Thinking the human and what follows from it seems to inevitably inspire detours into zones before, beside, below, beyond, or within it; detours that generate their own tangle of competing discourses— prehuman, parahuman, infrahuman, inhuman, transhuman, nonhuman, more-than-human, or other-than-human and so on. What remains irresistible in both detour and discourse is the pull of the human and its -ism, their inescapability as objects of (pre)fixation or modification. Sometimes a ghostly remainder, sometimes a starting point for “becoming-otherwise-human” (Braidotti 2), the human within posthumanism resides in the past and in the future, even as it occupies an uncertain position in the present (Wolfe).Footnote 1
The conceptual instability of posthumanism is partly a function of its foundations in humanism, which is far from a coherent philosophical system, and partly an effect of its novelty.Footnote 2 Although often traced to a series of conferences on cybernetics held in the decade after the end of World War II, posthumanism did not become a common term in the humanities and social sciences until the mid-1990s (Hayles; Wolfe xii). For centuries before it became a scholarly or technical concept associated with virtuality or the cybernetic reconceptualization of “humans … as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines” (Hayles 7), however, elements of what we now think of as posthumanism have been objects of inquiry and theorization in speculative genres of writing, from philosophy to science fiction. In creative domains, ideas (and fears) about the ends and limits of the human have been and often still are embodied by hybridized or monstrous figures or, more recently, by the merging of humans and machines. These forms of corporeal estrangement offer powerful tools for imagining posthuman futures, particularly those defined by the technological transformation or, in more extreme cases, the extinction of humans.Footnote 3 Despite their ubiquity, however, cyborgs and other technohuman figures are unavoidably shadowed by precybernetics attempts to draw lines between humans, machines, and nonhuman animals.Footnote 4 This essay considers the continued power of these lines of connection and separation by approaching posthumanism and science fiction in relation not just to the human but also to the biomachinic animal and what I call the dispositional beast.
Instead of distinguishing between posthumanism as philosophical category and posthumanism as science fiction thematic, I read critical, philosophical, and literary sources together as speculative expressions of a shared concern with the grounds and limits, and the origins and ends, of human existence.Footnote 5 If grounds and limits describe the conceptual landscape that enables humanist or posthumanist thought, then origins and ends function as punctual landmarks within such thinking, positions from or to which humans are imagined to progress or regress. While grounds and limits encompass origins and ends, I use the latter pairing to identify specific points of ontological divergence and convergence. Calling attention to the imagined boundaries and coordinates of human-animal relations in science fiction is a way to counterbalance the scholarly emphasis on the futurological aspects of the genre’s posthumanism; it is also a way of drawing attention to the role that nonhuman animals continue to play in it. While genetic engineering and human-animal hybridization are common themes in science fiction and speculative fiction, what interests me here are not visions of the end of the human or other animals as discrete organisms—starting points for certain posthumanist imaginaries—but rather how and when humanity’s nonhuman origins and possible endings become indistinguishable.Footnote 6
If human origins and ends ultimately prove indistinguishable, they nonetheless serve as essential oppositional coordinates in post-Darwinian thought. For Michel Foucault, the modern creation of “man” (a short-lived figure in his account) is inextricable from a newly historicized conception of life. It is historicity itself that
makes possible the necessity of an origin which must be both internal and foreign to it: like the virtual tip of a cone in which all differences, all dispersions, all discontinuities would be knitted together so as to form no more than a single point of identity, the impalpable figure of the Same, yet possessing the power, nevertheless, to burst open upon itself and become Other. (359)
This essay approaches origins and ends, “Same” and “Other,” similarity and difference, in a focused way, by gauging the more- and less-than-human grounds and limits, as well as the animal origins and ends, of humans in three mainland Chinese texts: the 1918 essay 人的文学 (“Rende wenxue”; “Human[e] Literature”), by Zhou Zuoren (周作人; 1885–1967); the 2013 novel 荒潮 (Huangchao; Waste Tide), by Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆; b. 1981); and the 2006 novel 异兽志 (Yi shou zhi; A Record of Strange Beasts), by Yan Ge (颜歌; b. 1984). Nearly one hundred years separate Zhou’s essay from Chen’s and Yan Ge’s novels. I read these works together because Zhou’s foundational humanist essay plots divergent paths—one nonhuman and evolutionary, one inhuman and dispositional—that the two later texts take up in response to the social and technological transformation of life and death in contemporary China. If the biological animals of Waste Tide suggest a nonhuman, evolutionary route for a normative, if elusive, anthropogenesis, the dispositional beasts of Strange Beasts are products of obscure forms of inhuman development that make it nearly impossible to distinguish humans from beasts.
