Science fiction author Chen Qiufan: “We are more than data”

Who China If you want to understand the world, you have to read your science fiction literature. Ever since Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg catapulted Liu Cixin's "Trisolaris" trilogy into the bestseller lists through recommendations, this has been a given. In China, according to the narrative, the future has long since begun: with huge investments in future technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and space travel, the People's Republic wants to become the world's leading tech power by 2025. Where once rosy-cheeked workers formed the backbone of the one-party state, data-sucking computer brains are now supposed to bring about the great leap forward - into a smartly networked, golden era that already seems to have dawned in megacities like Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Orwellian ideas such as a social credit system or widespread facial recognition do not seem dystopian to the government in Beijing and to large parts of the population, just as the promises of nuclear power once did to the USA. But there are also people in China who find technological progress and the dictate of eternal growth questionable and even frightening.

Science fiction author Chen Qiufan has been considered its chronicler since his eco-thriller "Silicon Island". The novel, which was also published in German in 2019, is set on a garbage-contaminated island off the Chinese coast. "The air, the water, the soil and the people, everything has been buried in garbage for too long. Sometimes we can no longer tell what is garbage and what is not," he puts into the mouth of one of his protagonists.

Chen sees his stories, which are usually set in the near future, as "anthropological field research". To research his book, the writer with the smooth, almost cyborg-like facial features settled for a while in the small southeastern Chinese town of Guiyu, where the world's largest garbage dump for electronic waste was located for decades. China was the largest importer of waste until spring 2018. Then the government announced that it was no longer dependent on recycled raw materials from abroad and was restricting imports. Despite this, tens of thousands of migrant workers still make a living by scouring the garbage dunes for recyclables.

The dream of endless consumption

In Chen's novel, the "garbage people" themselves become a resource for which the rich industrial nations and local mafia clans fight relentlessly. "For me, science fiction is a tool to wake people up from their dream of endless consumption," says the author, who was born in 1981 in the southern city of Shantou, one of the four special economic zones with which the reformer Deng Xiaoping paved the way for the country's unprecedented economic boom after the devastating Cultural Revolution.

Deng's slogan of "getting rich is glorious" not only unleashed the private sector, but also corruption, inequality and environmental pollution. "For the past four decades, we have tried to live the life of Americans, but we are 1.4 billion people," Chen sums up. "Late capitalism makes us believe that the technology solutions to all our problems. However, I think it also brings a lot of mental and spiritual challenges for our society. We Chinese are trying everything we can to jump on the bandwagon of progress, even if it exhausts us."

Before his career as a writer, the 39-year-old worked in the tech industry himself, designing marketing campaigns for Google China and its Chinese competitor Baidu. "My love of science fiction drove me into the tech world, not the other way around," explains the graduate of the renowned Peking University, who has already been dubbed China's William Gibson by critics. "In contemporary China, science fiction is considered the 'literature of ideas'. For me, however, it is above all a magnifying glass for better understanding our present."

Primitive ethical standards

Since he turned his back on the tech business in 2017 to devote himself entirely to writing, Chen has been considered a kind of oracle in his home country for the opportunities and dangers of progress. He is regularly invited to panels where he looks into the crystal ball on an equal footing with economics professors and physicists. "We need more perspectives from the humanities to come to a consensus on the criteria we apply to the development of new technologies," he says. The ethical standards of many tech companies today are "downright primitive." "The world as a whole is highly interwoven and unpredictable, as quantum physics describes. We are more than data and personality profiles."

In September, Chen's book "AI 2041", which he wrote together with the Taiwanese-born American AI guru Kai-Fu Lee, will be published. In it, "science" and "fiction" are literally interwoven. The computer scientist and billionaire start-up investor Lee, who landed an international bestseller with his book "AI Superpowers" three years ago, analyzes the state of the art, while Chen expands the potential possibilities of AI into ten visions of the future, which revolve around, among other things, "genetic palmistry" and a completely contactless society.

Dependent on algorithms

"I feel like we're already making many of our decisions and behaviors dependent on algorithms," he says. "In many ways, we're becoming just like our devices - efficient, optimizable, and caught in an endless cycle of productivity. Nobody knows where this will lead."

The fact that a tech luminary such as Kai-Fu Lee, admired in Silicon Valley, is teaming up with a Chinese science fiction author shows what influence the future genre now has abroad. Netflix is currently working with "Game of Thrones" screenwriters David Benioff and DB Weiss on a multi-million dollar series adaptation of Liu Cixin's Trisolaris trilogy, for which the two even turned down an offer to work on the new "Star Wars" film. Chen is also in talks with directors at home and abroad. "I want my stories to be in good hands."

Beijing is taking advantage of the popularity of domestic science fiction to push the state's agenda of technological progress. Last summer, China's film authorities issued a set of rules for the production of science fiction films, calling on directors to "emphasize Chinese values," "promote Chinese innovation," and "implement Xi Jinping Thought."

On thin ice

"The government has realized that it can use science fiction as a soft power tool. But it takes time and a suitable atmosphere to really promote the industry," says Chen cautiously. He knows that he is walking on thin ice with his novels. When he speaks to government officials, he always emphasizes the importance of science fiction as a tool for strengthening creative thinking and innovation.

The social criticism and class struggle on the "Silicon Island" can also be read as a criticism of global consumerism, he says. And the dangers of AI in "AI 2041" affect all people equally, which is why he deliberately set the stories in ten different countries around the world. "As science fiction writers, we imagine the end of the world - with the goal of avoiding it in time."

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