(Speech given at Peking University on May 17, 2011. Translated by Emma Xu. See also the complete version in Chinese)

David Der-wei Wang (王德威) is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Harvard University and a member of Academia Sinica. His specialties are Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature, Late Qing fiction and drama, and Comparative Literary Theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University. 

In 2011, professor Wang gave a lecture in Peking University on the topic of Chinese science fiction. He related the three concepts in western literature—utopia, dystopia, and heterotopias to the study of Chinese literature and discussed two Chinese writers Lu Xun (鲁迅) and Liu Cixin (刘慈欣) from two different times. The following is an excerpt of his lecture on the development of Chinese science fiction in different periods of history.

Professor Wang divided his lecture into the following parts:

Late Qing Dynasty — the May Fourth Movement

First I need to go back to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. At the time of late Qing Dynasty, fantasy or science fiction in a broad sense used to be a grand literary genre, which once played a meaningful role in a period of political and historical upheavals. Such a phenomenon gradually faded away after the year of 1911. After the May Fourth Movement, science fiction even became a sub-genre which was little known. The transformation is worth thinking about.

Liang Qichao (梁启超)

In 1902, in his magazine New Novel (新小说), Liang Qichao wrote On the Future of New China (新中国未来记). This was the starting point of our today’s discussion on science fiction. There were five chapters in On the Future of New China and he did not finish it. It was a projection of the year 1962, sixty years after the publication of the novel. At that time, China had already raised to a world power, with many other countries coming to pay tribute to China and admire the greatness of its civilization. The 72^nd generation of descendants of Confucius (which is not Kong Qingdong 孔庆东) gave a lecture on various kinds of prosperity and harmony in the world. Thousands of students from all over the countries came to the lecture. It was a world with advanced civilization and the ideal projection of Liang Qichao in 1902. However, it as a scientific fiction was quite superficial, using only temporal projection to illustrate his ideal for the future.

The novel was inspired by Looking Backward by American writer Edward Bellamy in late nineteenth century. Translated by missionary, the book was circulated among few Chinese intellectuals in the 1890s. The novel was adapted into On the Future of New China by Liang Qichao.

Lu Xun (鲁迅)

In 1903, Lu Xun , namely Zhou Shuren (周作人), who was then studying in Japan, was also greatly interested in science fiction. In 1903, Lu Xun translated two novels: one is Travel on the Moon; the other is A Journey to the Center of the Earth. In talking about Lu Xun’s  contribution to Chinese modern literature of today, it cannot be ignored that his experiment on literature started from the translation of foreign scientific novels. The origin of the two books translated by Lu Xun was actually the French writer Jules Gabriel Verne, who was extremely popular at the time in Europe. A Journey to the Center of the Earth and Travel on the Moon were respectively published in 1864 and 1865 and were both popular at that time. Lu Xun translated from Japanese versions and had many parts deleted from original plot. But the point is we had a student who advocated reform and who was full of imagination and curiosity to the outside world. They had already felt worried and indignant about current China and its traditions.

It is the imagination and narration that are significant in rebuilding our imagination of China and the world with a novel. After traveling to the moon and the center of the earth, the exchange between humanity and world had become an incredible adventure by creating a different space. Indeed, hundreds of years later, what Lu Xun did in 1903 has become a scientific feat in today. It has become an ambitious project to explore different places astrologically. In the process of human civilization, we are constantly searching for paradise and fairyland. But the civilization brought itself a flickering and direction. During such a historical crisis, “China can rise to prosperity”. Hopefully Chinese can rise up again, using our power to recreate China and the world. Such vivid imagination was the beginning of Lu Xun’s literature. However, our literature textbooks started with A Madman’s Diary (狂 人日记), which is another dystopian imagination. The so-called source of science fiction which constantly influenced the China’s scientific narration was such foreign writers such as H. G. Wells who wrote Time Machine.

Other works

Some of these books became extremely popular at that time. One was The Suppressed Modernity (被 压抑的现代性) that was popular during late Qing Dynasty. The earth was no longer habitable and we could fly to another planet by hot balloons. In The New Story of the Stone (新 石头记), Jia Baoyu (贾宝玉) came to a civilized world after several rounds of life. This civilized world was harmonious and ethical, including everything. People from different classes lived equally and happily together and the technology was advanced. Jia Baoyu once had many incredible acts such as going on deep-sea expedition in a submarine, and flying toAfricafor hunting. The climax of the novel comes when Jia Baoyu went to the Expo, he met a great master of eastern civilization, whose name was Mr. Eastern Civilization, just like today’s professor Du Weiming (杜维明). Jia listened to him talking about the possibility of prosperity. The expo image is very funny and reminds us of spectacle social events such as the Shanghai Expo and Beijing Olympics. In such an occasion, we are actually having a heterotopian imagination which we cannot have in current society. It seems to be a vision that can be fulfilled, making such a society our reflective subject.

