Overcome by Speed: Acceleration and the Transformation of Chinese Science Fiction, 1954–1996
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
East Asian Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Tsu, Jing
Abstract
From a state-sponsored tool of popular science and propaganda to a sophisticated genre of speculative literature, science fiction in the People’s Republic of China underwent a metamorphosis from the 1950s to the 1990s. This era also witnessed the first generation of science fiction writers in socialist China growing, flourishing, navigating the challenging political and literary environment, and surviving along with the ill-fated genre. Despite the genre’s suspension during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and its significant changes in generic characteristics and identity, I argue that the core concern of Chinese science fiction in this era remains constant: to anchor the nation to science in an ever-accelerated world. The concern originated from the Maoist mandate in the mid-1950s to catapult China to a communist utopia, and reoriented itself after the Cultural Revolution as the leadership under Deng Xiaoping sought to reform the country’s path of modernization. Burdened by the past revolution running amok, the concern gave way to skepticism toward progress. However, facing the new historical conditions, it also developed into a critical awareness of the self-generating, systematic crises embedded in modernization and globalization. As the feeling of acceleration profoundly transformed China’s literature and science, Chinese science fiction—as a genre straddling the two fields—provides a vantage point to grasp these complicated changes that define Chinese modernity. My dissertation presents two major findings, and how its four chapters are organized highlights them. Firstly, the dissertation demonstrates how paradigm shifts in science and China’s vision of modernization shaped science fiction. Representative authors surveyed in this dissertation, including Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Ye Yonglie, are among a small group of intellectuals who trained to be professional scientists or science popularizers before or during the early socialist period. Their writings sensitively resonate with the radical changes in science regarding its institution, knowledge, paradigm, ideology, and aesthetics. Accordingly, each of the four chapters discusses a group of science fiction texts that are particularly relevant to specific disciplines. The themes surveyed by the four chapters include astronomy and aeronautics, archaeology and paleoanthropology, microbiology and epidemiology, and oceanography and cetology. Secondly, the dissertation distinguishes the different senses of acceleration from the two periods before and after the Cultural Revolution that informed science fiction’s changing temporal consciousness and aesthetics. Whereas the Maoist experiments of communism trumpeted an anthropocentric, voluntarist effort to accelerate the progress toward a utopian destination, an awareness of the crises generated by past modernization emerged in the 1980s, conceiving of humanity accelerating toward an uncertain horizon of upcoming risks. In order to trace this paradigm shift, all chapters cover a time span across the second half of the 20th century, examine relevant texts and events chronologically, and feature a biographical focus on several representative authors. This dissertation combines methods of literary studies, cultural studies, intellectual history, and the history of science to analyze sources from science fiction, popular science, literary criticism, studies in natural and social sciences, political documents, and journalism. For the field of Chinese studies, the dissertation showcases how China’s shifting paradigm of modernization and science shapes its literary institution and aesthetics, and how literature produces an imaginary space to speculate on and reflect on the political and technological consequences of state-led science. In addition, the dissertation contributes to the studies of Chinese literature and culture with its focus on acceleration as a generative condition for aesthetic creativity, and its expanded coverage that tracks the political and technological contexts of literature across the second half of the 20th century.
Recommended Citation
Zhou, Dihao, "Overcome by Speed: Acceleration and the Transformation of Chinese Science Fiction, 1954–1996" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1052.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1052
