The Gothic Hater Presents: Sinofuturism and Techno-Orientalism

The episode titled "Sino-Futurism and Techno-Orientalism" explores the relationship between the West and China, challenging binary views. Sino-Futurism is a response to historical colonialism and aims to position Chinese society as futuristic. Techno-Orientalism portrays East Asia as hyper-modern but dehumanizes its people, reinforcing Western superiority. The concept of "Yellow Peril" and fears of Asian dominance play into these ideas. Both Sino-Futurism and Techno-Orientalism reflect and critique power dynamics between the East and West. Hello everyone, this is Phoebe from The Gothic Hater Presents, and today the episode is titled Sino-Futurism and Techno-Orientalism. The subtitle is actually, What is Sino-Futurism, an aesthetic, a trend, a phase in your life? No, Sino-Futurism is a relationship. So as we all know recently, there has been a trend of China-maxing or treating Chinese culture and now the country of China and its practices as a fascinating thing that American audiences or Anglophone audiences want to emulate. So it comes across to me in the meme of, I'm in a very Chinese time in my life right now, and so you have people drinking hot water or eating Chinese foods or trying to go to China as a tourist, now that this country and its culture is seen as palatable to the Western audience and it seems popular and a trendy place to go to. So let's start us off with a quote taken from Lawrence Leck's 2016 hour-long film titled Sino-Futurism, which also helped popularize this term. Sino-Futurism is in fact an early form of the singularity, an artificial intelligence whose origin or behavior is impossible to identify with certainty. It is a massively distributed network focused on copying rather than originality, addicted to machine learning rather than ethics or morality, with a total capacity for work and an unprecedented sense of survival. It is not the other either. Orientalism is a shadow of Occidentalism. In the West, the East is the other. In the East, the West is the other. Sino-Futurism moves beyond these boundaries. So in simple words, Sino-Futurism is a set of practices, a relationship that describes the anchor between the West and the non-West, in this case China, and how China views the West in relation to China. So one could even argue that the West does not exist without the East, and the East does not exist in the West, which is very different to previous understandings of Orientalism in which the East solely exists to preserve the West, and that the East cannot exist without the West. So I would argue that Sino-Futurism at least attempts to challenge that binary. So why the name Futurism? It is derived from the genre called Afrofuturism. It's containing literature and media that is rooted in imagining a better future for African people due to a colonial and traumatic past. In the case of Chinese history, it occupies this unique space of having been an empire, but while simultaneously that empire was being torn apart by Western imperial powers and had colonialism forced upon them, while Imperial China, as it was named because it was an empire, was doing imperialist actions in the past. Sino-Futurism can also be seen as an offshoot of Techno-Orientalism because there are many Western-imposed ideas that created the idea of Sino-Futurism. And Sino-Futurism does lean into stereotypes forced upon them by the West to negotiate the relationship of power between China and the West. So Sino-Futurism seeks to do the same as Afrofuturism in attempting to position Chinese society in a highly digitized and futuristic world. In the case of Chinese history, this desire for futurity stems from the century of humiliation that some people have argued when it occupies this unique space, again, of having been an empire, but it was still being dominated by colonial Western powers. In the 19th and early 20th century, China was subjected to colonial practices of unequal treaties that led to land cessation and led to a lot of treaty ports being forced upon China to welcome in Western trade that often did not benefit the Chinese population at all. So therefore, Sino-Futurism can be seen as a retaliatory practice in which the colonial path of the 19th and 20th centuries affects how the current Chinese authors and artists want to reorient their cultural hegemony in the 21st century to signal an end to the century of humiliation that was imposed by Western imperial powers. So what is techno-Orientalism? So a brief introduction and summary of Orientalism and techno-Orientalism. So I would argue that it is a set of aesthetics that place the Orient, and in this case, usually the urban landscape of East Asia, such as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in some cases, the urban spaces and cities of Southeast Asia as more technologically advanced than the quote-unquote West. If Orientalism, by Edward Said's work, places a vague landscape of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa as the Orient, which is this anachronistic place that exists solely in the past as compared to the present West, then techno-Orientalism firmly places East Asia in the future. However, this idea of futurity comes at a cost. Just because East Asia is seen as hyper-modern, it exists on the contradictory tension that the people who advance this technology are not entirely human. So you see a lot of photos of people working inhumane hours in claustrophobic assembly lines in Chinese factories, the dystopian stalls of a call center. These images posit Asian people more similar to machinery than individual, actualized human beings who have autonomy and agency over their own bodies and their selves. The Orient is also heavily gendered, so usually the Orient of the 19th century Western literature is full of mysterious, exotic, seductive women that the male author