Science Fiction in China - Chinese Language and Culture in Science Fiction Works From Other Countries

Chinese Language and Culture in Science Fiction Works From Other Countries

• Cordwainer Smith's short stories and novel, Norstrilia, which is said to be based on the Chinese classic Journey to the West, feature a race of 'underpeople' bred out of animals to serve mankind whose struggle for independence has been argued to be an allegory African American civil rights movement. Alan C. Elms, Professor of Psychology Emeritus, University of California, Davis, however argues that underpeople are meant to represent the Han Chinese who had been oppressed by the conquering Manchus during the Qing dynasty, citing the author's experiences working with Sun Yat Sen as a young man.
• An English translation of the Tao Te Ching plays an important role in Ursula K. Le Guin's 1967 post-apocalyptic novel City of Illusions. The novel also features a supposedly alien race called the Shing who suppress technological and social development on Earth, similar to the suppression of Western technology and ideas during the Qing dynasty following a period of relative openness during the Ming when Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci were allowed to live and teach in China.
• Although not strictly science fiction in that it lacks significant aberrations from the historical record, James Clavell's historical fiction series The Asian Saga is intimately concerned with the role which modern technology played in the collision between the East and West in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• David Wingrove's multivolume Chung Kuo series takes place in an alternate timeline where Imperial China has survived into modern era and eventually takes over the entire world, establishing a future society with a strict racial hierarchy.
• Maureen F. McHugh's 1997 novel, China Mountain Zhang, takes place in an alternate future where America has gone through a socialist revolution while China has become the dominant world power.
• The 2002 American television show Firefly features a future space-based society in the year 2517 where Mandarin Chinese has become a common language.
• Cory Doctorow’s 2010 young adult science fiction novel For the Win features a gold farmer from Shenzhen, China who joins forces with Leonard Goldberg, a sinophile gamer who speaks Mandarin Chinese and uses the Chinese name ‘Wei-Dong’, to take on the mainland authorities and gold farming bosses.
• The 2012 American film Red Dawn, a reimagaging of the 1984 film by the same name, as originally filmed portrayed the invasion of the United States by the People's Liberation Army of the PRC due to a US default on Chinese-owned debt. In hopes of being able to market the film in mainland China, the country of origin for the invading army was later changed to North Korea using digital technology, and references to the storyline about debt were edited out of the final cut of the film.
• The titular computer virus in American author Neal Stephenson’s 2011 technothriller Reamde was developed by a crew of mainland Chinese based gold farmers and a significant portion of the book takes place in Xiamen, Fujian.
• The prolific short story writer Chinese-American Ken Liu has published numerous original English-language science fiction stories featuring Chinese characters and settings, exploring issues of tradition, modernity, development, and cultural differences between the East and West. Two of his stories have also been published in Chinese, and has translated short stories by Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia and Ma Boyong.