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In the beginning it was Zheng Wenguang. Born in Vietnam and moved to China at the age of 18, in 1947, when it was not yet a People’s Republic. It is he who is considered the “father of Chinese science fiction“for the publication of his short story From Earth to Mars in 1954. When Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 science fiction disappeared from the Chinese galaxy. To then reappear, in 1979, with Zheng’s first long novel, Flyto Centaurus. It is the basis of an epic that in recent years has been relaunched with enormous vigor by a generation of new Chinese authors. With the active participation of government, interested in the construction of a Chinese mythology conveyed above all through cinema and television. Science fiction is now added to the classic historical dramas, obviously with patriotic traits like all the other genres that Beijing pushes onto the big screen.
The center of gravity of a genre that in China is experiencing enormous success in both literary and film production is Liu Cixin, the best known Chinese science fiction author also internationally. Its very famous The problem of the three bodies, published in 2008, it quickly became a major bestseller in Chinese literature. But then many other names emerged, starting with the talented Hao Jingfangwhich with his acclaimed Beijing folding became the first Chinese author to win the Hugo Award. She then moving on to Han Songa reporter for the Xinhua State News Agency and author of de The building blocks of rebirth. Automation, artificial intelligence, a mixture of different levels of reality and grotesque situations are the basis of this literary production which in China is defined as “ultra-unrealistic” but which in reality rests on a reality that perhaps runs too fast, risking to alienate those who are part of it.
Chinese science fiction to conquer the big screen
If in literature the reins are rather loose, science fiction in the cinema takes on a value not only cultural but also rhetorical and political. And to say that in 2011 the State Administration for Radio, Cinema and Television had discouraged film productions and television programs that included “fantasy, time travelmythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even the propagation of feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons and a lack of positive thinking. ”Only a few years later, these instructions had become a distant memory.
The trend of Chinese interest towards the science fiction genre begins earlier, but the general public, especially the international one, realizes it with the release of the blockbuster The Wandering Earth, based on Liu Cixin’s own novel. On a budget of about 50 million dollars, the film grosses 700, become the highest-grossing non-American film in the history of world cinema behind the solo Wolf Warrior 2, a 2017 Chinese thriller. The fame of the film continues after its acquisition by Netflix and influences not a little the film production of the past years.
Science fiction to create an epic of soft power Chinese
But Chinese science fiction on the big screen is more than just The Wandering Earthwhich will still have a sequel to the cinema in 2023. In the past few weeks, for example, it has achieved great success Journey to the West by Kong Dashan. Self The Wandering Earth told of a heroic feat in space led by a Chinese astronaut, Journey to the West is a kind of Close encounters of the third kind with Chinese characteristics. Tang Zhijun, a middle-aged editor of a Beijing magazine, travels to a remote village to investigate the mass sighting of an unidentified flying object. There he meets a local poet who claims that the answer to the mystery lies on a mountain.
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