usually encounters on his trips to the Orient. The irony is not lost on me because of the idea of these Western male scholars and explorers unveiling the Orient for their own sexual desires, and they also fetishize the women. But unlike the Orient of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the backwardness of the Orient shows the modernity of the West in comparison, techno-Orientalism of the 21st century reaffirms the West's centrality by showing Asia as this modern but soulless place. There is almost always a link between Asia being so modern, so futuristic, with the people being so inhuman to the point they have become robots and machinery with no thoughts. And techno-Orientalism, much like Orientalism, is also gendered. In a lot of films depicting robots, they're usually female robots that are sexualized or figures to be desired, and the robots are almost always racialized as East Asian women. So famous examples of techno-Orientalism can be found in Ridley Scott's movie Blade Runner, in which the futuristic capital is set in this vaguely Tokyo-inspired city, yet all the main characters are white people fighting against their technological overlords. Another example is the Matrix trilogy, in which the movies are way less subtle and features Westernized or white protagonists fighting against their evil technological empires that contain this global empire with superior technology. And also the Matrix trilogy draws heavily upon East Asian philosophical ideals, namely Buddhism. So why does techno-Orientalism exist? So the first reason is because there is this perception of machine-like workers. The age-old anti-Asian rhetoric of, you know, these Asian people are so hardworking, they're like machinery, you can work them for 14 hours straight, and you know they're conditioned differently than workers of European origin. So a real example from the American Federation of Labor in the article called Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asian Coolism, which shows how it survived from 1902, argued that Chinese laborers could withstand fiscal deprivations that Americans and European laborers could not, which led to severely discriminatory practices for Chinese railway workers in 19th century America. The second reason is this fear of Asian dominance, usually called Yellow Peril, and this applies a lot to countries such as China and India, which is where you see people's anxieties expressed through rhetoric such as, you know, Chinese and Indian people, they're going to steal your jobs and they're going to take over the world. And it's also banking on this idea that because Asians don't have feelings or thoughts or human rights in their home countries, therefore you can work them for 14 hours straight and replace the Western actualized liberal human that has rights and freedoms and control over their bodies and minds. Reason number three is techno-orientalism exists as a reaffirmation of Western superiority. It reaffirms Western values, mainly values of democracy or liberal humanism, meaning like a person that has full control of their bodies, they have agency, autonomy, unlike the hive mind, factory, machine, cogs of the quote-unquote Orient. Liberal humanism was the foundation of the Enlightenment, which led to Western ideas of civilization of the West has the burden of civilizing the non-West with our amazing and superior ideas of democracy and free will to justify imperialism and capitalism in the 19th century. So a brief summary of how techno-orientalism exists in relation to final futurism. As I've established in the previous article, techno-orientalism postulates the Orient, in this case, again, East Asian urban cities and spaces and parts of Southeast Asia as exotic due to its hyper modernity. However, this hyper modernity is only possible on the backs of a mass of nameless, faceless laborers. For instance, again, I'm drawing back to the bleak images of a call center or the dehumanizing assembly lines of Chinese factories devoid of human warmth is what makes the Orient possible. The thought process is, again, an extension of the yellow peril, a fear that because East Asia, so in this case, Japan in the 1980s and now currently China, is able to mass produce technology cheaply and quickly. Therefore, it will assert dominance over the Western world and take over the West, so to say. Unlike traditional Orientalism, which seeks to center the West through its position as a landscape of the past, techno-orientalism reaffirms Western centrality because of its modernity. The idea that the Orient is full of unnamed and exploited labor masses reaffirms Western ideas of liberal humanism and individuality. So final futurism therefore builds upon these stereotypes established in techno-orientalist narratives. Kahn and de Seda reaffirmed that the perception of a hypermodern China became synonymous with the technologies of the future, which stems from the yellow peril line of logic, a fear that the Orient, again, will take over the West. Furthermore, the modernity of China and its rise to cultural and technological dominance serves as a stand in for the whole of East Asia and negotiates further Euro-American anxieties about ongoing geopolitical shifts. Kahn and de Seda further theorized that because of the rise of technology, the previous stereotypes of a China that is closer to the future and is dependent on technology is similarly applied to Chinese people. Yet at the same time, Chinese authors are able to co-opt these media platforms for themselves and further negotiate an understanding of China that goes beyond the pre-established stereotypes and present their own national and futuristic image. So what exactly is final futurism? Is it a set narrative, an aesthetic or the future? So scholars actually argue that the desire for a Chinese future happened long before final futurism was popularized