Comment by 5040 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 5040 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related:

NG You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.

I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.

https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishig...

While that article was written in 2015 about 2007, IMHO as a recent employer there and long term resident, the issues in China also stem from a lack of creativity in the educational environment, the political weaponisation of Confucianism, government-controlled media, a closed internet and the recent and unwaveringly vicious politically motivated disempowerment of high profile entrepreneurs. Nearly every single person a young person meets before the age of 25 is likely to scold them for original thinking, dreaming or playing: from their own parents to their state teachers, and all are co-witness to the public vilification, robbing or subsuming of successful innovators by the state. Meanwhile, the increasingly authoritarian government attempts to limit children's access to simple computer games. All are taught that the nail that sticks out is the one that is hammered down. In such an environment, who would dare to be different? Ideas are generally tolerated and evaluated on short term greed potential only.

More reflectively, it is such a shame to see the current situation because as Joseph Needham's classic series shows, the China region is perhaps historically the longest serving and arguably in many ways the most significant bastion of human inventive potential, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

This seems to underlie their problem: if they're only supporting SciFi (and probably other creative outlets) as a means to an end, as a means to encourage innovation, they're doing it wrong. Asimov didn't write because he foresaw all of the tech entrepreneurs who would read his work, he wrote because he wanted to, and because the society where he wrote supported him—and promoted artistic works (though of course there is perverse incentive for art here in the West, in the form of monetary incentive for artists). If China only supports SciFi to innovate, they won't produce good enough works to innovate.

Historically many or even most great works of work have been "compromised" by similar things, whether it's the politics of some King's court or flattering a rich patron or simply dealing with the vagaries of the market.

Why the CCP supports SciFi is can be detached from motivations of individual authors.

Something tells me the Party's support or funding of an author's work could have a lot to do with the author's ideology (or the perception thereof).

Not only must the work be ideologically correct, the work must also be understandable by ruling ideologues.

That is a serious choke point.

The ideologue brain is incompatible with big weird scifi ideas.

We see that in the west too.

As an aside to this tangent, the World Science Fiction Convention is in China this year, for the first time in its history (by way of comparison, it's been in Kansas City twice):

https://en.chengduworldcon.com/

The inventors at Google and Apple and Microsoft also like to trip on the occasional LSD. That might be something else China will have to allow if they want to be a magical radical land of invention.

Someone in China saw how well hollywood sci-fi could be used as a vehicle for PR and glorification of the American military and decided to follow suit.

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