In The New Era (新纪元), during a war in 1999, Hungary was trying to decide between western calendar and Chinese almanac and began fighting with each other. China interrupted by sending troops to Europe. The generalissimo led a troop of battleships pulled by crocodiles, beating all the western powers badly. Such imagination based on strong racial and national nationalism was very shocking at the time (around 1910).

Works of this type were popular at the time. Both utopian and dystopian orientation created a new imagination and space, provoking and disturbing Chinese of that generation with the question how to confront approaching disasters of the nation in real life. The Revolution of 1911 indeed resulted in a subtle confrontation with so-called utopian, dystopias, and heteropian phenomena in science fiction.

The May Fourth Movement — 1949

It is weird that science fiction suddenly disappeared after the May Fourth Movement introduced the notion of Democracy and Science into Chinese intelligentsia. Arguably, if the society had experience modernity, the new generation of intellectuals should have become more interested in either positive or negative utopian literature. On the contrary, the literature we read today is all about realism. Until today, we are stilling spreading the omnipotence and perpetuity of realism. It is a subtle reflection on the historical situation of that time. Why is such genre missing? One possible explanation is that in face of national disaster and in the concern for the country, people have no time to imagine another space whether it is possible or not.

• A Lisi’s journey in China (阿丽思中国游记), by Shen Congwen (沈从文), 1929
• 

The book was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Shen depicted aChinain late twentieth century with all kinds of ridiculousness that even A Lisi was shocked after coming toChina. It was a small experiment on dystopia.

• Diary of the Ghost Land (鬼土日记), by Zhang Tianyi (张天翼), 1931

It adopted the genre of “ghost stories” from Ming and Qing Dynasties, but he made the various ghosts ludicrous and the story was not at all scary. The story goes that a mortal of the secular world went to visit the underworld and saw all kinds of weird and ridiculous scenes he had read in literature. Various incredible, tacky, mawkish, violent and weird literary scenes made a spectacle in the world of ghosts. Zhang Tianyi used the underworld to investigate the ridiculousness and inequalities in the real world.

• A Tale of the City of Cats (猫城记), by Lao She (老舍), 1933

In A Tale of the City of Cats, an astronaut went on an expedition to the Mars. The spaceship had an accident and he arrived at a country of cats. Citizens here would save their “faces” at all costs. They consumed “” every day and their minds were always unclear. They grew up in such an environment. In face of the impending disaster, they still had fights with each other. The prospect of a nation was clear. Compared with the previous two in structure, the book has a more comprehensive reflection and imagination of dystopia.

• Eighty-one Dreams (八十一梦), by Zhang Henshui (张恨水)

The book was published during the Anti-Japanese War. It reflected various kinds of absurdity in an “Anti-Japanese society” under the government of Kuomintang through the interpretation of dreamland. Although Anti-Japanese War was an initiative of the whole country, Zhang Henshui did see the negative side such as corruptions during the War. He constructed a dreamland to liberate himself from his own criticalness to some extent—it probably was just a dream. This was another work of dystopia.

From the perspective of modern literature, these are just a small part in of an insignificant genre. However, there was another genre of “narration” other than novels. Either ideological narration or public and political narration had a lot of utopian imagination.

• Social Structure of Beauty (美的社会组织法), by Zhang Jingsheng (张竞生)

Writer of “History of Sex”, Zhang Jingsheng seems to be a very bad figure. In the middle 1920s, he wrote “Social Structure of Beauty”, imagining a surprisingly perfect Chinese society. In particular, people were most impressed with what he came up with as “Lover System”. Since marriage was so boring, it was better to have a “Lover System” so that people could enjoy more romantic relationships. Choosing what to wear every day made people have headache. The country could produce a kind of clothes that people could wear everyday and was easy to clean as well. Therefore people could dress beautifully with the same clothes and were no longer bothered by what to wear. The book actually can be read as a novel, which is even more interesting that the dystopias mentioned above.

