Abstract
This chapter will map how the trope of the “sick man of Asia” (东亚病夫) underwent a transformation that reoriented its object over the course of the twentieth century. The concept defined Chinese literature and political policies for more than a century, only later to be redeployed as an SF conceit for exploring issues of biopolitics and national influence. In their depiction of technologies for battling infirmity and prolonging life, both Lu Xun’s “Medicine” (1919) and Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnated Giant” (2005) explore the relationship of physical illness to the individual body and the state as a whole. While “Medicine takes seriously the trope of state illness as embodied in the individual, condemning China’s national character in the process, “The Reincarnated Giant takes as its baseline the assumption of China as a strong national body. In identifying “The Reincarnated Giant as a significant cultural shift toward a science fictional literature of nationalism that rejects the pathologization of the Chinese body altogether, the trope of the “sick man of Asia” is redeployed through a polysemic shift that recognizes its past use while weaponizing it for a new geopolitical positionality.
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Notes
- 1.
Writing in the preface to “Call to Arms,” Lu Xun notes that “if the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of natural scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students” (Lu 1960, 2). The Russo-Japanese War was primarily fought over imperialist control of areas of China and Korea.
- 2.
蓋一國之事同於人身兮 夫人身逸則弱 勞則強者 固常理也 然使病夫焉 日從事於超距贏越之間 以是求強 則有速其死而已矣 今之中國 非猶是病夫也耶 “The condition of the nation is like the condition of the body. Indulgence weakens the body and exercise strengthens the body. If this universal rule is followed, then it will be impossible to become a sick man. If we cannot strengthen the nation in the correct way, it will only quicken its death. China’s condition today is like that of a sick man.” Yan Fu. “Yuan Qiang Xiudinggao” [“On Strength: A Revised Draft”]. Yan Fu Ji, Di Yi Ce [Yan Fu’s Writings], edited by Wang Shi, volume 11, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1986, pg. 27.
- 3.
See Schell and Delury 2014. On page 95, Schell and Delury identify several military and political defeats as the impetus for Liang Qichao coining the phrase “sick man of Asia” to describe China’s debased position, necessitating radical reform. According to Schell and Delury, existing social Darwinist beliefs about individuals and racial groups led Liang to believe that only radical social reform at the level of the individual body could change China’s coming fortunes.
- 4.
The extent to which this is true is a matter of significant debate. While the definition of a genre such as science fiction has long been hotly debated in English, it is further problematized by the differences in translation and literary form when translating into English from Chinese. Authors such as David Der-wei Wang identify science fantasies as developing through translations undertaken in the early Qing dynasty, while scholar Song Mingwei points to 1989 as the first important blossoming of science fiction in China. Scholar Wu Yan has long described science fiction in China as developing out of the zhiguai (tales of the strange and supernatural) and chuanqi (fantastic tales and romances)—a position taken up in recent scholarship by Chinese SF scholars interested in “recuperating” an originary national origin for science fiction in China (see Song, Mingwei. 2015). After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction. China Perspectives 1: 7–13; Wang, David Der-wei. 1997. Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911. Stanford University Press; and Wu, Yan, Yao Jianbin, and Andrea Lingenfelter (translator). 2018. A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction. Chinese Literature Today 7.1: 44–53.
- 5.
I am using the transliterations provided by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang in their 1960 translation of the text, which is still the standard translation used today. The names of the two families involved would more contemporarily be translated as Hua (Chuan) and Xia (Hsia).
- 6.
The super-sign makes visible the assumption of commensurability across languages at the same time as the dominant language retains the power to shape and define the terms of the translation itself. In Liu’s example, the word “夷” is defined by and in relation to the English word “barbarian,” a hypothetical equivalence that glosses certain aspects of the word’s in-language meanings and adds meanings from external language imposition, creating a new heteroglossic term that ultimately became fixed through repeated use. I will not recount in particular detail here the history of the word/sign “夷/yi/barbarian”—Liu does a brilliantly exhaustive analysis in Clash of Empires—except to explain that it was one of the seven major points enumerated in the Treaty of Tianjin, the set of unequal treaties ending the first stage of the Second Opium War. They are perhaps most notable for including the banishment of the character/concept “夷/yi,” translated into English as “barbarian,” alongside concessions to Western military, mercantile, and political demands. Liu claims, “If we read the ban carefully, Article 51 exiles the super-sign yi/barbarian but does not otherwise banish the English equivalent of the exiled term. It might be suggested that the English word enjoys the double advantage of being both the authoritative signified of the super-sign yi/barbarian and an independent English word, uncensored and safely bracketed by the treaty clause.” See Liu 2006, 38.
- 7.
Chinese characters are often made up of multiple components. The word yan (speech), when written on its own, is 言, but when it becomes part of another character (here, 诊), it becomes the radical component seen to the left of the character. This construction implies that the word zhen (diagnose) has a speech-related aspect to it.
- 8.
The Ship of Theseus argument is a thought experiment, first described by Heraclitus and Plato, that asks if each individual component part of a cohesive object is gradually replaced, whether that object retains its original identity.
- 9.
The Bamiyan Buddhas were two enormous statues of Gautama Buddha carved into the stone side of a cliff in central Afghanistan. The smaller of the two was 125 feet tall, while the larger was 180 feet tall. They were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
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Conn, V.L. (2021). Translating the Pathologized Body as a Tool of Nationalism in Chinese Science Fiction. In: Campbell, I. (eds) Science Fiction in Translation. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84208-6_11
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