GARDEN CITY MOVEMENTS AND A MEGALOPOLIS TEMPLATE
All the branded and customized tram SF stations somehow seemed just an extra supplement to the “park city” idea itself. Here was a city-wide designed showcase that upholds a difficult and powerful commitment in our climate and COVID crisis-shaken world: to be China’s model eco-city showcase. That doesn't mean that Feng Zhang’s article Why Climate Change Is Missing From China’s Sci-Fi Boom is not still relevant. To be a city that can offer a possible correction to abuses and excesses and a possible way to divert the accelerationist lifestyles of the megacities back East and South into something else. Chengdu is purposefully expanding upon previous utopian eco-socialist garden city movements as well as sporting a certain wish to adopt certain human-nature Taoist symbiotic ideals.
PARTICULARISM NOT ISOLATIONISM
This may be possible because Chengdu is situated in a place apart - the Red Basin of Sichuan province permitting such scaling up of alternate modeling. If this can be reproduced elsewhere or if it is just a local phenomenon remains to be seen. But it had to happen here first, at a place with a pre-existing alternate or parallel archaeological civilizational nucleus, one that communicated with the ancient Chinese Great Plain but was nevertheless distinct. Maybe that's one of the best displays of the ‘multicore’ Chinese civilisational processor.
The possibility of Chengdu as this ‘alternate’ experimental ground was taken up by SF artworks and fusions I have seen at this unique Worldcon. The iconic and spectacular bronze masks examples of ancient metallurgy, protruding eyes, and possible shaman kings with bird names found its way out of the archaeological sites of Sanxindui and Jinsha and came to take on futuristic and technological meanings.
The Jinsha Golden Sun Bird disk surrounded by fantastic birds became a portal. This particularism does not equal isolationism. I already knew from economist and historian Isabelle Weber’s book How China Escaped Shock Therapy – that Chengdu was at the forefront of enterprise reform, starting with a handkerchief factory in 1979 that after fulfilling state plans, created new types of designs that served to “lower costs and increase the market demand for their products”.
CHINESE ELECTROCENIC SPARKS
There is also much to be said about the “Electrocenic” dimension of Chengdu (and maybe other Chinese cities which I have not been able to visit yet).
I am not referring just to China’s record-breaking electric car industry or its enviable battery production pre-eminence, but to a more aesthetic and ecstatic electrifying vision. I am referring to the use of illuminated lines, LEDs, and trajectories to illustrate real electric flows. Starting with the public boardwalk and street signs – I noticed an abundance of new ways to visualize and feel the upsurge in electrical fervor China is experiencing as a whole country.
Maybe you will bear with me for adding a new Chinese meaning “with Chinese characteristics” to Lenin’s definition of Communism as “Soviet Power + Electrification”.
TRUE FANS AND DIGITAL LIFE FORMS
Another early encounter at the Worldcon was with two SF female fans (one sporting the Institute for Digital Life. CAS lab coat). I do not remember how we entered into the discussion but we rapidly came to an agreement about smashing the SF patriarchy and allowing for more biophiliac SF, a more life sciences-informed biopunk. After that, I was pleased to see Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl among the must-read display classics in the SF Museum show.
Instead of a supposed party, I ended up with a bunch of young Chinese fans talking not about the Hugo nominees but about James Joyce(!), formalism, Red Moon and the viability of long-term space settlements, Whitehead and a long argument for processualism and event-based cosmologies.
I will also remember a good talk about the ‘cutthroat’ Chinese business world’s heightened interest in the Dark Forest theory Fermi Paradox answer - with an SF fan from Guangzhou traveling all the way to admire the waterworks at the opening.