• Da Tong Shu (大同书), by Kang Youwei (康有为)

Kang Youwei (康有为)

Kang Youwei started writing the book in 1880, but the book had been circulated among the literati in the Kang family. In 1913, several chapters of Da Tong Shu were published in print. The book wasn’t published in its entirety until 1935. It was an important discussion or narration on utopia. He imagined that the world had no countries. There was one central government elected by the people. There was no family and men and women could not live together for more than one year. No matter how much they loved each other, there were more people who they should love. So one had only one year to express your love to the other and needed to move on to next stage. The growing of children was extremely important, so it should be taken care of by the country with public care house. Schools of different levels were pre-arranged and one just needed go from one to another. Employment, hospitalization, and retirement were all arranged. In the end, when one was ready to go to the heaven, things were arranged, too. One would be immediately be cremated after death. Right next to the crematorium was a fertilizer plant. The whole life of people was made the fullest use. It was a perfect world of great unity. Thus in the wild utopian imagination of Kang Youwei, there were radical traditional Chinese ideas of livelihood, as well as anarchy and other western political concepts. All of these made a interesting story. It was difficult to define it as a subtle argumentation. I think its narrative process is worth rethinking about. The worked appeared in 1935, almost half a century later than Kang Youwei started writing.

Kang Youwei’s Da Tong Shu even had great influence on the “On People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (论人民民主专政) by the great Mao in history (毛泽东). Mao in this declaration mentioned the great world of the Da Tong Shu. There was an ideological connection between the two. It is important to notice that in 1958 when people’s commune movement began, Mao Zedong was indeed partly inspired by Kang Youwei’s Da Tong Shu.Interesting historical materials suggest possibilities of exchange between different eras and political ideals. The utopian potential seems to exist in narration or political writings. In comparison, what we usually read in novels are the possibilities of dystopia.

1949—

After 1949, there was a period of science fiction in its broadest sense. But at that time, “science” was controlled by an ideological and political rhetoric and a way of knowledge acquisition. Thus it was inconceivable for many politically correct figures to put together science fiction and science in a certain historical background. Science fiction could only play an auxiliary role under the premises of scientific popularization and study. Writers were not allowed to have imaginative explorations into various utopian and dystopian futures. Therefore science fiction was indeed limited and became a kind of propaganda literature.

A sinologist in Germany Wagner once studied the science fiction of the 1950s. Mr. Zheng Wenguang (郑文光) contributed to early science fiction after 1949. Mr. Ye Yonglie’s (叶永烈) “The Little Smart Wondering into the Future” (小灵通漫游未来) in the early 1980s was the most popular science fiction ever. Such science fictions were mostly categorized as popular science books and more important ones belonged to children’s literature. In the many years of the creation and practice of science fiction, once it was categorized into children’s literature, the issue had the nature of group, family and children, which was a very ridiculous situation.

Chinese science fiction was dwarfed by the voluminous western works of the same genre. Mr. Han Song (韩松) once said, “If you tell other you write science fiction, you will feel insignificant. How can you be compared with those great guys like Yu Hua (余华), Su Tong (苏童) or Wang Anyi (王安忆)? Science fiction forms a sharp contrast with realistic literature. The graduate students of Professor Wu Yan (吴岩) in Beijing Normal University belong to the department of children’s literature. It you want to study science fiction, you have to go to the department of children’s literature. These children are really not simple.These great “children” who were over fifty or sixty years old still kept writing science fictions in contemporary times.

Zhang Xiguo (张系国)

Born in mainland, Zhang Xiguo grew up in Taiwan and lives inUSA. In the seventies and eighties, he wrote a large number of science fictions. He is a Doctor of Philosophy in electronic computing. His works include “Five Jade Plates” (五玉碟), “Flying Soldier in the City of Dragon” (龙城飞将), and “A Feather” (一羽毛), which are a trilogy series. It imagined the crossing of time and space, future of the universe, and exploring different planets, etc. But he put the story in late Qing Dynasty and around the time of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, making an interesting phenomenon in the shifting of time and space.

The generation of Liu Cixin (刘慈欣)

Liu Cixin

Liu’s douban site

Liu Cixin has become a phenomenon in mainland literature circle during the past five or six years. He is an engineer, as well as a figure who is famous, exemplary and standard in the field of science fiction but little known in literary field. It was in the Niangziguan power plant where he works that he wrote powerful science fiction. Liu began writing San Ti (三体) in 2006, before which he had already had more than ten years of writing experience, including the work Ball-shaped Lightening (球状闪电).

