‘Immortality Cultivation’ (xiuzhen 修真) and Neoliberalism
in Contemporary Chinese SF and Fantasy
We are excited for a fascinating talk by Future Speculations Reading Group member Echo, followed by a conversation with Dr Edward King
Thursday 6 June, 43 Woodland Road
SF and fantasy as types of literature bred out of post-enlightenment engagement with or critique of reason have a distinctive European origin, yet their global transmission and transmutation with globalization mean that they are also a type of world literature always on the move. This talk will trace Chinese SF’s and fantasy’s global origins in China’s two points of entry into the world in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries respectively and how each genre has responded to China’s social conditions and literary traditions in their localization. The second part of the talk will focus on how a familiar trope in SF and transhumanism, ‘digital immortality’, reincarnates in contemporary Chinese SF and fantasy in various forms of ‘immortality cultivation’. Originally a concept in Daoist alchemy, ‘immortality cultivation’ (xiuzhen 修真) is appropriated by Chinese fantasy and SF as a way to engage with social inequalities in contemporary Chinese society under a neoliberal, capitalist logic.