Chinese science fiction's growing popularity and integration into an increasingly diverse global science fiction field have sparked discussion of the genre's approach to gendered subjectivity. This article explores the intersections of gender and genre in Chinese science fiction on both textual and extratextual levels. The author argues that Hao Jingfang's 郝景芳 “Beijing zhedie” 北京折疊 (Folding Beijing) and Xia Jia's 夏笳 “Baigui yexing jie” 百鬼夜行街 (One Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight) combine, subvert, and reinterpret tropes of premodern Chinese literary genres like caizi jiaren 才子佳人 (scholar beauty romances) and zhiguai 志怪 (tales of the strange) to critique gendered and racialized expectations placed upon Chinese women via discourses like patriarchal authoritarianism and ornamentalism. Such strategic mobilizations of generic tropes, when considered in the context of larger discursive fields, challenge popular conceptions of science fiction as a male-dominated genre and expand definitions of science fiction within China and globally.

In 2015 a panel was held based around a couple of key questions: what the reasons or the causes underlying the current global disorder are, and what are the venues to overcome it. As part of the panel, the author of the present article argued that the underlying causes of the prevailing chaos are, on one hand, the persistence of global coloniality and, on the other, the fact that since around the year 2000 we have been witnessing the economic and political reemergence of cultures and civilizations that have historically been undermined by global coloniality. This article pushes further on those preliminary answers to the above two questions and relates them to the present world disorder ten years later. The chaos has intensified. We, on this planet, are at the crucial historical moment in which Western unipolar political, economic, and cultural hegemonic global order is declining, while a multipolar economic and political world order is emerging in interstate relations and a pluriverse cultural horizon is emerging in the public sphere globally.

This article analyzes the meanings and problematics of China's heavy reliance on sovereignty as the state's governing principle in recent years. It also invites us to think with and beyond the concept to envisage the state-people relation.

Debates concerning the relevance or appropriateness of the term colonialism to describe Africa-China relations are often opposed to arguments about the relevance of African agency in shaping either the benefits and consequences of relations with China. While these arguments may provide a corrective to the Sinocentrism of the China-Africa discourse exemplified in the geopolitical specter of “colonialism,” they also decenter critical perspectives on global political economy and their relation to the legacies of colonialism. Nonetheless, it matters who is making these arguments and the kinds of political work they allow. The author argues that discourses surrounding agency in both academic contexts and everyday discussions are not just empirical claims but also political claims that do different kinds of work depending on the context, audience, and scale of political action. What is at stake are the politics of holding actors and entities responsible for processes that are relationally co-constituted. While the discourse of South-South cooperation gestures toward the recognition of the uneven interdependence of people in the world, we must distinguish between the relationality-of-being in the global capitalist order and the varied projects to build equitable relationships otherwise within those conditions of possibility.

This article aims to shed light on the image of plant life attributed to Chinese civilizational stillness in cross-cultural encounters and imaginations in modern times. The author shows how the same image has had different cognitive values and cultural meanings. The article begins with an investigation of Hegel's negative portrait of China as vegetative other and then a consideration of Du Yaquan's 杜亚泉 affirmation of the vegetalism of Chinese civilization and its healthiness. It moves on to a reading of plant image in Lu Xun's 鲁迅 writing across different genres and elucidates his nondichotomous and more resilient understandings of plant life. Along the path of tracing the disparate concepts nestling in the image of plant life, the author also discusses other important cultural figures, such as Zhou Zuoren 周作人, Karl Jaspers, Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, and Zhang Taiyan 章太炎. By invoking a central image of plant life, the author attempts not an exceptionalist and representational claim but an illumination of its protean nature. The large philosophical question of interest is the intersectional question of China's emergence as a modern nation.

Dung Kai-cheung's 董啟章 (1967–) V-city tetralogy was first published right after the Hong Kong Retrocession in 1997. Turning from the foreground of modernization and colonialism's impact to the background of the writer's perspective, we see Chinese literature's profound influence on the writer's creation of a V city—a fictional counterpart of modern Hong Kong. This article questions how textual narratives of places in Dung's four novellas rebuild collective cultural memory with a historical tradition of Chinese literary geography. As the founding text for the series, the first volume, Ditu ji, constructs a V city based on both historical documents and fictive texts and implies the city's historical and cultural connection with the Song dynasty (960–1279). In Meng Hua lu and Fansheng lu, with two Song capitals as foils, the V city is full of layers of memories and emotions. The human-things relations as reflected in Bowu zhi demonstrate the regionality and internationality of modern Hong Kong. This article shows that classical Chinese literature as subtexts of the four novellas is important for the reformation of cultural memory, history making, and competition between cultures in contemporary world literary space.

