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China's Arthur C. Clarke
HughPickens.com writes Joshua Rothman has a very interesting article in The New Yorker about Liu Cixin, China's most popular science-fiction writer. The author of thirteen books has retained his day job as a computer engineer with a State-run power plant in a remote part of Shanxi province, because it helps him to stay grounded, enabling him to "gaze at the unblemished sky" as many of his co-workers do. In China, Cixin is about as famous as William Gibson in the United States and Cixin is often compared to Arthur C. Clarke, whom he cites as an influence. Rothman writes that American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity's imagined future often looks a lot like America's past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources.
For example, in The Wages of Humanity, visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth's wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In Taking Care of Gods, the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. "We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in," they say. "I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety," writes Rothman. In another story, The Devourer, a character asks, "What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding." But you can't expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a "self-sufficient, introspective civilization." "At the core of Liu's sensibility," concludes Rothamn, "is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?"
For example, in The Wages of Humanity, visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth's wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In Taking Care of Gods, the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. "We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in," they say. "I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety," writes Rothman. In another story, The Devourer, a character asks, "What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding." But you can't expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a "self-sufficient, introspective civilization." "At the core of Liu's sensibility," concludes Rothamn, "is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?"
The Clarke comparison certainly grabbed my attention. My next question was "where can I find these works in English?" I see that one of the links above leads to English translations of a couple of stories.
Thanks for the tip!
Or...if you have talked to any native Chinese in some depth you might realize that a lot of them actually have different values than Westerners about social responsibility and such. Far beyond what we are accustomed to with our emphasis on individuality, etc. Their system of government didn't develop in a vacuum and was certainly informed by their culture. So, I think you're right that your comment is a bit of a kneejerk response that assumes their authoritarian government has a hand in EVERYTHING.
That said, I would also assume that if his books were promoting pro-capitalist or anti-government ideas they would have been censored immediately, so maybe we're missing all the "Westernized" Chinese sci-fi books because of this...
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That is utter nonsense. Adam Smith goes out of his way to describe how government regulations are abused again and again for what we now call rent seeking. While Adam Smith wasn't categorically opposed to all government functions (he favored publicly financed defense and justice systems), he certainly did not hold the beliefs you attribute to him.
This kind of ludicrous horror story gets invented time and again by opponents of free markets and rent seekers and they make no sense. How is the would-be profiteer actually going to make a business out of that and earn a profit?
Captialism is necessary, though not sufficient, for a free society.
Marx believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labour, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labour and hence the real value.
His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labour to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital.
Marxism and all of its derivations are inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since they lack the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximise what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.
Marxism which is based upon class divisions, has failed as a predictive model of economic and social revolution. This is demonstrated in pure Marxist terms by the continued existence of bourgeois capitalism. In terms of a scientific method based on Popperian logical positivism, do you think these theories should now be rejected as null hypotheses?