Theodore Huters

Hui Wang

Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition

Chinas New Order

Mingwei Song

A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the “Chinese dream,” the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.

An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction

The Reincarnated Giant

The Seventies (Qishi niandai) is a remarkable compendium of essays recollecting those years originally edited by the poet Bei Dao and the writer/editor Li Tuo, first published in Hong Kong in late 2008. Among the collection's most notable features is its powerful ability to reach back and illuminate that strange decade, now mostly thought of as an interregnum between a just preceding Maoist frenzy with its intense socialism and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping and his new era at the very end of the period. It was also, however, the formative time in the growth of the group of intellectuals, writers and artists--almost all born after 1949--who came to dominate Chinese cultural life by the turn of the century. As "educated urban youth" (zhishi qingnian), many of the writers represented here were at once the most active participants and most evident victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that spanned the years between 1966 and 1976. The works selected and translated here provide a series of vivid impressions of what has turned out to be a key period in modern Chinese social, intellectual and artistic life. List of authors: Xu BingBei DaoZhang LanglangAh ChengWang AnyiLi LingYan LiankeWang XiaoniZhai YongmingHan ShaogongDeng Gang

Recollecting a Forgotten Time in China

The Seventies

Reincarnated Giant

One of China’s most influential intellectuals questions the validity of thinking about Chinese history and its legacy from a Western conceptual framework. Wang Hui argues that we need to more fully understand China’s past in order to imagine alternative ways of conceiving Asia and world order.

The Politics of Imagining Asia

Bringing the World Home sheds new light on China’s vibrant cultural life between 1895 and 1919—a crucial period that marks a watershed between the conservative old regime and the ostensibly iconoclastic New Culture of the 1920s. Although generally overlooked in the effort to understand modern Chinese history, the era has much to teach us about cultural accommodation and is characterized by its own unique intellectual life. This original and probing work traces the most significant strands of the new post-1895 discourse, concentrating on the anxieties inherent in a complicated process of cultural transformation. It focuses principally on how the need to accommodate the West was reflected in such landmark novels of the period as Wu Jianren’s Strange Events Eyewitnessed in the Past Twenty Years and Zhu Shouju’s Tides of the Huangpu, which began serial publication in Shanghai in 1916. The negative tone of these narratives contrasts sharply with the facile optimism that characterizes the many essays on the "New Novel" appearing in the popular press of the time. Neither iconoclasm nor the wholesale embrace of the new could square the contradicting intellectual demands imposed by the momentous alternatives presenting themselves. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Theodore Huters

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