Hua Li

Montana State University | MSU · Modern Languages & Literatures

China’s science fiction community was the earliest group on the Chinese literary scene to respond to the COVID-19 crisis when it officially began in January 2020. On the one hand, this community foregrounded discussions of both local and international science fiction narratives and films about virus pandemics. On the other, it thought beyond the cu...

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction - edited by Gerry Canavan January 2019

This essay takes an analytical approach to examine some Chinese science fiction narratives with the themes of climate change, terraforming, and environment degradation—written from the mid-twentieth century to the early years of the twentieth-first century. My broad reading of the texts treats these narratives as archive—textual sources that docume...

This article focuses on Chinese scientific animated films produced from 1957 to 1983 by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (hereafter SAFS) in order to shed light on the important function of scientific animation as a media tool that contributes to the nation’s political, cultural, and scientific development. This article discusses six representati...

With the occurrence of energy crises and ecological degradation since the 1960s, many ecologists, philosophers, economists, and sf writers have begun to adopt the intergenerational spaceship as a metaphor and a model of human life in a finite environment. This article explores how the idea of spaceship earth is reflected in the Chinese sf writer Li...

This article examines Liu Cixin’s “The Western Ocean” (Xiyang), a story in which Liu satirizes Zheng He’s voyages into the Indian Ocean and presents an alternate history of China from the fifteenth century to the present. The combination of China’s imagined future and the historical memory of its past provides a political and social commentary on t...

This article focuses on contemporary Chinese science fiction, specifically the political elements in Liu Cixin's (b.1963) critical utopian novel China 2185 [Zhongguo 2185], written in 1989 against the social and political background of China in the 1980s. I analyze China 2185 at the "iconic level," at the "discrete level," and at the level of "gene...

The term "manufactured landscapes" has negative, critical, and even ironic connotations. It refers to landscapes that have been deformed, destroyed, or devastated by human industrial endeavour, such as shipyards, dams, abandoned quarries and mines, and recycling junkyards of industrial waste. These man-made landscapes are closely related to energy...

Su Tong, a fixture among Chinese fiction for decades, achieved international fame when his novel Wives and Concubines was adapted in 1993 by director Zhang Yimou into the Oscar-nominated film Raise the Red Lantern, and then again in 2009 when his novel The Boat to Redemption won the Man Asian Literary Prize. In this interview conducted by Montana S...

This article focuses on gender roles and their displacement resulting from market-based modernization in Tuya’s Marriage. I argue that Wang treats the inversion of gender roles as an unwanted consequence and an irresolvable predicament within Tuya’s Marriage in order to criticize the economic exploitation of Inner Mongolian grasslands and the heavy...

Yu Hua’s two short stories, “Boy in the Twilight” and “The Boisterous Game,” are contextualized in a productive dialogue with studies of the short story genre and its narrative strategies, as well as in the context of contemporary China and its not-sodistant past. Specifically, this article focuses on the poetics of space and time in the two storie...

This article focuses on a specific aspect of Yu Hua’s satiric criticism of Mao-era rhetoric through the use of double-voiced discourse in his full-length novel Cries in the Drizzle. I analyse how this double-voiced discourse is achieved through the contrast between the focalizers’ unreflective and matter-of-fact use of Maoist rhetoric and the publi...

IN THE 1980S, A GROUP OF YOUNG CHINESE WRITERS, including Ma Yuan 马原, Can Xue 残雪, Su Tong 苏童, Yu Hua 余华, Gei Fei 格非, Sun Ganlu 孙甘露, Bei Cun 北村 and others, emerged in mainland China at a particular historical juncture when the utopian mood of the country was on the decline. Their experiment with language and writing technique differentiated them fro...