A fearful symmetry: the novel of the future in twentieth-century China

Abstract

The ‘novel of the future’ speculates on the ‘temporal’ utopia/dystopia. Its strange fate in modern China reveals much about the relationship between imagination, ideology and modernity in the Chinese mindset. Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. For, in traditional China, history did not have directionality. Two powerful Western ideologies, both ‘progressive’, took turns to dominate modern China. Social Darwinism led to the great explosion of the novel of the future in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, with Marxism becoming the dominant ideology, the novel of the future disappeared completely: when the future was predetermined, no speculation was to be tolerated. In the 1990s, there erupted another spectacular flourishing of novels of future in China, although these works are pessimistic in tone, as belief in the future has been thrown into serious doubt.