by the multimedia artist Lauren Fleck, whose quote I started off this episode with. So in his hour long film, Lauren Fleck both leaned into the stereotypes associated with final futurism while demonstrating a future that does operate on these stereotypes. The film includes documentary footage, news clips, media art, video game clips and etc. The work has been dismissed as being too stereotypical, but it also allows us a diasporic view. Because before final futurism was taken back into the hands of Chinese fiction writers and artists, it was first and foremost an imposed genre. According to Ashley Lau's article, Final Futurism, A Speculative Design, the pushback towards lex media was mostly negative. Described as internalized historical discrimination or that the narrative was reductive, which asks again the age old question of can diasporic artists accurately represent their own culture when they grew up in the diaspora and its communities? So in this article, for the purpose of this article, Lau defines a Sino diaspora as Sinophone speaking Chinese people living outside of mainland China. So places like Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and in the Anglophone Western world, all of those places are considered diaspora. So Lex himself states that final futurism is about his viewpoint, looking in as a diasporic person. He quotes, well, I quote him saying, quite often, emigrant cultures preserve the old traditions even more strongly than the original people in the original place. Those traditions being computing, copying, gaming, addiction, laboring, gambling. My understanding was that emigration and diaspora culture bring certain things up to the forefront as essentially livelihood gets harder, especially because immigrants at those times and now have fewer rights, rights of immigration and legal rights, and of course, less money. They are susceptible to these systems of labor, subjected to addiction and gambling. Lau argues that this is an introspective and semi-autobiographical work of Lex's experience as a diasporic person. And these stereotypes are really his own childhood experiences of Chinese diasporic communities and how they practice their culture. And the whole point of this 2016 film, as Lau argues, was through the use of sweeping generalizations, surrealism, dark humor and satire. Sinofuturism, the film, explores the origins, verity, benefits and drawbacks of cultural narratives and questions the basis of constructed dichotomies. The West versus the East, modernity versus tradition, human versus non-human or post-human, and utopia versus dystopia, which all invariably pose one side as the other. So Lau further argues that Sinofuturism, the film, posits that in ancient China, centuries before industrialization, humanity's disposition for and belief in the transformative power of computing, copying, studying and labor have already been latent. So as the chicken or egg question goes, which came first, humanity or artificial intelligence? So this is kind of building on top of scholars that argue Sinofuturism, this rhetoric of futurity, has existed long before the name was coined. One could argue that Chinese science fiction that positions a Chinese future and the sentiment of the Chinese century will take over Western dominance has been going on as early as 1901 during the wave of revolutionary fervor that eventually dismantled imperial Chinese rule in 1911, ending a millennia long imperial rule over China. So I also attribute Sinofuturism to an aesthetic that this negotiation of stereotypes and leaning into stereotypes while building something new out of these stereotypes as a negotiation of power. But it's also accumulating into this aesthetic that showcases the futuristic landscape of Chinese cities. So another example of Sinofuturism is seen in the Chinese city of Chongqing. So why Chongqing? When I first visited China's Blade Runner City last year, the city was coined the Blade Runner City because of how modern and highly digitized it looks. I was reminded of the harmonious blend of the new and the old. Chongqing, a city situated at the confluence of the Jialing River and the Yangtze River, has a long history, like most Chinese history and their cities, in the southwest of China. And it was not until recently, in the last, I would say, 10, 20 years, that there was a huge tourist boom. From iShowSpeed's visits to the many TikToks and Instagram posts describing the complex web of 8D architecture that was built into the mountainside of the city, Chongqing has truly made a name for itself. But what lies beyond its tourist-friendly facade? So here's a quote from Asa Roast, who is a urban geographer, and he did his doctoral research in Chongqing. So he introduced the city as an emblematic of the ways in which new imagined values are being assigned to a Chinese urban future. Chongqing is an island city with a population of approximately 8 million, lying about 1,500 kilometers upriver on the Yangtze River, or in Chinese, you can call it Changjiang. Historically, it was an industrial port city of Sichuan province, isolated by the mountainous highlands that surround it, previously viewed as, quote-unquote, lagging behind coastal cities like Shanghai. It has grown rapidly since the 1990s to become a center of high-tech manufacturing. Places like Chongqing appear in the Western imaginary of inland China as an eruption of vast megacities, appearing ex nihilo, I don't speak Latin, and rapidly becoming larger than many European metropolises. Chongqing, as argued by Roast, is that it is such a modern city, this megacity, that it gives an almost otherworldly, futuristic feel to it. I know I've repeated the word futuristic many times, but that is the case here. The city of Chongqing, at least portrayed on social media, doesn't feel like a real place. It feels like something straight out of a movie