In connecting these texts, one aim is to test the supposedly genealogical links between modern Chinese literature and contemporary Chinese science fiction (Healy; Song), a commercial and scholarly category that has attracted much attention in recent years, but which I use with reservations. Chinese science fiction might be an effective marketing tool, but it risks not only positing a cultural or ethnic Chinese variation on earlier European or American science fiction but also inviting celebratory claims of Chinese specificity that blur the line between a form of fiction that comes from China or is written in Chinese and a distinctly ethnic, national, or civilizational one. The shadow of translational belatedness is not entirely distinct from claims to a nascent Chinese form; both articulate difference to mark the boundaries of the same.Footnote 7
By focusing on animal-human figuration in Chinese science fiction, I show how and when difference appears but fails to cohere, both narratively and as an underlying critical logic. Thanks to a continued engagement with both humanist and popular evolutionary thought—a legacy of the developmental logic that has informed conceptions of modernity in China for over a century—Chinese science fiction offers an instructive example of how animal figuration not only exercises biological and supernatural counterweights to the familiar technofuturist imaginaries of some types of posthumanist thought but also troubles the logic of difference and similarity that subtends them. While recent scholarship on modern Chinese literature has demonstrated the centrality of “the animal” to the “quest for the human” (Hodges), traced the relationship between animals and children as “developmental” figures in popular evolutionary thought (Jones), and identified new “mode[s] of animal writing” in contemporary fiction (Lee 145), relatively little has been written about the role that nonhuman animals and beasts play in contemporary Chinese science fiction.Footnote 8 This neglect is also common in scholarship on Euro-American science fiction (Vint). Technofutures, cyborg fantasies, and even the AI singularity are, I argue, inextricable from the human-animal comparisons that define humanist thought in both Euro-American and Chinese contexts. There is a ghost in the machine of posthumanist science fiction, and it is animal. If it is easier to see it in Chinese language texts, that does not necessarily make it less Western or more Chinese.
In what follows, I approach the cultural and social projects that generate humanist and posthumanist animals as part of shared, if deeply unequal, historical processes. Though it is not always addressed explicitly in the texts included here, Chineseness as “ethnic supplement” is central to my analysis (Chow, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies), not as a descriptive term used to differentiate between ethnicities or nationalities but as an artifact of a preoccupation with differentiation that attempts but often fails to disavow similarity—between China and its others and between humans, animals, and beasts.Footnote 9 The co-constitution of posthumanist thought as a project of failed biological or ethnic differentiation is poorly obscured—and thus made abundantly clear—by the essentializing tendencies of mainstream science fiction culture, which has long relied on techno-orientalist figurations of simultaneously sub- and superhuman East Asian futures.Footnote 10 Blade Runner’s (1982) neo-noir vision of a seedy, rain-drenched, LA Chinatown—a site for quick ramen and a market for robot animals in a dystopian future reshaped by mass extinction—offers perhaps the best known techno-orientalist imagery. Yet even Donna Haraway’s field-defining 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” turns to Asia in search of “unnatural cyborg women making chips” and the “real-life cyborgs” that Haraway argues humans (women in particular) are already becoming (14, 59).
Posthumanism, whether popular or scholarly, has long been Asian. In Chinese cultural production, however, East Asia is not a site of uncanny similarity or maximal alterity where an actual posthumanist future first materializes. It is a site of coemergence, one in which efforts to trace the grounds and limits of the human continue to overlap with the pursuit of a seemingly universal, but stubbornly particular, humanism. There, as elsewhere, humanist and posthumanist thought are defined by animal and human entanglements that figure the logic of differentiation but that can also be read as points—“like the virtual tip of a cone”—at which “all differences, all dispersions, all discontinuities” converge. A singularity, maybe, just not the one we have been told to expect.
Beasts and Animals
Imagined from the never entirely safe distance of Europe or America, Chinese people have long served as “hypothetical” figures useful for testing the physical and intellectual limits of the European human (Hayot) or, since Charles Darwin, as hinge figures operating in the pseudoscientific space between what Sylvia Wynter describes as those “selected by Evolution” (e.g., those possessing “Caucasoid physiognomy”) and those “dysselected by Evolution” (e.g., those possessing “Negroid physiognomy”; 316). In the Euro-American popular imagination, this liminal status rendered Chinese people suspect, a Yellow Peril capable of assuming a civilized veneer—as in the figure of Fu Manchu—but ultimately less than fully human and thus potentially existentially threatening (Frayling; Mayer).
In China, as in other sites subjected to the material and epistemic violence of Euro-American imperialism and colonialism, the human has been a more aspirational category, one with the appeal of the universal but the tendency to differentiate. In the early twentieth century, popular evolutionary thought was often translated into the self-othering terms of a faulty national character desperately in need of moral and physical transformation (Liu, Translingual Practice; Jones). If China and Chinese people were developmentally belated, then they needed methods of expediting evolution, forms of eugenicist humanism capable of forging a new people (Isaacson 56–59). These methods were sometimes figured in literal terms as “creating humans” (zaoren; 造人), as in a 1905 science fiction story by Xu Nianci (徐念慈; 1875–1908) that includes a passing description of a gruesome process of brain matter transplantation (28).Footnote 11 Or in 造人术 (“Zaoren Shu”; “The Technique of Creating Humans”), by Lu Xun (鲁迅; 1881–1936), an adaptation of a Japanese translation of Louise J. Strong’s 1903 short story, “An Unscientific Story,” about a mad scientist who uses an undifferentiated “life-germ” (renya; 人芽; 411; or “human sprout” in Lu Xun’s version) to create humanoid life in his laboratory.Footnote 12 While Lu Xun’s truncated version omits Strong’s violent ending—the scientist destroys the grotesquely animalized and racialized humanoids after they begin to rebel—the danger and promise of expedited evolution were evident to at least one reader. In a brief commentary, Lu Xun’s younger brother Zhou Zuoren, writing under the pen name Pingyun (萍雲), interprets the translated story as “claim[ing] that all of the evil in the world … requires a great furnace to smelt it down … only then will it be possible to carry out a process of natural selection so as to ensure the evolution of the human social order” (Suozi and Rojas 75).
