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Zhang, Ruiying

University of British Columbia

Early Mao-era science fiction depicts advanced machines such as automated assembly lines, robotic animals, and telecommunication devices, which are highly relevant to the national technology plans and cross-cultural technological discourse during the Cold War period. This study explores human–machine relationships in 1950s and 1960s Chinese science fiction stories and films and argues that these texts often betray a tension between “laboring machines,” machines that serve human needs and socialist construction, and “laboring for machines,” a situation in which laborers are transformed or even enslaved by machines. Chapters examine three types of tension between laboring machines and laboring for machines. Chapter 2 analyzes the first cinematic work after 1949 to incorporate science-fictional elements, Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (1958), in which the once intimate interaction between humans and tools no longer exists in the imagined future. Humans serve as annotations to machines and labor to prove machinery’s abilities. Chapter 3 analyzes the duality of politics inscribed in the push buttons that appear in many science fiction stories published between the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Push buttons simplify operations and enable people with low education to operate machines, echoing socialist ideologies of mass participation in technological development. At the same time, they separate design from operation and turn workers into mere attention-payers. Chapter 4 discusses the history of cybernetics and its correlation with 1960s Chinese science fiction. The boundary between humans and machines, which Maoist ideology claimed was absolute, is blurred when both humans and machines contribute labor to a system, with machines gaining humans’ praise and recognition. The tension between laboring machines and laboring for machines, this study argues, is endemic to Mao-era science fiction. While scholars have viewed the genre as utilitarian and didactic, this study shows that it is not one-dimensional, as it embodies conflicts between mass participation and expert management, the democratization of knowledge and the specialization of knowledge, and the glorification of labor and its unnecessariness. In these fictional texts, it is human–machine dynamics that expose contradictions within Chinese socialism, and reveal that in Maoist China, depicting technology demands nuance and involves ideological risk.

Text

2024-06-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88489

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/