Abstract
Through an analysis of four works, this study delineates the history of disease and medicine in contemporary Chinese science fiction. Specifically, Liu Xingshi’s “The Village Doctor” (1963) echoes Maoist public health policies with scientific utopianism; Ye Yonglie’s “Illness of Love” (1986) expresses an anxiety about the infection of a “capitalist disease” in the era of opening up; Wang Jinkang’s Balance between Life and Death (1997) imagines the challenge of Western medicine within the framework of cultural clash; and Chen Qiufan’s “Future Disease” (2015) exposes how technology transforms human subjectivity to posthuman subjectivity. As illness is metaphorized from physical to ideological and cultural, the medical response transforms from technological optimism to medical humanitarianism, then to the challenging of modern Western medicine, and finally to the deconstruction of the “human” itself. Such transformation reflects the four stages of the Chinese discourse of modernity: socialist modernity, the transition from socialist modernity to Western modernity, the critique of Western modernity and the search for an alternative, and the transcendence of modernity in the posthuman future. This process also reflects the changing representation of human subjectivity, i.e., from collective subjectivity to individual subjectivity with an ideological label, to culturalist subjectivity, and finally to posthuman subjectivity.
Translated title of the contribution | Disease and Medicine in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction |
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Original language | Chinese (Traditional) |
Pages (from-to) | 145-180 |
Journal | 中外文學 |
Volume | 49 |
Issue number | 3 |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2020 |