China banned the popular video game ‘Plague Inc.’ in February 2020 because of uncomfortable parallels with the growing pandemic. Considering China’s ongoing paranoia over the origins of covid-19, it’ll be interesting to see how its burgeoning crop of sci-fi writers come to grips with this topic in coming years. Or how Hollywood, so eager for access to China’s lucrative movie market, will tap dance around the pandemic in its own sci-fi blockbusters.
Chinese dystopian novels such as Chan Koonchung’s ‘Fat Years’ – which makes veiled references to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – and Yan Lianke’s political satires are already banned. Likewise verboten is Max Brooks’ apocalyptic zombie novel ‘World War Z’, where a mysterious new disease shows up in China; and the government responds by suppressing news of the infection, threatening several doctors who try to sound the alarm, all of which allows the virus to spread beyond its borders. Sound familiar?
Surprisingly though, you can buy a copy of Orwell’s ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ in Shanghai, or even Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ in spite of those obvious parallels, at least to Western observers, between modern-day China and the totalitarian surveillance state. There’s even a Chinese edition of Michael Crichton’s pandemic novel ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’.
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| Chinese edition of Brave New World |
This nationalist strain first came to my attention while reading Liu Cixin’s otherwise incredible 2006 novel ‘The Three Body Problem’. It’s a sprawling, dazzling space opera that can be boiled down to a China-led planetary resistance against a pending alien takeover from afar, along the way discussing "dark forest theory" and dimension-destroying warfare. As I ploughed through all three tomes of this series, I was at once wowed by its sci-fi inventiveness and increasingly perturbed by its China-centric visions of the future. At first, I thought it was because I had spent a lifetime reading and watching American and British sci-fi. And indeed, there are enough American-led and American-filled spaceships in the genre to fill up the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Another example of American cultural imperialism, some might argue; while others might contend that American writers are perhaps entitled to populate their fictitious spacecrafts with their ilk, having landed the first man on the moon and now a crop of rovers on Mars.
Ken Liu, translator of ‘The Three Body Problem’, was quoted in 2016 as saying that, “When you go into space, you become part of this overall collective called ‘humanity’. You’re no longer Chinese, American, Russian or whatever. Your culture is left behind.” For a preeminent translator of science fiction, it’s ironic just how wrong Ken Liu was about the near-future of his genre, not to mention the evolving space race between the U.S and China. For it appears the Chinese are taking a leaf out of the American playbook by rushing to assert their own brand of sci-fi nationalism alongside real-world advances, such as their landing a rover on Mars and another on the dark side of the moon. Those lingering suspicions about Liu Cixin, meanwhile, were finally borne out by the transformation of his novella ‘The Wandering Earth’ into China’s highest-grossing science-fiction film of the same name in 2019. Once again we have the scenario of a China-led planetary resistance, this time against a future global catastrophe rather than aliens, which brings nations together in a herculean effort to save mankind by rocket-boosting Earth all the way to Alpha Centauri.
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| Wandering Earth's brotherly love vs. communist propaganda poster |
Whatever the naivety of Cixin’s cultural viewpoints within this far-fetched story, the Chinese scriptwriters made sure to excavate and amplify the story’s nationalistic undercurrents, so much so that China basically becomes the saviour of the universe (cue Flash theme song). For all its spectacular effects, the movie’s Sino-jingoistic perspectives are worrisome at times, above all that climactic scene where diverse nationalities, including Russia and even Japan, all come together to selflessly work as one – under Chinese hegemony, naturally – to get some thruster or other restarted. All that brotherly pushing and grunting for one common goal is like something out of a propaganda poster for the Cultural Revolution.
Still, it’s a far cry from China’s recent past when you couldn’t direct or show any films about ghosts, zombies or ‘un-scientific’ subjects. The Chinese government’s aversion to zombie films, in fact, was supposedly the main reason why Paramount cancelled a planned sequel to ‘World War Z’. Beijing has apparently taken a more lenient attitude in recent times, yet the sex and violence of ‘Game of Thrones’ remains heavily censored while seven minutes of blood and guts was cut from the cinematic release of ‘Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’ (2016). It’s a small wonder that the latter made it into any Chinese cinemas at all, since the South Korean zombie sensation ‘Train to Busan’ (2016) had to be illegally downloaded by China’s millennials.
