Contenu du sommaire : Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China: Towards Plural Horizons of Political Imagination

This essay examines two interconnected human-made nonhuman entities stemming from Shenzhen, China's first special economic zone, that have become dominant figures in mapping the city's – and by extension, China's – future: the robot and the drone. I bring an interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to the multiple meaning-making practices that engage with these two objects; both participate in enacting the vision for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as an extension of the success of Shenzhen. These practices simultaneously normalise aspirations for a future fuelled by the power of nonhuman technological agents while offering glimpses into the uneven power relations between different humans that underpin such future making. At the same time, they also point to the emergent possibilities of meaning-making that conjoin the human and the nonhuman.

Beginning with a discussion of Liang Qichao's 1902 unfinished novel A Future History of New China, this article examines four twenty-first century science fiction works by Han Song, Liu Cixin, Chan Koonchung, and Hao Jingfang – arguing that each work uses a future-perfect narrative mode to comment on the present. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that one may learn from the past to improve conditions in the present, this article instead contends that one implication of these works is that a focus on the future can – somewhat paradoxically – inhibit the possibility of meaningful political reform in the present.

In Dechen (Bde chen) County, Yunnan Province, a Tibetan county of the People's Republic of China, prominent lay Buddhist practitioners work to resist and mitigate the impacts of agrochemical pollution and climate change on sacred landscapes. In this region of northwest Yunnan officially renamed and dubbed “Shangri-La” by the local and national state for tourism purposes, and in alignment of this name with the term Shambala, a place of divine serenity in Tibetan Buddhism, the protagonists in this paper insist that chemical futures and pollution are only adding to the creation of a “fake” Shangri-La, and that more than human- and nature-centric views are necessary in building a more ecologically sound future. This paper ethnographically analyses these activities and motivations in the context of ecocentric views surrounding indigenous Tibetan more-than-human spirit worlds. I ask what drives rural Tibetan grape-growers to pursue an ecologically friendly agenda. Motivations include observation of chemical degradation on land, Buddhist ethics, local land worship, and conceptions that being a local Tibetan should revolve around the preservation of sacred landscapes and mountain gods and spirits rather than purely economic profit and development. A critical variable, however, is that lay Buddhists holding these beliefs are exceptions, with most villages showing more concern for the economic benefits of new cash agricultures over sacred landscapes and spirits. I argue that while many villagers are willing to ignore the long-term vitality of the sacred landscape in favour of economic prosperity and view new economic activities as morally acceptable within Tibetan spirituality, some individuals insist that preserving the local landscape is paramount to a sustainable future both locally and across Greater China.

How might the future of a city be foretold in a single ubiquitous, yet often invisible, building material? Across the Chinese capital today, municipal planners, developers, artists, and residents alike are mobilising the brick not only as a window to the past and an indictment of the present, but a key portent of the future. Amid a capricious climate of creative destruction, this article tracks how bricks emerge as historicised artifacts, aesthetic interventions, and weapons used by and against the forces of China's spectacular development. Against clichés of intractable permanence, the Chinese brick today is revealing new and unpredictable vicissitudes as it is co-opted in projects of governance and resistance, demarcating both the material and symbolic parameters of urban belonging in contemporary Beijing. Approaching the lived form of the Chinese metropolis through this traditional architectural material, the article describes Beijing brick in three instantiations: as a lightning rod for debate about the past, present, and future of Beijing's historic old city; as a materialisation of the atmospherics of pollution and “progress”; and as the armament of both development and its opposition. Through these instances, the brick oscillates between being understood as a relic of aestheticised tradition, a symbol of modernisation, and a trenchant instrument of both building and destruction. As extended fieldwork in Beijing evidences, it is precisely this social and material mutability of the brick that today reorients life in the city toward novel human and nonhuman alliances and oppositions, while also conditioning wider political sensibilities about who counts and what matters in official and unofficial imaginings of China's future.

Since the 2010s, the “Dongbei Renaissance” has emerged in China as a transmedial phenomenon driven by a cluster of cultural producers retelling the stories of their parents' generation as laid-off workers during the tumultuous transition of Dongbei, or Northeast China, from a socialist industrial headquarter to a decadent urban ruin in the 1990s. With a focus on the translocal relevance of this cultural trend, this paper discusses the prominent role of literature and its synergy with digital media in transmitting repressed social memories across generations and shedding light on contemporary conditions of economic precarity. I propose the notion of “ruinated futurity” to characterise conceptual openings offered by this digitally-mediated literary boom in three dimensions: (1) a mnemonic future that resurrects the repressed memories of the silenced through transgenerational renarration; (2) a media future that reworks literature within a digital media ecology of remediation and interrelatedness, and (3) a socioeconomic future reoriented towards disposable populations beyond narratives of progress and development.

The sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) caused an unprecedented catastrophe worldwide. Different communities adopted a wide range of preventive measures to halt transmission of the disease. This article examines how rural Tibetan communities in China's eastern Tibet (Kham) have addressed this pandemic, including their popular discourses and practices concerning the ethics, etiology, and prevention of Covid-19. Through analysing the experiences, views, and responses of local Tibetans to Covid-19, this article reveals their underlying beliefs and values, and highlights the integration of their religious and medical practices. Analysis of ethnographic data shows that local Tibetans in Kham have not only relied on religious rituals and traditional Tibetan medicinal practices but have also adopted various modern public health measures to ensure effective prevention of the virus. Therefore, this study demonstrates not only a syncretic practice of religion and medicine in the landscape of Tibetan medical culture but also the practicality and adaptability of local Tibetans during crises.

The sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) caused an unprecedented catastrophe worldwide. Different communities adopted a wide range of preventive measures to halt transmission of the disease. This article examines how rural Tibetan communities in China's eastern Tibet (Kham) have addressed this pandemic, including their popular discourses and practices concerning the ethics, etiology, and prevention of Covid-19. Through analysing the experiences, views, and responses of local Tibetans to Covid-19, this article reveals their underlying beliefs and values, and highlights the integration of their religious and medical practices. Analysis of ethnographic data shows that local Tibetans in Kham have not only relied on religious rituals and traditional Tibetan medicinal practices but have also adopted various modern public health measures to ensure effective prevention of the virus. Therefore, this study demonstrates not only a syncretic practice of religion and medicine in the landscape of Tibetan medical culture but also the practicality and adaptability of local Tibetans during crises.