San Ti Trilogy

“San Ti” refers to the three stars in the endless universe and sky. They have created a new living environment that differs from the earth as a result of mutual gravitation. In such a star system exist so-called “San Ti people” (三体人). There is no fixed law to follow due to gravity effects, unlike the seasonal changes on the earth. In that world, there are only two systems of time. One is called “Eternal epoch” (恒纪元), in which time goes in a regular way. The other is called “Chaotic epoch” (乱纪元). People have no idea about when the “Eternal epoch” or “Chaotic epoch” would begin. “San Ti people” live in a extremely unstable time system, so they have acquired the ability to handle variable situations constantly. With such ability, they have to be calm, crafty and treacherous to deal with impending crises. For them, morals and ethics are produced by people on the earth who are idle and rich. In the world of “San Ti”, unbounded rationality expanded to an absolute cynicism and their technology and civilization are far advanced than the earth.

First, there is a female scientist Ye Wenjie, whose father was executed wrongly during the Cultural Revolution. As a result she developed an absolute pathetic and cynical attitude toward humanity with a total lack of confidence. In revenge of her father, she secretly got in touch with “San Ti people” with her scientific power and invited them to destroy the current world. The problem thus came that how can human beings fight against “San Ti people”. The only opportunity is a period of 400 years which it takes for “San Ti people” to arrive on earth. The 400 years is fair enough for people on earth to take defensive measures. In the novel, people from different fields across the world join each other to fight against “San Ti people”. Our visionary leaders have already predicted in 1960 that creatures from foreign planets might come to attack Chinese someday. So there is indeed the grand red side that great men are there. But on the other hand, “San Ti people” is after all a very evil force and it is unknown what the results will be. So there is another quite solemn clue that no matter how hard you fight back, it will end up nothing left. Perdition is the ultimate fate of the earth. However, before the “San Ti people” come, we have to leave some proof of our efforts, so there are astounding descriptions.

The problem thus came that how can human beings fight against “San Ti people”. The only opportunity is a period of 400 years which it takes for “San Ti people” to arrive on earth. The 400 years is fair enough for people on earth to take defensive measures. In the novel, people from different fields across the world join each other to fight against “San Ti people”. Our visionary leaders have already predicted in 1960 that creatures from foreign planets might come to attack Chinese someday. So there is indeed the grand red side that great men are there. But on the other hand, “San Ti people” is after all a very evil force and it is unknown what the results will be. So there is another quite solemn clue that no matter how hard you fight back, it will end up nothing left. Perdition is the ultimate fate of the earth. However, before the “San Ti people” come, we have to leave some proof of our efforts, so there are astounding descriptions.

In the process of defense, Liu Cixin asks a profound question. He no longer discuss the issues such as the direction of China, the rise of China, the existence of automatic mechanism inside the Communist Party of China. His question is: beyond the current concerns over China, as Chinese, are we able to response to Chinese civilization in a broader sense or even the world’s and universe’s civilizations?

Here he is revealing a powerful, Kantian and spectacular confrontation between humanity and the infinity. As a writer who is rarely seen in the latest ten or twenty years, Liu Cixin has great imagination into the future. Such imagination leads to nowhere, though, because the capacity of humanity makes it impossible to survive. At last, when “San Ti people” come nearer, human world is compressed our three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional with a “Er Xiang Bo” (二向箔), like the picture created by Zhang Yimou (张艺谋), in which our three-dimensional world was compressed into the subtlest two-dimensional civilization. How spectacular scene that is! All humanity, constructions, and civilizations are compressed with only death left. With everything disappearing, how can we keep our civilization? At the historical or universal cross, what judgment would the one or two great men make? Should we act like “San Ti people” who work in conspiracy and change the destiny of humanity with absolute calmness and rationality? Should we continue our belief that has shaped our civilization and continue our unavoidable tragedy? There are many moral concerns involved. In addition to the exaggeration of universal landscape and spectacles, there is a more profound of Liu Cixin on the antinomy that “what make humanity”.

The second part of the story Dark Forest (黑暗森林) talks about one type of surviving law. In the Dark Forest (黑暗森林) of zero morality, how are we going to keep the precious residue of humanity’s moral ideas? There is no solution. In the last part Dead End (死 神永生), humanity’s destiny came to the end. How can we keep our last dignity? Here Liu Cixin raises an even more profound question.

