From a recommendation by former US President Barack Obama in The New York Times to a Netflix adaptation that premiered this year, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy has become the standard bearer for the mainstream success of Chinese science fiction (SF). But how did novels like Liu’s overcome the disreputable status of pulp fiction and gain an international reputation as serious literature?

Chinese literature and film scholar Angie Chau has a theory: contemporary Chinese literature carries “cultural currency,” she writes, as “the most accurate lens through which to view and truly understand China.”

In the last decade, authors Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang have successfully won foreign readers over thanks to English translations of their fiction by Chinese American author Ken Liu. According to Chau, these works can be analyzed through the concept of “littérisation,” which comparative literature scholar Pascale Casanova explains as the process by which “a text from a literarily deprived country comes to be regarded as literary by…legitimate authorities.”

But in the case of Chinese SF texts, “an additional layer of literary transmutation has taken place: the English translations of these works facilitate a shift in perception of SF from genre fiction to literary fiction,” Chau writes.

Another Chinese SF writer, Chen Qiufan, surmised that SF is gaining international traction because of “the rise of China as a whole, in politics, the economy, and culture.” From this, Chau suggests that China’s promotion of Three-Body and Chinese SF “can be traced to the long-standing desire for Chinese literature to be considered on a par with Western literature.”

That’s as today’s writing carries the baggage of twentieth-century “de-elitization,” “vulgarization,” and “anti-spiritualization” trends, which have led literature to be commercialized and commodified.

To be sure, the genre of science fiction isn’t necessarily popular with readers in China. Three-Body sold more than 2.1 million copies in the decade after its release—but that feat pales against a Chinese collection of short love stories that accomplished the same volume of sales in just half a year.

All the same, the level of domestic popularity that SF enjoys domestically “is, in a way, irrelevant for its afterlife in circulation outside China,” Chau comments. That’s because, while works like Three-Body win overseas acclaim for “fulfill[ing] generic SF conventions,” they’re also interpreted “[a]s a way of making China comprehensible” to outsiders.

Indeed, Chau points out that commentators have latched onto SF texts to explain all manner of social phenomena in China, ranging from unemployment and the economy to air pollution. Three-Body, for example, stands out for how the Chinese Cultural Revolution is incorporated into its plot. In the novel, an astrophysicist, as an act of revenge for her father’s murder by Red Guards, chooses to put Earth at risk by sending out a provocative interstellar message to hostile aliens.

“[Her] act of planetary and species betrayal is traced back to the ‘spiritual crisis’ inflicted by historical trauma,” Chau observes—and not just any trauma, but a distinct slice of Chinese history. As she muses,

Claims about contemporary Chinese fiction overlap in their tension between, on the one hand, insistence on verisimilitude to the absurdities of contemporary reality and national specificity to the Chinese condition and, on the other hand, universal applicability and allegorical significance that extend beyond national borders to encompass global trends, such as concerns about environmental degradation and the implications of automation.

Chau notes that both Liu Cixin and Ken Liu have worked to “dissuade readers from the notion that there is something inherently ‘Chinese’ about their writing.” Still, she writes, “[d]espite the shortcomings of applying an essentialist nationalistic reading to contemporary Chinese SF, the Chinese label combined with the genre conventions of SF is one way to draw in readers who would otherwise not read contemporary Chinese literature.”

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