The Late Qing’s Other Utopias: China’s Science-Fictional Imagination, 1900-1910

This research paper examines the genesis and mechanism of China’s imagination of the future at the turn of the 20th century, a time when the country’s current socio-political reality was seen as being in many ways abominable, while the future was seen as a utopian dreamland of possibility and hope. An analysis of Wu Jianren’s the late Qing fiction The New Story of the Stone (1905), especially its second half which depicts the future China as a “Civilized Realm” (文明境界), shows the influence on the young Chinese writers of contemporary Western science fiction and (especially) utopian fiction. It also shows that these late Qing writers wanted to portray their imagined China of the future as being “better” than the contemporary West (and also future West of Western utopian narratives) inasmuch as it will be using (originally Western) technology in a manner which is fundamentally moral and spiritual, as befits China’s traditional culture. Here the key contrast is between, on the one hand, ancient (Confucian, Daoist) Chinese civilization, moral idealism and spirituality, and on the other hand (contemporary and future) Western barbarism, empiricism, materialism, pragmatism, a “nonhumanism” which seems to ignore moral and spiritual life. The author points out that Wu Jianren (吳趼人)’s future Chinese Civilized Realm has turned Western technology (the X-ray machine) into a “spiritual technology” (the Moral Nature Inspection Lens) which justifies China’s own cultural and philosophical past while simultaneously placing this past in a distant future which seems to go even “beyond” the one imagined by Western writers. That is, finally China will be technologically superior to the West on account of its age-old moral and spiritual superiority.