In addition to humanity’s yearning for and reflection over universe, and humanity’s helpless ethnic confrontation with infinite darkness after conflicts, Liu Cixin also emphasizes one power the humanity can be proud of even after the extinction of “San Ti people” or the universe or humanity itself. This is human imagination. The imagination enables humanity to write poems and literature. Thus all in a sudden, he becomes quite lyrical and uplifted in that humanity cannot be completely controlled by computers, “San Ti people”, or various black powers of the universe.

He wrote a special novel called Cloud of Poetry (诗云). After the earth was taken control by creatures from foreign planets, there was only one thing left that could not be controlled and was created by humanity–poetry. A foreign creature was very curious and wanted to copy what humanity did. He even gave himself a pen name–”Li Bai” (李白). He tried everything he could to steal the most mysterious and most incredible creativity of humanity–writing poetry. “Li Bai” created a nebula hundreds of millions long by permutation and combination of all the literary resources. But he still did not grab the key to writing good poems. The human he captured had a less advanced civilization than foreign creatures, but he was the only one who can tell what is poetry. As for the collection of quadrillions of characters made by computer, he said that was not poetry.

Therefore according to Liu Cixin, the last hope for human civilization is literature. This is a great honor for literature. In this sense, the tension beneath all the wonderful narration in Liu Cixin’s novels comes from the absolute fantasy on the basis of popular science knowledge, the moral principles that made humanity who they were, and expectation for humanity’s imagination. In the end of the novel, everything was gone with the only museum left by human being on Pluto. The earth was gone, together with other things. Such imagination made people wonder whether their future would be like this after reading and feel lost. It is because what we hope is the most utopian imagination of the rise of the country and a magnificent future. In this aspect, Liu Cixin has a broader vision and make us understand that there are much more things in such an infinite universe that we do not know and can continue to explore as human beings.

However, there is a problem in time. If Liu Cixin had already know the destruction of humanity, why would he write a novel called “San Ti”? The name of the novel was Memories of the Earth (地球往事), which used the tense of future perfect to project the what had already happened. He always tells us that there are many dimensions of the universe. The dimension we are in may be another possibility, in which we have already avoided the ultimate disaster. But the projection of life or time is not a simplified logic narration with progressive development. As a scientific enthusiast and researcher, he felt the power to tell us the possibility of infinite expansion.

In 1989, Liu Cixin wrote a novel called China 2185 (中国2185). The story goes that in the year 2185, the ruler of China is a 29-year-old woman. However, one thing happens. A hacker-like figure steals into the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall and replicate Mao’s brain with the most leading-edge technology and creates a new virtual entity. This entity becomes the biggest challenge to our president–the great man is back. What is more terrible is that the brain of a common people is also replicated into a virtual entity and is constantly be replicated. As a result, there are thousands of brain replicas of the same person, becoming the biggest nightmare of humanity. They establish a Republic of Huaxia and the Internet is a chaos. The president is petrified in face of a challenge with multi aspects. In the end what she does is to cut off the power and the whole (virtual) world disappears all of a sudden. Although the Republic of Huaxia only lasts several hours in the cyberworld, it has been 600 hundred years in their world. However, the president ends everything through the operation of the power in one minute. So Liu Cixin is interesting in that his vision is not confined to the current world and he explores various phenomena in politics and history.

Other important works

The subway system of Beijing is advance and convenient. But in the story Subway (地 铁) by Han Song (韩松), we are told that the subway is a dystopia. In such a space, we crowd in the train and who know what will happen in next second? The subway takes us into a special and profound undergroud space. In the novel, Han Song’s depressive, even decadent and cruel imagination explodes.

In 2066: Wondering to the West (2066年之西行漫记), China has already risen to a great power in the year 2066. America, however, is not so lucky and has a second civil war.Chinaplays an important role here. Wondering to the West has a historical origin based on Edgar Snow’s Red star over China. It is a subtle confrontation between the red memory and imagination of the future.

In Taiwan, Yi Geyan (伊格言) wrote Dream Eater (噬梦人), telling a story of human brain competing with computer.

It is hard to define Hostel of West Xia (西夏旅馆) by Luo Yijun (骆以军) as a science fiction. But in the broadest sense of today’ heterotopia, it created a most sexual, decadent, and strange hostel with the name of West Xia. It had historical origins. In every single room of the hostel, there would be incredible things happening. The visit of every guest became the most mysterious and usual story. As a Taiwanese writer who belongs to the second generation of another province, Luo Yijun has a deeper historical projection. In the eleventh century, West Xia was a small state and had a short-lived civilization between Liao and Song Dynasties. It later disappeared completely. He used such a literary reference to project the life of Chinese on Taiwan Island. There is also a touch of self pity. But more importantly, he emphasized that in such a strange world, people coming to and leaving the hostel and their short stay suggest a kind of agitation, anxiety, and imagination of a new civilization.

