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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?"
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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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Chinese have different values, but "Capitalism" might not mean what you think it means. If you read Adam Smith, you might find that Capitalism means the Government regulating business to ensure a level playing field, which causes Capital to rule because all a person needs to start a business and compete is the capital. Without those Government controls, existing business will conspire to keep out or at least disadvantage newcomers, and politics and connections will be required, not just capital. The thing that modern Westerners often push as "Capitalism" is exactly what existed when Adam Smith wrote his book; not the thing actually described.
Similarly, China doesn't have "Communism," or "Socialism" either. Modern China has Capitalism, along with a single party political system. China doesn't have the sort of central economic control that the Soviet Union had. Instead, the Government controls industry by investing in a large number of the successful businesses. For example, many of the technology fabrication companies are about 25% government owned. So they use Capital and their partial ownership in order to influence business. And if I go to China and meet a farmer with a big idea who wants to start a business, and I invest in it so that he has the capital, he can start that business and compete.
Capitalism has nothing to do with Democracy. In many ways China is more capitalist than the US. If a Chinese business person goes to a village, buys all the bananas and creates an artificial shortage, and then raises the price 300%, that is punishable by death. Why? Because he's creating an illegal monopoly, and using it to ruin the market. Leveraging existing business to keep everybody else out and maintain a monopoly is the most anti-Capitalist thing you can do. China is one of the few places with clear bans on almost any anti-competitive practice. (Disclaimer: I'm only measuring the Chinese economy internally; foreigners like me don't have the same market access that Chinese people do. Just ask any US car company)
The words are so misused, they don't usually have much meaning. Chinese people value national unity more than others. Some people just assert that means they're repeating propaganda; but in reality they threw out almost everything Mao taught. They don't have political freedom, but it also isn't what most people want. Chinese people claim to actually want good governance, not western political theory. And the current propaganda seems to mirror the cultural norms. If you use real popular ideas and phrases as your propaganda, it is natural for people then to complain mostly about if you're actually following it. It is a totally different situation than when propaganda is used to try to manipulate views, or frighten enemies. The whole concept that most westerns have of propaganda is absurdist anyway when it is applied outside the context of elections. Their government has no reason to push propaganda that differs from cultural norms; their goal is to maintain the status quo, they're not trying to indoctrinate anybody.
Are you saying that space somehow becomes less nutty if we envision a Chinese future in it? Since China has now become the world's great builder at the same time as US/Europe retreat from science, this scenario might well come to pass. Now we're talking about space nutters with budgets in the trillions, a government studded with engineers, not lawyers, and no anti-sciecnce hippies hobbling every project. You're going to want to negotiate a new long-term contract with your local bridge authority.
It turns out Ken Liu (no relation) wrote "Paper Menagerie," the first work of fiction to win all three of SF's major awards (the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award) a few years ago.
So I expect the translation to be excellent.
I was going to bring up Stanislaw Lem as someone who wrote outside of the American tradition for science fiction. In a lot of ways it's like he is descended more from Voltaire and Swift. And while I have no idea what Lem was like in the original Polish (and German, and French), there was a lot of great wordplay in English courtesy of his translator (Kandel?). Plus his jokes in Latin were funny too.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson likes to remind us that "culture is what you don't notice." You might see PRC Propaganda in this description of Cixin's work, but if you think about what movies like "American Sniper" and "Top Gun" and the Superbowl must look like to non-Americans, then "propaganda" becomes a relative term. I have long been under the impression that Chinese culture is heavily censored and controlled, so I am perpetually amazed at the things I find portrayed in Chinese media, like the reoccurring themes of government corruption and the importance of a strong press.
I just finished reading The Three Body Problem, and I did not see anything propaganda-like at all in the book. Cixin presents some pretty complex moral issues for the reader to wrestle with and an extremely damning portrayal of the Cultural Revolution as being anti-science, anti-intellectual, and horribly destructive to the environment. The book opens with a physics Professor on trial for the crime of teaching modern physics, which is considered Western propaganda. Later we see the Cultural Revolution slash-and-burning entire forests and turning them into deserts and one of the characters gets hold of and is influenced by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which is banned by the government for pushing capitalist ideology (how ironic from my American perspective). It is only decades later, when China experiences a renaissance of free public education and science that things are portrayed as getting better.
--------Spoilers--------
In fact, part of the aliens' plan to keep humanity weak is to undermine science and promote magical thinking in our culture. Despite the seemingly pro-environmentalism message early in the book, the aliens consider using environmentalism to halt our scientific progress. The reader is left to thinking about how we balance scientific progress against extreme environmental crimes like those committed during the Cultural Revolution.
The bad guys in the book are a cult of of human beings who want an alien race to provide a central totalitarian government to the entire world. That doesn't exactly endorse central planning. The book portrays overt nationalism as detrimental and unsophisticated, as when a proposed nationalistic message to extraterrestrials is scrapped for a universal statement about humanity.
I'm sure there are ways to interpret Cixin's writings as PRC Propaganda, but--like most complex texts--there are ways to support many criticisms of the text, even contradictory hypotheses.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
It's unfortunate that a good sci-fi book and a good hard sci-fi writer appears on Slashdot, and the discussion turns around PRC propaganda, anti-Chinese sentiment, bad communism, eviltotalitarian government, etc, etc, just because the author is from China? You might want to read the book first before commenting, you might be surprised. It might even open your eyes to a whole new world from your stereotypical veil.
A couple of people here had already read the book, and given a pretty insightful comment, kudo to them. I read the whole series, in Chinese, last year, in one week, and I couldn't give a better comment.
The Three Body Problem is a serie of 3 books, involving science, philosophy, religion, world conflict, environment, culture, love, etc. If you like the Clarke's Space Odessey and the Rama series, and the Asimov's Foundation series, and the Herbert's Dune series, you would like these books as well. The books leave you with a lot of issues to ponder upon, from a humanity, as a whole, perspective. Theses issues are not specific to one people or one culture.
Please put down your stereotypical glasses and forget for a moment that the author is Chinese, and read the book just like you would do any other book. You might enjoy it a lot more.