or an animated form of media. I would even argue further that Chongqing almost exists in this futuristic, digitized, aesthetic landscape. It doesn't feel real. So it almost feels like a virtual place that doesn't exist in real life. So a quick search on Reddit, also confirmed by Roast's article, suggests that tourists who have visited Chongqing argue that it is the most worthy of the Chinese cities to resemble the high-tech cities in the Blade Runner movies. In fact, local Chongqing artist Shouzi Duanle actually created digital artwork that further pushes the narrative and aesthetic relationship that Chongqing is indeed a very futuristic and imaginative place, or as Roast would call, the artist depicted the skyline as an exaggerated, final futuristic landscape of digital and infrastructural excess and verticality. This further reaffirms that Chongqing is a place that exists more in a digital framework instead of a real city that is surrounded or grounded in its reality or its presence. The concept of Chongqing, this digital city, is also popularized by the anxieties of the Western audience because the modern skylines of Chongqing elicit a right reaction from Euro-American audiences that will think, oh, why is my European or American city or city from the Anglophone world lagging so far behind Chinese cities, which reaffirms the sentiment of final futurity. Roast further argues that the construction of the Chinese city as a digital object thus rests on a certain set of anxieties distinct to the West. Besides the futurism represented by Chongqing, these anxieties focus on a fear of China's rise and the loss of dynamism, novelty, and urban modernity that historically were viewed as the exclusive domain of a handful of Euro-American cities. The result of this is that the city of the future is imagined in terms of a direct usurpation of the urban modernity that European and North American cities have nominally abandoned. As such, what it recognizes as futuristic in Beijing or Chongqing is limited to the tropes that it understands as belonging to the lost future, past of the modernist Western city. So Roast is arguing that Chongqing is so popular in relation to the West, which kind of reaffirms older techno-Orientalist or Orientalist ideas and concepts that the Orient simply cannot exist without the West. Again, this futurity is propelled by a fear from the West, a fear that China will take over and that the future will look very Chinese. And that's why it is so popular. So again, Sino-futurism exists on this tension between China versus the West. And also another side note is that the reason why Chongqing has risen in popularity is not a mere coincidence. There is an underlying thought of rejecting Chinese cities with former colonial ties, such as Hong Kong or Shanghai, as too modern. Chongqing has far less colonial or Western ties than those two cities and way less culture exchange with the West. So it is read as more, quote unquote, authentically Chinese than other cities. And photographers also popularize Chongqing for its gritty vibe of an authentic urban China that lacks the cosmopolitan veneer of Beijing and Shanghai, because those places are either too Westernized or too polished. But that's actually not true, because Chongqing, it was a treaty port in the 1890s and when it opened up to the British and Americans, British and American and other European companies actually came in and traded in Chongqing. They had company headquarters that I actually visited and now is repurposed as this new touristy area. So Chongqing has a lot of Western ties, just not as much as Shanghai. It didn't have concession parts of the city that was owned by foreign hands, I would say. So now we bring to the topic that Sino-futurism is an inevitable future and there's no avoiding it. So Zhang in his article argues that Sino-futurism is often the diasporic Chinese community looking back into China. So as we now see on social media, how diasporic Chinese communities are now quite literally peering into China through Chinese social media or Chinese content on social media and kind of reconnecting with their parents' homeland or their birth culture through this exposure on social media, looking back into China and admiring Chinese culture for being so, quote unquote, modern and innovative and dominant. So Kahn and De Sera, our old friends, I've quoted them many times in this article, they are the experts in this field, argue that Chinese science fiction, one of the areas that is the most prolific in promoting Sino-futurism, is in line with the Chinese political narrative of the Chinese dream that has been heavily promoted since 2016. One example is when the author of The Three-Body Problem, the famous science fiction novel that has been translated to English and made into a Netflix show, when the author Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award in 2016, the Chinese vice president praised Chinese science fiction as in line with Chinese political goals, such as the idea of, again, the quote unquote Chinese dream that posits a collective hope for restoring China's lost national greatness and a guiding principle that focus on time and futurity. So the concept of China's lost national greatness and now they've played catch up, they've caught up and will dominate the future is very much in line with the early revolutionaries of the 20th century who also wrote science fiction novels that positioned China as a future global superpower. So science fiction in Chinese literature has a long history. It's not a new thing. It was not coined recently. It has always existed. And furthermore, Chinese science fiction also posits China as both a source of tradition and an existential threat to the linear development of Western neoliberal progress. These works, though often cynical, view a Chinese future as both an inevitability and