Dong Qizhang (董启章) from Hong Kong is a typical withdrawn otaku and the only thing he does is writing novels at home.A Complicated History of Time (时 间繁史) is one of the works in his enormous writing project. The relationship between humanity and robots is no longer an issue here. We are indeed living in a world of robots and whether we are robots ourselves is unknown. In the process, he projected the history of Hong Kong and the ideas of someone from Hong Kong. The climax in A Complicated History of Time happens when in the year 2097 after a deluge, Hong Kong is submerged. In a dilapidated library on a small mountain top, a girl named Victoria is still in charge of the fragments of Hong Kong’s history. It is known that Victoria has something to do with the history of Hong Kong. But the girl is a robot and has to be winded everyday, otherwise times stops here like all the other civilizations that have disappeared. The novel is still being written.

Chen Guanzhong

Chen Guanzhong (陈冠中) is from Hong Kong who now lives in Beijing. The name of the novel is An Era of Prosperity (盛世). The novel is about things that are happening soon. The story goes that with a inviting prospects, a lot of weird things happened in Beijing in 2013. After another worldwide economic panic, China was saved from dangers by the leading of senior officials of the country and rised to an even greater power, becoming the biggest country in the world. However, from that day on, every citizen in Beijing have big smiles on their faces. And there was a specific term to refer to Beijing citizens–”high”. Everything looked so great and people could not be happier. Nevertheless, at that time, when student in the Chinese department of Peking University had classes about Yang Jiang (杨绛) and Qian Zhongshu (钱钟书), they did not know who they were anymore, as well as the Wansheng Books Garden (万圣书园). The history of China started from the year 2008 when the Beijing Olympics took place. This is an obvious dystopian novel.

There was a group of people who were not able to have fun. They were not satisfied and wanted to know the reason for the happiness of Beijing citizens. They unexpectedly kidnaped one the leaders of the country. The leader was not wearing hair that was dyed black, nor dressed decently with a face glowing with health. He had few hair and was exhausted, but he was a man of high taste and wore an Armani suit. His children had been sent abroad at an early time. But he knew his responsibility for Chinese people and worked hard in the real sense. There is a marvellous monologue in the novel. I could not believe that one person could deliver such a long paragraph when I first read the novel because I thought it was already out of the limit of a novel. But when I read for a second time, I realized the point of the novel was not how “high” Beijing citizens were, but how the leader used a tender, rational, and nostalgic tone to tell us his responsibility to China. He talked about how he governed the country, that he knew the conflicts between the new leftists and the liberals. He said their conflicts were not problematic. He let they fight against each other and they were all under his due consideration. He would stop them at a certain time. He also talked about that under the circumstance that politics, academics, and philosophy intertwined with each other, they came up with a new body of citizens. The most fundamental thing for the new body was to forget–how to forget. Moreover, there was a great secret.

The writer Chen Guanzhong was not simply a Hong Kong journalist who criticizes China. As a matter of fact, he has profound love toward and deep concerns about China. This is another way of reflecting on China, but not starkly criticizing the current political power. He is against classicism. As a Hong Kong citizen living in Beijing, how can he create a heterotopia through the novel instead of simple utopia or dystopia? How to reflect China’s future in a position on the fringe? How to confront with the political leaders of the country with his literary voices? He is not meant to simply criticize, but to re-present , through the novel, the costs of a magnificent future of China and the efforts needed to make up for all the consequences we would not like to see.

At the end of An Era of Prosperity, the leader told the kidnappers: you are so disobedient. The country is pretty good, but why do you still isolate yourself?

I would end with what Lu Xun has said:

I would not like to go the heaven where there are things that make me unhappy; I would not like to go to the hell where there are things that make me unhappy; I would not like to go to the golden world in your future where there are things that make me unhappy.

As an intellectual writer, how can we make use of our limited literary imagination or the unlimited imagination of Lin Xinci, constantly create a new way, a vision, and an expectation for possible heterotpias between utopias and dystopias. In the system from Lu Xun to Liu Cixin, there were a lot of evidences or new suggestion to the future of China.