The challenge of creating humans, which Zhou describes as a distinctly unnatural selection in support of normative evolutionary development, was also figured through animal allegories. Lu Xun’s canids in 狂人日记 (“Kuangren riji”; “Diary of a Madman”; 1918) and 祝福 (“Zhufu”; “The New Year’s Sacrifice”; 1924), for example, famously convey not only the nonhuman evolutionary origins of humans but also their latent animality (Jones). In offering a new understanding of the descent of the biological human from the nonhuman animal, popular evolutionary thought also enabled the imagination of evolution come undone, an unravelling of the human that exposed the animal within. Then, as now, origins had a way of becoming endings; to acknowledge the human species’ past was to catch a glimpse of a possible posthuman, animal future. For white writers at the centers of imperial power, this devolutionary ending was often imagined in racialized terms as a future fall—another kind of “descent.”Footnote 13 For writers in semicolonial China who recognized themselves as part of a large group of people constitutively absent from, or only partially included within, the human and its ideologies, evolutionary theory offered something else: a roadmap to finally becoming human that overlapped with a new awareness of animal obstacles to that becoming.Footnote 14
For Zhou, humanism was first and foremost a question of evolutionary development and its inhuman obstacles.Footnote 15 In his 1918 essay “Human(e) Literature,” he describes the path to becoming human(e) as running through two possible realms, one metaphorical and inhuman and the other biological and nonhuman:
Just as humans were born into the world, so too was a humane way born. Unfortunately, people were ignorant of this and stubbornly refused to embody the will of the human species and to follow this proper path, instead losing themselves in the ways of beasts and ghosts, where they lingered for so many years before finally managing to emerge.
世上生了人, 便同時生了人道。無奈世人無知, 偏不肯體人類的意志, 走這正路, 卻迷入獸道鬼道里去, 旁皇了多年, 才得出來.Footnote 16 (575)
The appearance of “humans” (ren; 人) preconditions a “humane way” (rendao; 人道), which is both a path forward and a set of principles embodied (ti; 体) in the “will of the human species.”Footnote 17 This “proper” or “straight path” (zhenglu; 正路) can be discovered, and lost, multiple times, which is suggested by Zhou’s capsule history of the “true principle of the human(e)” (rende zhenli; 人的真理) in Europe since the fifteenth century (575). It is by acting counter to the “will of the human species”—lingering in inhuman realms—that people fail to progress toward the human(e).
For Zhou, “the will” (yizhi; 意志) is a moral and biological trait proper to the species (577).Footnote 18 The inhuman, in contrast, is a morally retarding force tied to China’s premodern culture—beasts (shou; 兽) and ghosts (gui; 鬼) evoke the feudal superstitions against which Zhou’s contemporaries so often railed, as well as the popular literary forms Zhou attacks later in the essay. It is also a prebiological instead of a properly “animal” (dongwu; 动物) state, a term Zhou uses when he describes humans as “a type of organism” (yizhong shengwu; 一种生物) “progressively evolved from animals” (cong dongwu jinhuade; 從動物進化的; 576), whose “outward expression of life in no way differs from that of other animals” (他的生活現象, 與別的動物並無不同; 576). Though Zhou stresses their evolutionary ties and essential “outward” similarity, he goes on to distinguish humans from “other animals” by highlighting two possible understandings of anthropogenesis: humans evolved not just from but away from animals. The latter form of evolution as purposive distancing is possible because humans, unlike animals, are able to “improve their lives” (gaizao shenghuo; 改造生活; 576). What obstructs their potential for self-improvement is not the animality encoded in humans’ evolutionary origins but a “residual bestiality” (shouxingde yuliu; 兽性的余留) that exists beyond the limits of both the human and the animal (576).
The animal, along with its pedagogical playmate, the child, are central to what Andrew Jones describes as the “developmental thinking” of modern Chinese literary discourse, in which they serve as figures for “the antinomies of (national) development” (5). It is through the animal and its figures that the child was imagined as malleable—a potentially, but not inevitably, moral representative of the human species and future citizen of the Chinese state. As Zhou’s essay demonstrates, however, “the animal” is not identical to “the beast,” even if the two were often used interchangeably. In premodern Chinese, shou refers to wild quadruped mammals or objects of the hunt (“to hunt” is a less common meaning), though it can also be used to describe fantastical creatures or monsters.Footnote 19 Shou continued to be used in the early twentieth century to refer to some types of animals, but it not only precedes the animal of Zhou’s evolutionary sequence epistemologically, it also exceeds it figurally. Dongwu (literally “moving thing”) has a similarly long history and was used in premodern texts to refer to animals, though it took on new meanings in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became the standard translational term for the biological concept of the animal (Sterckx et al. 1).