Upon his arrival in Gansu Province in 1939, Tang Qi 唐祈 (1920–1990) composed a suite of sonnets that vividly depicted the previously unseen frontier landscapes. In these sonnets, the figure of a shepherdess emerges with a melancholic aura, capturing the reader's attention. Her portrayal garners both acclaim and curiosity, particularly concerning her origins. This article aims to explore the roots of this shepherdess imagery, leading to a reevaluation of a seemingly established tradition in Chinese poetry. The shepherdess, often perceived as a solidified poetic image, is revealed to be a more contemporary creation, emerging after pastoral and biblical archetypes of the shepherdess were introduced to China in the late Qing and modern periods. Prior to Tang Qi, the image had already been shaped and transformed by intellectuals. Therefore, when Tang Qi encountered this motif, he was positioned to draw on a localized adaptation for his literary work, rather than relying exclusively on the Western iteration. This exemplifies the manner in which new Chinese poetry has assimilated into global poetic movements. Additionally, situated on the margins both geographically and literarily, this poem presents an alternate perspective for reexamining the practical issues in modern China related to the imagined community of multiple ethnicities.

China and, more broadly, the Sinosphere is the gaping blind spot in the study of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory's concepts are tacitly tied to experiences of Western colonialism in the nineteenth century and onward and their legacies in Asia and Africa, even more specifically, British India, British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the French Maghreb, and the British and French Caribbean. In these sites, colonialism drew in varying degrees on the discourse of the civilizing mission. The Sinosphere is an exemplary site from which to question this inflation of the civilizing mission because the experiences of colonialism and imperialism here predate Western colonialism. With the onset of Western colonialism, the experiences of colonialism became even more complex and multifaceted because they involved multiple and overlapping colonialisms.

This article looks at how contemporary Chinese writers tackle established space and sea adventure themes, such as the imperialist connotations of the Pacific in postwar Japanese science fiction, the idea of the ocean as a resource-rich frontier for humanity in Arthur C. Clarke's works, or the ocean as a space of encounter with the dangerously alien in the work of Zheng Wenguang 鄭文光, and revisits them from a posthuman feminist perspective as they explore the oceans of outer space. The article first visits the alien seascapes of Titan in Chi Hui's 迟卉 “Deep Sea Fish” (Shenhai yu 深海鱼), with its oceans composed not of water but of liquid methane, analyzing the colonialist logic behind terrascaping and examining how the environment shapes the minds of the human residents even as they try to shape their environment. Second, Regina Kanyu Wang's 王侃瑜 “Return to Mi'an” (Chongfan mi'an 重返弥安) is read as a text that highlights the duality of space and ocean as realms for both frontline exploration and ultimate homecoming, while problematizing the very notion of the frontier itself, relying as it does on violent ignorance and erasure of earlier inhabitants. The article ends with a look at how Hu Shaoyan 胡绍晏 imagines the universe itself as an intergalactic ocean characterized by what Astrida Neimanis's has called “the hydrocommons of wet relations.”

Gender in Liu Cixin's fiction is hardly considered a promising topic, given the flat portrayal of his men and women, while his gendering of nonhuman lives, objects, and worlds receives little attention. This article examines the gendering of conventional and alternative beings in Liu's novels, especially his Three-Body Trilogy, to argue that whereas Liu's human characters help confirm an essentialist view that reduces women to an atavistic, ghostly existence, the nonhuman bodies and cosmic history open up spaces for a reading that destabilizes gender stereotypes and disrupts an ostensibly masculine historical narrative. An overlooked dimension of time that can be traced from the human characters complicates gender in tech-enabled new realms and cosmic-scale spaces, while alternation between and fusion of masculine and feminine qualities on various levels unsettles gender binaries and lets in abundant ambiguity. Instead of an androcentric enclosure uninhabitable and uninheritable to feminist readers, Liu's science fiction world harbors enough inconsistency to justify our “rebellious” reading against both popular impressions and the ostensibly antifeminist dictation by the trilogy itself.