The Gilded Age & Chinese SF

[Rii]

The Gilded Age: China 2013 may or may not turn out to be the title of Hong Kong author Chen Guanzhong's novel when it makes the leap to English (and French, German, Italian, etc.) next year, but of the possible translations it's by far the most pleasing to my ear, so I'm sticking with it until there's official word to the contrary.

The Gilded Age has been described by some as a kind of Chinese 1984, however it's difficult to know at what level this comparison is being made; something which is hardly clarified by the fact that 1984 has itself been the object of innumerable invidious comparisons. Opinions on the English-speaking interwebs as to whether the novel is actually any good also seem to be in short supply. This is perhaps unsurprising, yet I can't shake the impression that this is a work making waves not because of what it is, but rather what it represents and to whom. Or maybe not; time will tell. In any case, it sounds interesting enough:

FP

As the novel's plot unfolds, on the day that marks the beginning of an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis, the U.S. dollar falls by one-third. The same day, China officially enters what its leaders call "the prosperous time." Every Chinese person accepts this happy coincidence, except for two men and a woman. The three remember events differently: They believe that a month, somehow been lost from public memory, separates these two events. And they set out to recover memories of that lost month.

For those lucky few who can read Chinese, there's no need to wait on the translation: get the novel here.

Beyond The Gilded Age itself, the discussions it has brought to my attention concerning SF in China more broadly have been of some interest. The (American) Foreign Policy article linked earlier has this to say:

The significance -- and uniqueness -- of the novel is that it is a work of social science fiction, a subgenre that has become virtually nonexistent since the establishment of the People's Republic. Such keen reader interest in visions of China's political future is remarkable -- and reveals a pent-up appetite among readers. Take a look at recent issues of the popular Chinese Sci-Fi World magazine, published in Chengdu, or at Internet rankings of today's most-read Chinese sci-fi stories, and you'll find every kind of plotline you might find in Western sci-fi literature -- time travel, space voyage, robot battles, you name it -- but social or political criticism, as you might read in books like George Orwell's 1984, is almost completely lacking.

That isn't because politically charged science fiction never existed in China. As popular sci-fi writer Ye Yonglie has documented, the history of modern Chinese science fiction goes back to the early 20th century. The genre was catalyzed by the first Chinese translation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1900. Early Chinese sci-fi works often doubled as political parables and social criticism, starting with 1904's The Moon Colony.

[....]

This politically-charged tradition in Chinese sci-fi continued for more than four decades, epitomized by Lao She's controversial 1932 novel, Cat Country. Lao She, one of the most important Chinese writers of the last century, published his only science-fiction novel as serial installments in a magazine. The story is set on Mars. Although it was published 13 years before Orwell's Animal Farm, the political satire functions in similar fashion, with intrigues among a colony of cats on Mars serving as criticism of contemporary political reality in China. It was the only Chinese sci-fi novel then translated into foreign languages.

Cat Country was so popular among readers that it was reprinted seven times over the course of 17 years until 1949. Under Communist rule, however, the book disappeared from shelves, and any social or political criticism content in new sci-fi works disappeared along with it. Mao Zedong's official literary policy was that "literature and art serve [his] politics." As a dystopian novel, Cat Country was politically incorrect, and in August 1966, Lao She was publicly denounced and beaten by the Red Guards. Not long after, he committed suicide.

[....]

It was around the late 1970s and early 1980s that some Chinese sci-fi writers became bold enough to embed reflections on domestic events such as the Cultural Revolution in their stories. For a while, it seemed that social sci-fi might reestablish itself as a literary subgenre in China. That hope, however, was extinguished in 1983, when Deng Xiaoping launched a "clean up spiritual pollution" campaign against writers, in effect clamping down again on freedom of thought.

Interesting stuff, but the assertion that social/political SF is lacking in contemporary China has not gone unchallenged:

The Foreign Policy piece linked above is badly misleading about the current state of SF in China. Yes, many authors and readers lament the fact that hard-SF and pulp adventure predominate, but socially-oriented, politically-conscious SF is far from as rare as the author makes it out to be. I mention two recent stories in that comment linked above, Ma Boyong's "City of Silence" (寂静之城), which ran in SFW a few years ago, and Han Song's My Homeland Does Not Dream (我的祖国不做梦), which was published online. Pretty much all of Han Song's stuff involves social or political criticism, and there are other authors who write SF in that vein.

So ... I'm operating in a near vacuum here. Do we have any experts on contemporary or historical Chinese SF who'd care to weigh in on this?