For Zhou, the scientific animal (dongwu) is defined by a traceable natural history that includes the origin and descent of the modern human and, with it, the possibility for a human(e) literature and society. The beast (shou), by contrast, is the product of an unnatural, nonlinear digression that undermines the human(e) and contributes to the continued dominance of “inhuman(e) literature” (feirende wenxue; 非人的文学; 575). From a distance of more than a century, it is hard not to hear, however anachronistically, an echo of the “nonhuman” (feirenleide; 非人类的) and a whisper of the “posthuman” (hourenleide; 后人类的) in Zhou’s “inhuman(e)” (feirende). In introducing the bestial and the ghostly in his pursuit of an aspirational “human(e) literature,” Zhou creates an opening for imagining a nonhuman and posthuman literature free of the pedagogical imperatives of his essay and moment, long before the advent of cybernetics. What might it mean to wander the nonevolutionary “paths of beasts”? How might the biomachinic animal and the dispositional beast help us rethink the differentiating powers of humanism and posthumanism, with or without Chinese as ethnic supplement?
Zhou’s description of a perilous inhumanism at the genesis of an unfinished humanist project looks back into human history, but it also offers alternative ways of approaching the speculative imaginaries of posthumanism, not simply as what comes after the human or humanism, but as what precedes it and makes it biologically and conceptually possible. The posthuman is unimaginable without the prehuman. More than robots, cyborgs, or aliens, animals and the beastly specters that so often accompany them force us to look backward and forward at the same time, a doubled perspective that keeps the “teleological” tendencies of certain varieties of posthumanism in check (Grusin ix). What follows picks up the nonhuman and inhuman pathways described by Zhou as a way of tracing divergent but related genealogies of posthuman figuration in contemporary Chinese science fiction. I aim to develop a better understanding of not just the genre’s thematics but also “how thinking [must confront those] thematics, what thought has to become in the face” of the animal and the beast (Wolfe xvi).
Ghosts in the Machine
Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide has reached a global audience thanks in part to the surge of interest in Chinese science fiction inspired by writers such as Liu Cixin, whose The Three Body Problem was published in a Hugo Award–winning translation by the Chinese American science fiction writer Ken Liu (2014).Footnote 20 In Waste Tide, also translated by Liu, animals mark the limits of generically familiar forms of posthumanism in a near-future dystopian China. In contrast to recent literary works that Haiyan Lee describes as “confront[ing] the biological and existential alterity of animal-kind” (146), Chen’s novel is less concerned with thinking about animals than it is with thinking about humans through animals. Despite, or perhaps because of, its anthropocentrism, it raises but ultimately begs difficult questions about human-animal relations: What kinds of interspecies care are imaginable when nonhuman animals remain squarely in the realm of human figuration? How should we understand the supposed posthumanist erasure of the line between humans and animals in a world of environmental ruination and mass extinction, where even those animals to whom we are culturally or genetically closest are in danger of disappearing altogether? Whither the human and the posthuman without the animal?
These questions surface at the start of Waste Tide, which opens with a storm named after an extinct animal:
Clouds roiled in the southeast like runaway horses. Typhoon Saola, still three hundred kilometers away over the sea, was approaching Hong Kong.
The typhoon’s course, fleet-footed and erratic, was just like its namesake.
A vision of that graceful animal, now existing only as pixels in image databases and stuffed museum specimens, flashed before the eyes of Sug-Yi Chiu Ho.
The name “saola” (scientific name: Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) came from a Dai word used in Vietnam. Scientists had to wait eighteen years between the discovery of some unusual skulls and the first reported sighting of a live specimen by peasants; five years later, the species was extinct.
White stripes covered the saola’s cheeks. Long, straight horns, curving slightly backward, gave it the nickname “Asian unicorn.” The species possessed the largest scent gland among all then-extant mammals—also an important cause for its demise. In the folklore of Vietnam and Laos, it was a symbol of good fortune, happiness, and longevity.
Now all that sounded like a joke.Footnote 21 (9)
This abbreviated natural history describes an animal that went extinct almost as soon as it was first discovered, described, and named by biologists. The saola is a real animal. First identified in 1992 and currently critically endangered, it is “by far the largest terrestrial animal … that has never been seen in the wild by a biologist” (“Saola”). The discovery of the saola in Vietnam and Laos overlaps with its possible extinction, an eventuality that is realized in the near-future setting of Waste Tide. Contrary to its current certain existence, Chen’s character imagines the saola virtually—digitally preserved and networked as image and physically staged as museum specimen—while also experiencing its much stranger figural afterlife as the name for a giant typhoon.Footnote 22
Chen’s account of the demise and reprise of the saola combines scientific with mythological language to frame extinction through what Tim Choy describes as “anticipatory nostalgia; an expectation that something of the present will, in the near future, be lost” (49). As mysterious living creature, or “Asian unicorn,” the saola is imagined to be an auspicious symbol. As extinct animal, it is memorialized through scientific description, images, and specimens and also by the transferability of its name, which becomes “like a joke” about the ever-shrinking bounds of animal life and a floating signifier assigned to a weather event driven by climate change. Extinction is biological punctuation and punch line; it is also a starting point for a novel full of animals, metaphorical and material, endangered, extinct, and deformed. By the time Typhoon Saola returns at the novel’s catastrophic climax, it is less an object of nostalgia than an avenging animal spirit that thwarts the technofuturist trajectory of the novel.
