The driving question behind that sci-fi writing was a simple-sounding one: what was China to do next? The country had never before asked that question with such stark simplicity, nor had the stakes ever seemed so high. Between them, as David Wang of Columbia University has recently shown in an absorbing study, these Chinese writers around the turn of the last century came up with a wide range of possibilities, all set at different points in the future, from fifty to a hundred years ahead. In one of these novels, China weathers decades of internal warfare and imperialist aggression to emerge in the 1960s as an independent and powerful republic, guided by a vibrant constitution. In another, an incomparably wise Chinese ruler has created a new civilization blending traditional Chinese virtues with the highest achievements of Europe and the United States. So potent is this culture, peaceful its life and wealthy its economy that dissidents from the bordering “barbarous lands” flee there for sanctuary. In a third, China’s women are the guides, creating a new society of sexual independence and technological sophistication, and asserting their power through a secret anarchist organization a million strong, with local chapters spread across the entire country.
Of all these tales, perhaps the most apocalyptic is “New Era.” Published in 1908, just before the fall of the Ching dynasty, the novel portrays a series of colossal battles between the Mongoloid and Caucasian races beginning in Eastern Europe in 1999. Overseas Chinese around the world rise up in support of their motherland, creating breakaway Chinese republics in the Western United States and Australia, and seizing the Panama Canal. In the fighting, both sides call on the fullest range of new military technologies, from submarines and bulletproof vests to radioactive dust, electronic deflector shields and poison gas. The combined Chinese armies win the final victory and sign a treaty with the Western powers: China will henceforth control Singapore and Ceylon, Bombay and the Suez Canal, and have bases in the Adriatic Sea. Furthermore, though the Western powers can keep their own calendars, all Chinese will henceforth acknowledge and live by Chinese time, the traditional calendar dating their own history to the reign of the Yellow Emperor in high antiquity. Thus the treaty is dated both “2000 AD” and “Year 4707 of the Yellow Emperor.”
These fantasies were constructed at a despairing time of national weakness. China lost Taiwan to Japan in 1895, Beijing was occupied in the year 1900 by an international expeditionary force after the catastrophe of the Boxer Uprising, and many of China’s major cities had foreign settlements exempt from Chinese law. Though China now is infinitely stronger than it was a century ago, some of those once fantastical elements have an oddly current ring of reality. Those secret woman anarchists with their cells scattered across the land have a contemporary echo in the crowds of women and men from the Falun Gong, gathering boldly in Beijing and elsewhere. A deadly misplaced bomb on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade draws Eastern Europe suddenly into the very heart of Sino-Western relations, prompting riots and cries for retaliation in China. China competes aggressively in all international markets for the latest nuclear, rocket and undersea technologies, and are steadily acquiring the potential to reach around the globe. Even that hope for a harmonious and well-ordered republic, though still not realized, is kept alive by many who were not cowed by the repressions of 1989.
How might the 21st century manifest itself as a Chinese one? Obviously it will not be through the exact same means that led to the gradual emergence of the United States as the dominant world force of our own time; nor could it possibly be by the means employed by the British, whose own empire played a similarly dominant role across the 19th century. Nor is it feasible for it to be like that startlingly sudden and ferocious Mongol expansion, checked only by blood and chance in the Balkans in the 13th century. A Chinese century will come, surely, only if the idea and reality of what we call China are merged together in a new kind of synthesis. Such a synthesis would require the creative blending of three components: the territory itself - which, like all empires, is a flexible concept, one that has expanded, contracted and splintered over time; an ability to understand and assimilate the unique richness of China’s own cultural and ethnic heritage; and a recognition that those Chinese who have left their core homeland have broadened the idea of being Chinese and given it a truly global dimension.
China’s human resources are vast, but its natural resources are limited. To conjure up a future Chinese superpower, we have to imagine scientific advances that will eliminate some of China’s glaring weaknesses: nanotechnologies that will transform Chinese ways of warfare, hydroponics that will make the deserts of Xinjiang a shining mass of crops, cloning and genetic engineering that will alter all previous livestock-raising practices, modes of communication swifter and cheaper than any we now dream of. The Chinese science-fiction writers of today may still be nationalists, but they are speaking for and from a multitude of Chinas - from the mainland, from Taiwan, from Hong Kong, from Southeast Asian communities and from the United States and Canada. One of them writes of a China redeemed and restored by democratic currents coming from Taiwan; one of a huge urban block of China that breaks away from the mainland and drifts aimlessly round the world in search of anchor; one of a blighted and politically fragmented China, laid waste by civil war, that sends a billion emigrants out beyond its borders to destabilize the other countries of the world; one, with dark humor, writes of a United States corroded and undone by the crassly insidious commercial energies of Taiwan, condemned to an endless yearning for Chinese food and a passion for playing the market.
Any one of these scenarios could possibly be on the right track. In a world where the newly installed governor general of Canada is a Chinese woman immigrant, Adrienne Poy, and the Hong Kong shipping tycoon Li Ka-shing scoops the cream off the $127 billion Vodafone AirTouch-Mannesmann takeover war (even as Sen. Trent Lott warns of Li’s dominating position in the Panama Canal), the past has already blended with the future. What more can the voice of reason attempt to add? Only that the coming century is going to be one of unknown opportunities, demanding hitherto unknown flexibility, and that in such a climate the ebullient and pragmatic Chinese, with their own restless energies to the fore, and the gigantic consumer market and labor force of their country at their back, are going to be among the boldest pursuers of whatever opportunities present themselves. In this broad context - with a multiplicity of Chinas playing an intersecting set of global games - the exact details of specific trade agreements or of specific governmental practices in any one region or segment fade in their significance.
The last time there was a Chinese century was the 11th. During the 11th century, China was both the largest and the most successfully run country on earth: its commanding position sprang from a combination of technological innovation, industrial enterprise, well-managed agriculture, widely available education and traditions of administrative experimentation combined with religious and philosophical tolerance. Its decline was largely due to its military weakness in the face of a formidable array of enemies on its borders, enemies whom the government chose to attempt to bribe away rather than to confront directly. The policy of weakness and accommodation was fatal. If China proves it can defend its borders effectively, limit the disruptive intrusion of foreign forces while utilizing their positive sides, and re-establish that formidable combination of positive attributes it knew 900 years ago, there is just a chance that it will give its name to a century for the second time. Except perhaps for the Roman Empire at the height of its glory, that is not a feat any single state has been capable of before.