as a disruption of current Western hegemonic progress. Additionally, Kahn and De Seta argue that Sino-futurism is built on far more than just stereotypes and detections of this futuristic China in books and in media. To paraphrase a Sinologist named Arif Dirlik, Sino-futurism is a relationship. He argued that both the Orient and Orientalism were products of a relationship between Euro-Americans and Asians. So therefore, Sino-futurism is built on this relationship. And sometimes this relationship is a tension. It's an intersection of fearing Chinese domination while admiring Chinese hegemonic cultural power and also fearing that the West is lagging. But that kind of goes back to the points about techno-Orientalism, how this hyper-modern Asia exists to reaffirm the West's centrality. But I feel like that is now changing because a lot of younger people in the anglophone West are now realizing the so-called, I guess some can call it, the decline of Western civilization and now is looking to China in an admiration sort of perspective. So I just want to say that Sino-futurism regarding this, experts have said that this relational understanding allows to move beyond the opposition between temporal articulations from within and without and take stock of the contact zones between European and Chinese modernities where ideas about the future are exchanged and negotiated. As a relationship, Sino-futurism is articulated through the exchanges between global futurists and Chinese leaders, science fiction authors and their translators, contemporary artists and their curators and critics, as well as scholars writing about these issues. We hope that this multiplication of exchanges will contribute to more nuanced, pluralistic and equitable accounts of this relationship. So in conclusion, Sino-futurism is an invisible movement, a specter already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows, flows of population, of products and of processes. Because Sino-futurism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China, but it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists. I also noticed that Sino-futurism is rooted in a combination of the past and the future. One example is a tourist destination in Xi'an called the Datang Everbright City. So this is a city that mimics the architecture of ancient China, specifically the Tang Dynasty because Xi'an was its capital. And the aesthetics of this city thrive on the combination of the past and the future. So you have the architecture that is supposedly archaic. The workers are dressed in ancient clothing from over a thousand years ago. Yet there are drones and lights and light shows. All the hallmarks of modernity, almost as a stand in for the techno-oriental trope and orientalism, in which the Orient is a place of the past while being propelled into the future due to its connections to the past. It's kind of going back to the point about how when Lawrence Leck leaned into historical stereotypes of Chinese culture in order to prove that China is modern. And it's also going back to how a lot of scholars were arguing that science fiction, Chinese science fiction, that positions China as the future has long existed. It is an old tradition rooted in what Ashley Lau talked about, like these practices of almost machine-like learning and working habits have existed for millennia in ancient China. But it's just because it's so rooted in tradition, that's what propels China into the future. And going back to architecture, same in Chongqing, you also see buildings that are newly constructed in the last 10, 20 years, yet they try to make it look older, mimicking ancient Chinese architecture. But really, it is to promote this unity of the past and the future to promote a sense of futurity. I hope I'm getting at the point where there is this centuries, millennia old tradition of Chinese people being really hard workers and almost computer-like and machine-like. But that's what propels and is labeled now as modernity. So it's almost like drawing on China's historical traditions and its past is what allows it to be modern. Again, Sino-futurism is a relationship not just between China and the West, but also a relationship between the past and the future. And it's a constant renegotiation of this. I think that some people can argue that Sino-futurism is a successful way to combat Sinophobia. Yet a lot of the time, Sino-futurism reproduces old Sinophobic tropes of Asians are machinery. They're predisposed to be addicted to technology and they are part of the machinery and they're not fully human. But again, I'm getting at the point of Sino-futurism as a concept of a set of relationships between the Oriental Chinese and the Anglophone West. And we can create new concepts that are rooted in reality and less rooted in misconceptions of China. We could even argue that the reason why Lech was drawing on these stereotypes is to strip it away and to get at this idea of these tensions between the past and the future or how drawing on the past, at least for Chinese people, is what creates the future. Again, it's rooted in this constant defining and redefining of perceptions of Chinese culture and its relationship with the West. And this is a positive thing to see China standing at least marginally improved among the younger generations of Euro-Americans, people live in the Anglophone West, especially diasporic Chinese communities have now kind of have this pride in their culture. And hopefully we can temporarily forget the hostility between China and America, especially those two. So this is the end of my episode. This was a very heavy episode. It took me a lot of brain power to get through all the research articles that I've read and hopefully digested and made understandable for all of you who are listening. Stay tuned for the next episode and I will hear from you soon. Thank you. Bye.