Censorship rules are as murky and arbitrary as ever in China; and of all the sci-fi tropes, it’s not zombies but time travel that has been the stickiest of all. The censors claim that the subgenre disrespects history, when in reality they fear its potential to comment upon past and present. Despite the franchise of ‘Back to the Future’ being banned for years in China, the makers of ‘Looper’ (2012) overcame such antipathy with a neat trick: showcasing a flatteringly futuristic China within the time-travel plot. The producers of this Bruce Willis sci-fi adventure even went so far as to add a scene in which a character says, “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” But after years of suspicion and vilification, sci-fi is starting to establish itself as a rare exception to creative expression in China, as Jing Tsu recounts in the Financial Times. China, in fact, is already cementing its position as a sci-fi powerhouse, with its growing army of sci-fi nerds now seeking to host the World Science Fiction Convention in 2023. From the perspective of earth’s Star-Wars-quoting geeks, this is like bidding for the Olympic Games. As such, Chinese science fiction is emerging as “an unexpected element in a broader initiative of cultural diplomacy aimed at projecting a positive and engaging impression of the country abroad,” Jing Tsu informs us, somewhat in the tone of Stan Marsh in his South Park bedroom trying to write his death-metal biography while a Chinese censor stands over his shoulder (in response to the scathing ridicule of this episode, South Park has been entirely ‘band’ in China). |
| Mad Sheila riffs off Mad Max |
Since China’s box office is just too important, it is now commonly accepted that there will be no Chinese villains in any Hollywood film in the years to come. Quite the opposite in fact. Humanity is saved by the Chinese in the disaster movie ‘2012’ because the Chinese government had the foresight to build life-saving arcs. In ‘Gravity’ (2013), Sandra Bullock survives by getting herself to a Chinese space station. In the 2015 Ridley Scott film ‘The Martian’, China’s space program saves the day for Matt Damon marooned on Mars. ‘Arrival’, the unusual 2016 alien invasion film, also predicates its happy ending on Chinese forces coming to the rescue. In extolling the saving qualities of China in all of these sci-fi films, the writers probably didn’t imagine they’d also be extolling concentration camps for religious minorities (or ‘joycamps’ as they’re known in 1984 newspeak). Other minorities, such as gays and lesbians, are also singled out by the Chinese. As recounted in the PEN report, Beijing’s censors commonly demand that kisses between same-sex characters be removed, in movies like ‘Star Trek Beyond’ (2016) and ‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017). No place for gays in China’s utopic futures. Or as that mad sheila at the Aussie pub might say, no poofs allowed.
Hollywood studios have been accused of sending their scripts in advance to the Chinese censors so as to pave their way for cinematic release in the land of 1.4 billion potential viewers. U.S. producers are even now supposedly pre-empting the censorship boards by getting their scriptwriters to come up with films that they know will pass the Chinese litmus test, such as Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), where you’ll certainly see no same-sex tongue kissing between Tibetan monks. In addition to the ‘Three T’s’ of Chinese censorship, might we now already be dealing with the Three Ps: Pandemic, Poofs and Winnie the Pooh?
Chinese meddling in Hollywood, so astutely lampooned by South Park, is affecting all sorts of film genres and forms of pop culture. John Cena, star of the latest ‘Fast and Furious’ movie was forced to publicly apologize for casually referring to Taiwan as "a country”, lest he place in jeopardy the release of F9 in the biggest movie market of the world. As if a Chinese-made AK-47 were pointed at his head, musclebound John Cena issued this grovelling apology in Mandarin. Cena’s not the only Hollywood star to be co-opted into Chinese ideology. One has to look no further than Matt Damon in the big-budget, propaganda-riddled historical fantasy, ‘The Great Wall’ (2016). The James Bond film, ‘Skyfall’ (2012) was only allowed to open in China after a scene in which Bond kills a security guard in Shanghai was cut, as too references to prostitution in Macau. Subtitles were even changed to hide references to torture by Chinese security forces (remember, no more Chinese villains, aside from the loveable Mr. Chow in ‘The Hangover’ perhaps).
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| No Taiwanese or Japanese flags allowed |
Perhaps the worst consequence of current Sino-Hollywood relations is not what gets made but what doesn’t. In today’s climate it would be all but impossible to make something like ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ (1997) about China’s invasion of Tibet; or a remake of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire ‘Brazil’ (1985) set within Xinjiang, China. As the Washington Post and The New Yorker remind us, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 saw Hollywood studios studiously avoiding films that would make the Nazis look like, well, like Nazis. American producers simply didn’t want to risk losing access to the German market, never mind Hitler and all that. Now history seems to be repeating itself, with Hollywood studios not only kowtowing to Communist China, but also indulging in self-censoring.
Look, nobody likes being compared to the Nazis, but it’s hard to overlook China being accused of genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs at its ‘joycamps’. Not that this stopped Disney from shooting the live-action version of ‘Mulan’ (2020) in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where China has been accused of carrying out these human rights abuses, including execution, torture and sterilisation of Uyghurs. If that’s not enough, Disney thanks no less than four different propaganda departments in the end credits to Mulan. And just to show that I wasn’t completely off the mark about my suspicions of Liu Cixin and his ‘Three Body Problem’, when asked during an interview with The New Yorker in 2019 about the Chinese government’s inhumane treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghur community, Liu Cixin replied: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? … If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”
Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it, South Park.
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| China disliked Tarantino's depiction of Bruce Lee |
©Tony McGowan
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