Biheguan Zhuren
Entry updated 25 October 2021. Tagged: Author.
["Master of the Jade Lotus Pavilion"] Pseudonym of Jin Zuoli (? -? ), a Chinese author whose first work of genre note Huangjin Shijie ["Golden World"] (1907 Xiaoshuo Lin) imagined Chinese coolies in America resisting a real-world 1894 racial exclusion law by founding a Utopian community. Inspired in part by the fiction of Liang Qichao, he subsequently wrote Xin Jiyuan ["New Era"] (1907 Xiaoshuo Lin), which imagines a Future War between China and the West in the year 1999. Positively embracing many of the tropes of Yellow Peril fiction, the story posits a global conflict centred not on politics but on race (see Race in SF), with flashpoints among ethnic Chinese in Hungary, Australia and Panama, called to fight and form fifth columns on behalf of their motherland. An Edisonade loaded with new Inventions, it ends with an ingenious Chinese solution to a European Poison gas attack, as Chinese Scientists use a catalyst that breaks seawater down into its combustible component elements, igniting the ocean underneath an invading fleet by shooting electric Rays from a dirigible overhead (see Airships). The Western United States are a Chinese colony by the year 2020. [JonC]
see also: Kang Youwei.
Jin Zuoli
born
works
- Huangjin Shijie ["Golden World"] (Shanghai, China: Xiaoshuo Lin, 1907) [pb/]
- Xin Jiyuan ["New Era"] (Shanghai, China: Xiaoshuo Lin, 1908) [pb/]
about the author
- David Der-wei Wang. Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Lorenzo Andolfatto. Hundred Days Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902-1910 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2019) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry