![]() Do you think it’s very different to read it after Nineteen Eighty-Four? That book gives us a year, an actual date for Orwell’s particular warning. You mentioned Nineteen Eighty-Four earlier. It also aroused a lot of interest in the United States after 9/11, when Bush junior’s new policies were branded as a new form of state fascism – that’s a bit of an overstretch, I know. This is a tradition that we need to remind ourselves of when we think about contemporary China. That was his warning at the time, in the early decades of the 20th century. I don’t think he ever used the word fascist, but it was a fascist state. Jack London wrote about a world where American democracy degenerates into an oligarchic state, very similar to a fascist state. I’m sure the authors have that in mind when they write – it’s a warning to their contemporaries. Many dystopian novels are cautionary tales. Is it important for this genre to talk about how things really are, or how they will be? He was referring to the author’s vision of the tensions that could arise between leaders of socialist movements. Trotsky used the same word – “prescient” – to describe The Iron Heel by Jack London. It was very prescient, in the sense that Bellamy almost tells the future of a certain Communist country that came two decades later. The world he imagined is a world of nationalistic “industrial armies”, not the kind of artisan-libertarian socialism in another famous utopian novel News From Nowhere, by his contemporary William Morris. It was supposed to be a utopia, and it was very popular – many people identified with this kind of socialist state at that time, even in North America. “If you talk with the people in China’s major cities, sometimes you wonder – why are they so optimistic, so euphoric?”īellamy is envisioning a better world, that’s his intention. He begins to regard the past, which is the author’s and the contemporary readers’ present, as nightmarish. When he is woken and he adjusts to his new life, he sees how different things are in the future – an industrial society where everyone shares the capital equally. The protagonist Julian West doesn’t see those ills at the beginning of the novel: but the author contrives to put him to sleep for 100 years. It’s set in America, where a future socialist state will solve or eradicate all the ills of society of late 19th century American capitalism. At that time there were many utopian novels. This book came out early, in the 19th century. Is it about a utopia or a dystopia – or a heterotopia? The first of the books you chose is Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It’s not exactly a utopia: it’s a realm you can have a glimpse of, but it’s very difficult to talk about or to see the whole picture because it’s almost beyond our comprehension. I prefer the term heterotopia, a term coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault and recently reintroduced into Chinese by Professor David Wang of Harvard University. ![]() ![]() If you talk with the people in China’s major cities, sometimes you wonder – why are they so optimistic, so euphoric? It’s a different kind of dystopia, or a different kind of utopia-dystopia. I realised people would think of it in that way – and that in particular they would compare it to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.īut it’s not quite a dystopia that you’re describing? Some reviewers thought that since it is set in the future it must be science fiction, and science fiction has these sub-genres, utopia and dystopia. It was essentially all about the present and what I call now the “new normal” of China, the Fat Years. I set my story in 2013, the not-too-distant future, so I could come up with some fictional events to explain my views. I wasn’t sure if my readers would agree with me and my feelings about China at that time. The world was going through an economic crisis. That was a dramatic year in China with a lot of things happening, among them the Beijing Olympics. When I had the idea of writing this book, it was 2008. Your book The Fat Years has been described as being both a utopian and a dystopian novel. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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