realistic narrative modes to promote modernization were also more or less synonymous with Westernization. Science was thus also closely moored to notions of civilization, modernism, and realism.⁹

      During the late Qing, definitions of science began to shift toward a sense of objective understanding of the material world. Although precise dating of the first usage of the term kexue is clouded by Kang Youwei’s penchant for forging memorials, it is clear that use of this term as a translation for “science” did not fully solidify until the early twentieth century, most likely in the year 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty (Wang Hui, 15).¹⁰ Not originally a Chinese term, kexue was a Japanese import: a product of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and another example of translingual practice. It was during this period that the term kexue, and its associations with categorizing knowledge, began to come into widespread usage. Kexue, though more closely associated with notions of “observation and factual experiment” (Wang Hui, 18), continued to be associated with positivism and