In addition to its many animals, Waste Tide also incorporates classic techno-orientalist and cyberpunk elements, including “body … [and] mind invasion … techniques [seen as] radically redefining the nature of humanity” (Bruce Sterling qtd. in Murphy and Schmeink xx).Footnote 23 Chen adapts these themes with what Cara Healy describes as “a high degree of social consciousness” (4) to produce a generically hybrid form combining elements of “modern Chinese realism and Western science fiction subgenres” (2), including, Shaoling Ma points out, “cyberpunk’s notorious sexism” (211). The narrative, set in the near future, revolves around Mimi, a young migrant working in the hellish e-waste recycling industry on “Silicon Isle” (Guiyu; 硅屿), a lightly fictionalized version of Guiyu (贵屿; located near Chen’s hometown Shantou [汕头] in Guangdong Province), and Chen Kaizong, a Chinese American man who has returned to his birthplace of Silicon Isle as the interpreter for an American company pitching an environmental remediation project.Footnote 24 Mimi and her coworkers, whom the locals call “trash people” (lajiren; 垃圾人), are descendants of Haraway’s “real-life” Asian cyborgs (“Cyborg Manifesto” 59), though instead of assembling chips in hypermodern factories, the workers disassemble the products they animate, work that exposes them to highly toxic chemical and biological waste. They are also victims of gratuitous violence, as when Mimi is raped and buried alive by a gang of thugs.Footnote 25
Catalyzed by this traumatic experience and an earlier encounter with an experimental device that partially siliconizes her brain and infects her with a weaponized virus, Mimi undergoes a mysterious cyborg transformation. Drawing on the language of shamanic possession and Christian resurrection, Chen describes Mimi’s consciousness seeping through the wet soil of her shallow grave, hovering in midair, and rushing through the bodies of her rapists before entering a military “exoskeleton robot” or “mecha,” a term borrowed from Japanese anime and manga. As Mimi-mecha, she quickly kills two of the three men before realizing that she must exhume her human body before it and her consciousness expire. Upon recovering, Mimi discovers that her consciousness is now divided between Mimi 0, the original trash girl, and Mimi 1, a superhuman entity that can project itself into information networks. It is through this mind-body bifurcation that Mimi comes to the human and class consciousnesses that inspire her to lead an abortive rebellion against the local clans who control Silicon Isle and dehumanize the trash people and against the government that limits the trash people’s access to the network. When Mimi’s rebellion fails, her embodied self suffers major brain damage. Reduced to a “soulless shell … like a machine that had been restored to factory defaults,” she ends the novel as “the mental equivalent of a three-year-old.” When Kaizong kisses her forehead in farewell, “animal-like [dongwubande; 动物般的] murmurs escape from [her] mouth” (351). Like a broken-down Cartesian automaton, Mimi is reduced to an animal-machine state—soulless and dumb, all machine, no ghost.
René Descartes famously compared animals to “automata or moving machines” in his account of the role of “animal spirits” in generating automatic motion in both human and animal bodies (33). What makes it possible to differentiate humans from soulless animals and machines—including a hypothetical human machine “that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as far as … practically feasible”—is the human capacity for language and the reason that underlies it (31). “There is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be” that shares this (32). For Descartes, animals are machinic because they lack both reason and the ability to generate discourse, even if some animals can reproduce human sounds. Descartes’s description of animals as automata is well known, though his reference to an almost imperceptibly human automaton capable of replicating “our actions” is less frequently cited. The resemblance between Descartes’s human automaton—which brings a technologically plausible but not yet invented human machine together with animals understood in mechanistic terms—and science fictional robots and cyborgs is striking. The limits of the human remain inviolable for Descartes—his imagined automaton is not posthumanist—yet they are measured against and tested by animals and machines (and by animals as machines) in ways that prefigure Mimi’s ontologically indeterminate end in Waste Tide.
Descartes’s efforts to draw a line separating the human from the animal with the help of the machine continue to influence capacity-based understandings of species difference and animal rights (Trestman et al.). With the advent of the Darwinian revolution, however, discourses of human-animal difference were radically challenged by narratives of origin and descent that drew lines connecting, not separating, animals and humans. As Haraway proclaims in “A Cyborg Manifesto”: “the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached… . Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace” (10). Mimi’s devolutionary fate is a reminder that the cyborg is, among other things, an evolutionary figure with animal origins, one that makes an extended process of continued development beyond the human species and into some other kind of nonhuman entity thinkable. It is along and across Haraway’s faint trace of a line—simultaneously before and after the human, but always close to the animal and never far from the machine—that Mimi is placed at the end of Waste Tide.
Mimi’s descent from the all-powerful Mimi 1 to a machine-animal child suggests a reverse form of Haeckelian “recapitulation,” just one of many outdated evolutionary concepts that appear throughout Chen’s novel.Footnote 26 Many of these concepts are voiced by Kaizong or by the leaders of local clans, who espouse a “jungle society” (conglin shehui; 丛林社会) brand of survivalism that echoes late Qing evolutionary thought: “There has only been one rule: the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest” (162).Footnote 27 Kaizong’s exposure to the “trash people,” whom he sees as “victim[s] of just this type of thinking,” slowly undermines his faith in these ideas (80). At the same time, as Mimi 1 gains strength, she begins to espouse both an evolutionary theory of the human and a messianic vision of her own instantaneous, posthuman evolution: “[I’m] a by-product of billions of years of convergent evolution … I’m inevitable … [I’m neotenous human civilization’s cry at hyperevolution. I’m the nonrandom sampling vortex forming at the center of the self-organizing flood of modern technology.] I’m only the beginning” (325; trans. modified).Footnote 28
Mimi 0’s subhuman end offers a response to Mimi 1’s first-person technovision of the beginning of posthuman “hyperevolution,” but it does not fundamentally alter the novel’s allegorical approach to evolution, in which humanity’s biological origins reappear in the present and future as figures of animality and as clichés about the struggle for survival. As for Zhou, humanity is a shaky category for Chen, a state of being that devolves all too easily into bestiality, as when a “wolfish horde” (chailangmen; 豺狼们) of “[wild] beasts” (yeshoumen; 野兽们) attacks Mimi and the trash people (306). Though Chen describes the Silicon Isle locals as animals and beasts here, he normally introduces animal-human comparisons through more explicit figures of speech. Analogies and similes proliferate in Waste Tide, creating both a glaringly repetitive style and a structure of similitude and interchangeability—almost everything is “like” (ru [如]; xiang [像]; bande [般的]) something else—as in the opening description of the saola and its virtual and symbolic manifestations. This structure allows Chen to move across species and between humans and technology while still placing humans at the unstable center of an ongoing evolutionary and devolutionary process. For Chen’s characters, animals and beasts are good to think with because they allow for insights about human culture that might otherwise elude them. For the reader, however, such category crossing proves difficult, if not impossible; the faint lines dividing animals, humans, and machines might get tangled, but they never disappear. The foreclosure of the novel’s posthuman fantasy leaves Mimi an animal-like victim of the “residual bestiality” of Chinese society, lost somewhere among the Cartesian technoanimal, the recodable machine, and the not yet fully developed human.
“They’re Just like Us”
Like Chen Qiufan, the novelist Yan Ge considers the human in terms that tie her work to the literary foundations of humanist thought in early-twentieth-century China.Footnote 29 Although less engaged with contemporary scientific and technological developments than Waste Tide, Yan Ge’s A Record of Strange Beasts (Strange Beasts hereafter) shares with Chen’s novel a science fictional “process of ‘truth investigation’” (Song 20). What distinguishes Strange Beasts from Waste Tide, however, is its use of an eclectic range of literary influences to imagine not just evolutionary lines of descent and posthuman transformation but also a specifically beastly alternative to the animal allegories that shape Chen’s posthumanist imaginaries. Chen, on the one hand, considers the human and the machine in relation to the animal (dongwu), which reemerges in humans in moments of brutality and stands in close evolutionary proximity to women and children; Yan Ge, on the other, places the human alongside “beasts” (shou), whose origins and contemporary states are recounted in a series of chapters that echo premodern literary accounts of strange places, creatures, and events. While the English translation’s title, Strange Beasts of China, marks the novel’s beasts with a supplemental “China,” the original title, Yi shou zhi (异兽志), or A Record of Strange Beasts, emphasizes these premodern literary influences.
Strange Beasts unfolds across nine chapters, each of which centers on the protagonist’s encounter with a different type of beast. The opening and closing passages of each chapter are written in a loosely antiquated register, while the body is written in vernacular, if spare, Chinese. In a 2018 Chinese reprint (but not in Jeremy Tiang’s English translation), chapters are also prefaced by epigraphs written in terse classical Chinese that explain the names of each animal, as in the opening to the first chapter on “sorrowful beasts” (beishou; 悲兽): “This beast has a loyal nature and seeks only one lifelong mate, but it does not smile, as soon as it smiles, it dies, and so it is called sorrowful.”Footnote 30 Whereas the epigraphs and opening passages explain the origins of each beast’s name, closing passages reveal additional information about their “beastly nature” (shouxing; 兽性). This information is disclosed over the course of the chapters as the narrator, a novelist moonlighting as an inept investigative journalist, struggles to understand a series of strange events in her hometown of Yong’an. Taken together, these opening and closing passages can be read as a series of loosely connected zhi (志), a premodern genre that encompasses both geographically specific historical records or accounts, as in the term for “local gazetteers” (difangzhi; 地方志), and “accounts of the strange” (zhiguai; 志怪), such as 聊斋志异 (Liaozhai zhiyi; Accounts of the Strange from the Liao Studio), by Pu Songling (蒲松龄; 1640–1715), which includes stories about shape-shifting animals.
The novel’s beasts occupy subaltern positions in Yong’an society that align them with migrant populations in contemporary China. In the opening chapter, for example, we learn that Sorrowful Beasts come from the south and live in buildings that once served as dormitories for workers at a cotton mill. With a few exceptions, descriptions of the physical appearance of the beasts are followed by nearly the same refrain about their similarity to humans: “Other than that, they’re just like regular people” (5). Beastly difference with humans is first emphasized and then minimized, even as individual chapters end by reasserting the distinctive dispositions of the beast without any human comparison. The narrator’s informational openings, particularly her focus on morphology, suggest a beastly epistemology different from the classical frame structure and the premodern sources that it evokes. In fact, her cryptozoological knowledge, from which she draws to write romance novels and serialized fiction, comes from her training with Yong’an’s foremost expert on beasts. When she speaks with her former academic mentor by phone, he mocks her for abandoning her studies to become a novelist and tries to dissuade her from pursuing her research into beasts.
In contrast to Waste Tide’s engagement with the animal foundations of humanist and posthumanist thought, Strange Beasts concretizes the “beastly literature” and the “residual bestiality” that Zhou identifies as obstacles to the realization of a human(e) literature. Where Zhou understands the human in biological terms, as “a type of organism progressively evolved from animals” (576), Yan Ge never establishes clear evolutionary lines between humans, animals, and beasts. Beasts neither precede humans nor seem to represent their devolutionary fate, though some of them are said to descend from certain types of humans. In the case of Sorrowful Beasts, “if you look far enough, you might trace their forebears to a poet from ancient times, too far back for there to be any evidence” (6).Footnote 31 These unverifiable, conditional claims to historical and cultural, instead of evolutionary, descent are offered only in a few cases, but they always place the beast after an archetypal human ancestor. It is the beast, not the human, that follows.
While descent is sometimes mentioned in passing, the novel primarily categorizes beasts in terms of physical and behavioral traits that mostly overlap with those of humans. What drives the narrative is not a popularized understanding of natural evolutionary processes and relationships, but rather questions of “nature” (xing; 性) or disposition. In replacing the evolutionary animal with the dispositional beast, Yan Ge offers an alternative approach to familiar questions of similarity and difference—and to the mapping of origins and end points—that animate both humanist and posthumanist thought. Instead of treating human similarity to animals as evidence of retrogressive forces that make posthumanist hyperevolution impossible, as Chen does in Waste Tide, Yan Ge neutralizes difference through a refrain of similarity: “Other than that, they’re just like regular people.”
The repeated conflation of the beastly and the human sets the stage for the narrator’s first major discovery: she is not a human but a Heartsick Beast (chixin shou; 痴心兽) engineered in a laboratory by her former professor. Heartsick Beasts begin life with bodies that are “perfectly smooth and flawless, male and female for the choosing, a blank where their face should be” (184). The undifferentiated creatures evoke giant stem cells or designer fetuses not unlike the “life germs” (renya; 人芽) in Lu Xun’s “Art of Creating Humanity.” The creatures’ physical development and appearance are controlled by absurd diets, such as “three grams of sardine for a straight nose, thirty grams of stewed tofu for cuteness, char siu for beautiful eyes” (Yan Ge, Strange Beasts 184). The final humanoid product, which can be designed to resemble any existing person, is intended to serve as both pet of and companion to young only children:
After three months, the beast will have grown to the size of a five-year-old human, its vocabulary and intelligence similarly accelerated to keep pace with your child and stave off loneliness. Heartsick beasts have an outsize ability to foster morality and develop intellect, and any child growing up in the company of one is sure to become a pillar of society. (185)
Part luxury items and part morality models, Heartsick Beasts are “man-made creatures” (renzao shou; 人造兽) that assist (or perhaps replace) parents in the process of “creating humans” (zaoren) and moral citizens, at least theoretically. This account of biological engineering as a means of social engineering is a dystopian realization of Zhou’s call in his commentary to “The Art of Creating Humanity” for a technological “process of natural selection” that would “ensure the evolution of the human social order” as a whole (Suozi and Rojas 75). Having achieved this form of moral anthropogenesis, Heartsick Beasts have one additional, grisly function: after five years, they are “recycled” by the government, which renders them into processed meat products that are then sent as gifts to former beast owners, “who, upon eating the beast meat, [lose] their wits” and become “unswervingly loyal” (Yan Ge, Strange Beasts 227).Footnote 32
Though it excludes any scientifically plausible details, the Heartsick Beast record represents the most obviously science fictional portion of Strange Beasts. Nonhuman speciation is the product not of natural selection but of the bioengineering of life forms as commodities with planned obsolescence. Heartsick Beasts are both futuristic and designed to foster future citizens, though they are not intended to have their own future. The act of creating them is marketed as a tool for “creating people,” but the process turns out to be a secret means of social control. In contrast to the names of other beasts in the novel, Heartsick Beast does describes not a beastly disposition but the dispositional alteration of the humans who eat recycled beast meat. There are echoes here of Lu Xun’s famous “Diary of a Madman,” in which the isolated narrator discovers that Chinese society is cannibalistic, though the narrator of Strange Beasts makes no effort to expose the truth, as Lu Xun’s madman tries to do. The narrator herself is not an eater of beast meat but a beast who has escaped being slaughtered and eaten thanks to her connection to the man who invented her and her kind.
In Strange Beasts, discovering one’s beastly nature is not about finding traces of an unfinished evolutionary process. Instead, the narrator finds she is no different from the beasts about whom she writes. Ontological and dispositional similarity—a shared beastliness—prevails over the sequential records of behavioral and morphological difference that open and close each chapter. This is suggested from the outset by the refrain that beasts are “just like regular people” and by the narrator’s mother’s reminder that “[y]ou can’t be sure that beasts aren’t people, or that people aren’t just another type of beast” (19). The real surprise is that there are no humans in Yong’an, only beasts or creatures of mixed blood: “Every one of us had beast blood, pure or half or a quarter or one part in ten thousand… . We reeked of beast stench” (303). In a twist that echoes nineteenth-century Anglo-American science fiction narratives of devolution, we learn that humans were at some point driven away by beasts, taking refuge in “a huge underground cavern [where they] built a city” (304). Described as Returning Beasts (laigui shou; 来归兽), the only humans to escape the underground are hunted down by their own kind, who torment them upon their capture. The exception is the narrator’s love interest, Zhong Liang, another former student of the eminent zoologist, who hides Zhong’s identity by giving him a small beast bone to mask his human scent. Rather than a site of interspecies encounter that allows for a pseudoscientific catalog of behavioral and morphological difference and similarity, Yong’an turns out to be an almost entirely posthuman, beastly city.
Endings
Both Chen’s and Yan Ge’s novels hinge on questions of similarity. In the former, similarity takes on a shifting or simulacral quality. The nature of things is unstable and changeable, as in the transformations of the saola or Mimi’s hyperevolution and subsequent devolution. In the end, however, it is Mimi’s similarity to animals, machines, and children that marks both her difference from the novel’s central male character and her mental deficiency. In Strange Beasts, by contrast, the pseudoscientific basis of differentiation that structures individual records is exposed as untenable by the narrator’s overarching narrative of self-discovery. How can a beast be “just like regular people” if there are no regular people in Yong’an? The human baseline that appears throughout the novel does not exist for the residents of Yong’an: “Over thousands of years, the beasts grew foolish and now do not know they are beasts, nor do they recognize humans as people” (304).
While Strange Beasts alludes to the developmentalist and humanist origins of modern Chinese literature, it also experiments with alternative modes of thinking the nonhuman, inhuman, and posthuman. In contrast to the scientific animal—a potentially devolutionary figure that exposes the biological contingency of the human—the dispositional beast is a legendary figure that displaces the human without replacing it entirely. The dispositional beast is posthuman in that it comes after humans have been pushed underground, though the beast also suggests a posthumanist—or perhaps what Zhou describes as “inhuman”—approach to questions of moral “nature” (xing; 性) decoupled from scientific understandings of nature (ziran; 自然). Yan Ge’s novel by no means fully explores “the paths of beasts and ghosts” or the power of “residual bestiality.” The dispositional beast, not unlike the animals at the heart of Waste Tide, allegorizes the human under the dual forces of global capital and state power. Yet Strange Beasts’ turn to premodern and early modern texts about beasts and strange happenings offers an alternative to the differentiating promises of the popularized scientific knowledge that Chen invokes. Difference becomes a nonsensical refrain of similarity (“they’re just like regular people”) until we discover that the ground of comparison has been inverted. People (“modern Chinese society,” even) are at the allegorical heart of Strange Beasts, but the lines linking them to, or separating them from, beasts are less predictable and more magical than those that tie humans to animals.
Waste Tide and Strange Beasts do not stand in for a monolithic science fiction—Chinese or otherwise—but they do show that animals and beasts continue to play a major, if underexamined, role in speculative imaginaries about the human and the posthuman. Objects and accidents of scientific experimentation, victims of environmental collapse, partners in hybrid futures, guides and companions through strange worlds—animals and beasts are as important to the science fictional and posthumanist imaginary as aliens or machines. As figures that embody the pre- and the posthuman, as well as the non- and inhuman, the Chinese animals and beasts that I have described in this essay demonstrate what happens when the indeterminacy of the posthuman meets the instability of the human and the mutability of Chineseness as an ethnic, cultural, and national differentiator. In tracing alternative lines—one nonhuman and animal, another inhuman and bestial—that connect modern Chinese literature to “new wave[s]” of global science fiction (Song 15), I have attempted not only to probe the prehuman grounds and limits of the posthuman but also to consider the multiple origins and ends of Chinese literary animals and beasts and the humans they continue to produce.
