China stakes a claim on the future with sci-fi and speculative fiction

Speculative fiction, which encompasses sci-fi and other futuristic literature, is emerging as a strong vehicle for China to project soft power in a competition with the US over the imagined future.

The genre may help China and the Global South challenge Western views of colonialism, capitalism and future tech, according to Chinese scholars of literature and culture.

“Speculative fiction, as a genre that imagines the future while critiquing the present, has long been dominated by Euro-American discourses, and traditional science fiction studies have likewise focused primarily on the texts of Western economic powers,” said Du Lanlan, tenured professor of English literature at Nanjing University in eastern China.

She made the remarks in a presentation last month at a two-day conference on speculative fiction hosted by Nanjing University’s School of Frontier Sciences and its Institute of Global Humanities in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.

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Speculative fiction explores “what if” possibilities beyond the everyday world and encompasses fantasy, science and dystopian fiction.

Du said Western writers often worked within a neoliberal ideological framework, projecting capitalist society into future scenarios, and their imagined worlds tended to be “dystopian, bleak and pessimistic”.

South China Morning Post