China Perspective Issues

ABSTRACT: Since the 2010s, the “Dongbei Renaissance” has emerged in China as a transmedial phenomenon driven by a cluster of cultural producers retelling the stories of their parents’ generation as laid-off workers during the tumultuous transition of Dongbei, or Northeast China, from a socialist industrial headquarter to a decadent urban ruin in the 1990s. With a focus on the translocal relevance of this cultural trend, this paper discusses the prominent role of literature and its synergy with digital media in transmitting repressed social memories across generations and shedding light on contemporary conditions of economic precarity. I propose the notion of “ruinated futurity” to characterise conceptual openings offered by this digitally-mediated literary boom in three dimensions: (1) a mnemonic future that resurrects the repressed memories of the silenced through transgenerational renarration; (2) a media future that reworks literature within a digital media ecology of remediation and interrelatedness, and (3) a socioeconomic future reoriented towards disposable populations beyond narratives of progress and development.

KEYWORDS: ruinated futurity, Dongbei Renaissance, transgenerational memory, urban ruins, literature, digital remediation, disposable labour, precarity, neoliberalism, socialism.

ABSTRACT: In Dechen (Bde chen) County, Yunnan Province, a Tibetan county of the People’s Republic of China, prominent lay Buddhist practitioners work to resist and mitigate the impacts of agrochemical pollution and climate change on sacred landscapes. In this region of northwest Yunnan officially renamed and dubbed “Shangri-La” by the local and national state for tourism purposes, and in alignment of this name with the term Shambala, a place of divine serenity in Tibetan Buddhism, the protagonists in this paper insist that chemical futures and pollution are only adding to the creation of a “fake” Shangri-La, and that more than human- and nature-centric views are necessary in building a more ecologically sound future. This paper ethnographically analyses these activities and motivations in the context of ecocentric views surrounding indigenous Tibetan more-than-human spirit worlds. I ask what drives rural Tibetan grape-growers to pursue an ecologically friendly agenda. Motivations include observation of chemical degradation on land, Buddhist ethics, local land worship, and conceptions that being a local Tibetan should revolve around the preservation of sacred landscapes and mountain gods and spirits rather than purely economic profit and development. A critical variable, however, is that lay Buddhists holding these beliefs are exceptions, with most villages showing more concern for the economic benefits of new cash agricultures over sacred landscapes and spirits. I argue that while many villagers are willing to ignore the long-term vitality of the sacred landscape in favour of economic prosperity and view new economic activities as morally acceptable within Tibetan spirituality, some individuals insist that preserving the local landscape is paramount to a sustainable future both locally and across Greater China.

KEYWORDS: Tibet, China, nonhuman agency, Buddhism, pollution, climate change.

ABSTRACT: Beginning with a discussion of Liang Qichao’s 1902 unfinished novel A Future History of New China, this article examines four twenty-first century science fiction works by Han Song, Liu Cixin, Chan Koonchung, and Hao Jingfang – arguing that each work uses a future-perfect narrative mode to comment on the present. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that one may learn from the past to improve conditions in the present, this article instead contends that one implication of these works is that a focus on the future can – somewhat paradoxically – inhibit the possibility of meaningful political reform in the present.

KEYWORDS: China, science fiction, future perfect, cruel optimism, political reform.

ABSTRACT: This essay examines two interconnected human-made nonhuman entities stemming from Shenzhen, China’s first special economic zone, that have become dominant figures in mapping the city’s – and by extension, China’s – future: the robot and the drone. I bring an interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to the multiple meaning-making practices that engage with these two objects; both participate in enacting the vision for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as an extension of the success of Shenzhen. These practices simultaneously normalise aspirations for a future fuelled by the power of nonhuman technological agents while offering glimpses into the uneven power relations between different humans that underpin such future making. At the same time, they also point to the emergent possibilities of meaning-making that conjoin the human and the nonhuman.

KEYWORDS: Shenzhen, China, future, science fiction, nonhuman, robot, drone, artificial intelligence, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.