Rethinking the Orwellian Imaginary through Contemporary Chinese Fiction

Although George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 2003) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ([1932] 2006) have long offered contrasting paradigms in surveillance theory, little attention has been paid to how race and cultural difference operate in their respective regimes. This oversight is surprising given race’s centrality in surveillance theory and practice, and it is increasingly anachronistic in light of contemporary geopolitics and the rising power of non-Western states. By contrast, the best-selling and critically acclaimed novels The Fat Years (Koonchung 2013), The Three-Body Problem (Liu 20014), and Death of a Red Heroine (Xiaolong 2000) are all set in modern China and portray issues of surveillance technology, policy, implementation, and resistance previously associated with Western powers. Yet while these later novels’ Chinese settings offer radically different scenarios than our previous touchstones of surveillance imagery, their global popularity also demonstrates their vast resonance and accessibility. Indeed, in strong reaffirmation of Orwell’s and Huxley’s ongoing value—and the value of literature to surveillance theory more generally—these recent China-set novels collapse the Orwell and Huxley dichotomy to offer surprising glimpses into the more culturally diversified twenty-first century global surveillance society.

A CITY THAT NEVER EXISTED: XIAO BAI’S LITERARY REMAKING OF 1931 SHANGHAI

This article provides an account of the literary recreation of the semi-colonial Shanghai of 1931, carried out by the Chinese contemporary author Xiao Bai in his 2011 novel Zujie. It also includes the features and implications of such an operation. Critically praised as a turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction about old Shanghai, the novel appears to transcend genre categories, and was welcomed as a heterogeneous “third type” crossing the boundaries between genre fiction and pure literature. Inspired by historical facts and supported by painstaking archival research, Zujie originally incorporates a variety of literary models, narrative techniques, sources, genres, themes, and perspectives. The heterogeneity at play in the novel can be essentially scrutinised at three levels. Such levels are: the debate on the genre as it emerges from a number of paratextual sources; the treatment of historical factuality and its relationship with fictional creation; the use of polyphonic devices, with reference to the portrayal of hybrid characters, deliberately disorienting narrative techniques, and a re-elaboration of imported and domestic sources and literary models that plays havoc with the very notions of foreignness and identity. Xiao Bai’s original representation of 1930s Shanghai is analysed and commented upon with respect to such factors. Finally, the significance of this multi-layered literary operation and its implications for the reader are highlighted.

The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of the Hui Chinese Muslims, who have been integrated into Sinophone and China’s multicultural community since the third/ninth century, when the first ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and that by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined, then embodied, in literary texts authored by two prizewinning Chinese Muslim authors. Huo Da (b. 1945) alludes to the Qur’an in her novel The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), and transforms its teachings into ritual performances of alterity in her saga of a Muslim family at the turn of the twentieth century. Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948) involves himself in reconstructing the history of the Jahriyya Ṣūfī sect in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and invents an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition.