Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

As a journalist with Xinhua, Han Song has a broader perspective than most. He points out that the young people who have been grouped into one generation by the accident of their dates of birth have wildly divergent values and lifestyles, like fragments seen in a kaleidoscope. My generation includes the workers at Foxconn, who, day after day, repeat the same motions on the assembly line, indistinguishable from robots; but it also includes the sons and daughters of the wealthy and of important Communist officials, princelings who treat luxury as their birthright and have enjoyed every advantage in life. It includes entrepreneurs who are willing to leave behind millions in guaranteed salary to pursue a dream as well as hundreds of recent college graduates who compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position. It includes the “foreigners’ lackeys” who worship the American lifestyle so much that their only goal in life is to emigrate to the United States as well as the “fifty-cent party” who are xenophobic, denigrate democracy, and place all their hopes in a more powerful, rising China. It’s absurd to put all these people under the same label.