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If you can Travel through time, which year will you choose? What would you change in history? For a surprising number of Chinese, their answer is the same: use what they know today to save China from its less-than-glorious past.
In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Alternative History Fictions on the Internet and Popular AuthoritarianismRongbin Han, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Georgia, studies a popular genre of science fiction in which people travel through time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on the online novel review platform and found 238 such stories in which the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories and ideas of economic reform to ancient China or modern historical times. Who said that 10th-century China was not equipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone should try to see how it would work.
Hahn says he has personally read more than 70 of these alternate history books, as well as dozens of other web novels on other topics for comparison. Alternate history novels contain an average word count of 2.88 million characters, nearly the length of the entire text. Harry Potter Series in Chinese. It was a lot of work, he told me, but he really enjoyed the process — when he was in college, online novels were some of the earliest Internet content he had consumed, and writing this book took him back to his roots.
Courtesy of Columbia University Press
Like Han, my early online life was shaped by a focus on online narratives. Call them fanfiction, slasher novels, popcorn novels, or webnovels (which seems to be the most widely accepted English translation in the industry itself), they are extremely long, winding tales published in daily installments, giving readers a quick, regular hit of dopamine. The most popular authors have legions of highly engaged fans, who are willing to pay to open a chapter every day. Web novels have become a huge and highly profitable industry in China, and many titles have been made into popular films and TV series in recent years.
I’ve read at least a few novels in the genre of alternative history that becomes the subject of Hahn’s book, but his work also looks at the political and social context surrounding them. Hahn analyzed online comments on each novel and studied how the government monitored, selected and promoted them.
While most science fiction attempts to imagine the future, these novels focus excessively on China’s past mistakes and insults. “The dominant narrative structure they come up with is basically the slogan ‘Make China Great Again.’ “They literally go back in history and glorify China,” Han says. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that these narratives also serve as a way for ordinary people to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party and its power by repeating the same themes of nationalist propaganda and adapting to censorship pressures.
Choose your adventure
Shortly after his research, Han noticed an interesting gender aspect to the novels: “There are a lot of women traveling through history, but I mostly excluded (those stories) in this study because they are not trying to save China from all kinds of crises,” Han says. It is only novels written by male writers for a majority male readership who tend to embark on the quest to remake Chinese history.
Han also studied the time period the book chose to travel to, with China’s Ming dynasty emerging as a favourite, appearing in about a quarter of the titles he looked at. There is a popular understanding in China that the Manchurian Qing Dynasty, which overthrew the Han-controlled Ming government, is responsible for China’s backwardness in the Industrial Revolution; So these people want to save Ming. Other dynasties, as well as modern China before and after the establishment of the current Chinese government, have also had their fair share of time travelers.
In January, WIRED covered Morning Star in Lingaowhich is a classic example of alternative history novels in which 500 people return to the Ming Dynasty to try to bring the Industrial Revolution to China hundreds of years before it actually happened in reality. It is also one of the narratives of the study that Hahn finds particularly interesting.