If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past.
In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked.
Han says he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels with other themes for comparison. The alt-history fictions have an average word count of 2.88 million characters, about the length of the entire Harry Potter series in Chinese. It was a lot of work, he tells me, but he really enjoyed the process—when he was in college, online novels were some of the earliest internet content he consumed, and writing this book took him back to his roots.
Like Han, my early internet life was shaped by a fixation on online novels. Call them fanfic, slashfic, popcorn novels, or web novels (which seems to be the English translation most widely accepted by the industry itself), these are extremely long, winding tales that are published in daily installments, giving readers a quick regular dopamine hit. The most popular authors have legions of highly engaged fans, who are willing to pay to unlock a chapter every day. Web novels have become a massive and highly profitable industry in China, and many titles have been adapted into blockbuster movies and TV series in recent years.
I’ve read at least a handful of novels in the alt-history genre that became the subject of Han’s book, but his work also looks at the political and social context around them. Han analyzed the online comments made on each novel and studied how the government has censored, co-opted, and promoted them.
While most science fiction tries to imagine the future, these novels are hyper-fixated on China’s past mistakes and humiliations. “The dominant narrative structure they come up with is essentially ‘Make China Great Again.’ Literally, they’re going back into history and glorifying China,” Han says. In the end, he came to the conclusion that these novels also function as a way for ordinary people to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party and its power by echoing the same themes as nationalist propaganda and adapting to censorship pressures.
Choose Your Adventure
Soon into his research, Han noticed an interesting gendered aspect of the novels: “There are a lot of women who travel back in history, but I mostly excluded [those stories] in this study because they don’t try to save China from all sorts of crises,” Han says. It is only fiction written by male writers for majority-male readers that tend to embark on the quest of remaking Chinese history.
Han also studied which time period the writers chose to travel to—China’s Ming dynasty emerged as a favorite, appearing in about a quarter of the titles he looked at. There’s a popular understanding in China that the Manchurian Qing dynasty, which toppled the Han-controlled Ming, was to blame for China lagging behind in the industrial revolution; so these people want to save Ming. Other dynasties, as well as modern China before and after the establishment of the current Chinese government, also received their fair share of time travelers.
In January, WIRED covered The Morning Star of Lingao, a classic example of such alt-history novels where 500 people traveled back to the Ming dynasty to attempt to bring industrial revolution to China hundreds of years earlier than actually happened in reality. It is also one of the novels from the study that Han finds particularly interesting.
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