Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China by Xiao Liu (review)

After Deng Xiaoping became leader in 1978, China created zones with a market economy, reconnecting with the world, and pursuing a Chinese-style modernization. Xiao Liu's Information Fantasies analyzes China's media during this period, before the arrival of the internet. When market forces began to impinge upon media production, some Chinese intellectuals were uncertain about the fragmented "information society" that modernization might create, while others believed in the "ultrastability" of Chinese society, which might preclude any modernization. By applying perspectives from media, film, literature, science and technology studies to post-socialist China, the author reveals the different response to new media in China compared to the West. Rather than describe a linear technological transition from analogue to digital, the author emphasizes the impact of the new sociocultural and political environment after China's reform and opening-up. The book discusses techno-cultural imaginations as represented in science fiction stories, films, and experimental literary writing.

Liu employs five key concepts, each featuring in a separate chapter. The first focuses on imaginations of the "digital," triggered by the expansion of wireless tv broadcasting, as represented in science fiction. At their core were the "magic waves" that transmit real-time information between machines and the human body, which was both exciting and intimidating. Liu then discusses the imagination of artificial intelligence in popular media (chapter 2). Here the key concept is the "interface," or human-machine interaction. According to the author, a science fiction story about a robot doctor who kills a patient reveals people's appreciation of depoliticized knowledge and professional labor, as well as anxieties about the unfeeling robot, who will make mistakes due to the lack of communication. Next, Liu discusses film in terms of the concept of "system," showing how a film such as Yellow Earth, with its long, immobile shots of landscapes, expresses intellectuals' apprehension that the Chinese social system was not able to change. In the chapter on experimental writing and the concept of "noise," Liu points out how this writing style broke away from the socialist realism of Maoist times, using nonsensical language and exaggeration (chapter 4). It was inspired by commercial advertising, a new phenomenon in China. The final chapter shows how cinema too was forced by television and videocassettes to move away from socialist realism and instruction towards stories emphasizing sensual pleasure. However, there were still some voices of resistance at that time, which is why the key word for this chapter is "the liminality of cinema," suggesting an in-between state, marked by uncertainty.

When reading the book, I recalled my childhood in a city in southeast China in the 1980s, and those joyful summer evenings when people used to gather outdoors to watch the only TV in our neighborhood. Because of the differences in age, social status, experience, and background, individual responses to the broadcasts varied. Therefore, the author's interpretation of the media discussed in this book perhaps represents only one perspective among several. In view of the massive production of texts and films in this period, it is also unclear to what extent the sources chosen for analysis are representative. Throughout the book, Liu uses abstract concepts to construct and interpret the relationship between technology and literary works and films, which readers may find puzzling and hard to understand. Nevertheless, the site-specific and historically situated cases, along with brilliant interpretations, will interest researchers in media, literature, and modern China studies as well as historians of technology.