I will give you a sample of untranslated Liu Cixin — lonely at Niangziguan Power Station, writing about the perfect woman, cybernetic governance, and saving the Yellow River
▬ I will admit that I have read Liu Cixin only because I received questions about his work. I read only enough to answer those questions. I am not qualified to evaluate any particular novel or his overall output as a writer. I can only say that Liu Cixin’s writing never particularly interested me. ▭ But I have put some effort into reading and translating some of Liu Cixin’s China 2185, a novel completed in February of 1989, while he was working as an engineer at Niangziguan Power Station in Hebei. I am attracted to the unpublishable and unmarketable. I don’t know the reasons that China 2185 was never officially released. At the time, it might have come down to political events in 1989, as well as his own disconnection from the publishing world, but this novel has not received the treatment of other early writing. Other stories completed in the 1980s or early 1990s, before his regular appearance in Science Fiction World in 1999, have since been reworked and republished. However, I know very little about the career of Liu Cixin and even less about China 2185, so I won’t speculate further. I cannot be sure any of the details I have related are completely factual. ▭ The novel also appeals for its vision of a cybernetic future, with China under complete surveillance, wired into a national network, as well as what could be read as faith in the utopian promise of digital systems of control. ▭ I will work on this translation as long as I am interested, or until someone tells me to stop. I have been creative with my translation, which I hope is appropriate and expected, but I have not trimmed any of the fat. Below is the prologue and most of the first chapter, which covers the scanning of Mao Zedong’s brain and the arrival of a new Chief Executive of the Republic, who works to create a nationwide digital network. ▭ I am working from a PDF file that follows a version uploaded to a website called TXT小说天堂. ▬
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LIU CIXIN china 2185 <PROLOGUE>
Late one night, a man walked through Tiananmen Square, headed for the Memorial Hall. His title, assigned by a computer writing the annals of the age, was M102. At that time, Tiananmen had already been converted into a grassy expanse, so his footsteps, despite being made heavier by the duffel bag he carried with him, made no sound as he crossed it. In the moonlight, he could pick out the massive silhouette of the Hall. The architects of his age had praised its fatherly dignity, looking out on the Square. They had come to admire this building, which had been built two hundred fifty years before. The honor guard once accorded the place had disappeared decades ago, replaced by a single guard that occupied a hut as old as the Hall itself. That night, it was the man designated M103. He had just fallen off to sleep when M102 woke him with a rapping of his knuckles on the door. He asked to enter the Hall. When M103 refused him. M102 produced from his bag a white bottle that gleamed under the moonlight in a way that caught M103's eye immediately.
"This is Moutai, old man," M102 said in a teasing tone. "It went into this bottle in the 2080s, cost me a month's wages..."
"You should've led with that, silly boy!" M103 said. He took it from M102 and unscrewed the cap. He took a sip and nodded with pleasure. "Head on in!"
M102 stepped around the hut and continued his journey toward the Memorial, but he turned back after a couple steps and called back to the guard, "Aren't you interested in what I'm up to?"
"Remember this, my boy," M103 said, "there are many things in this world worth sacrificing your life for, but I can't think of one worth losing sleep over." He turned and went back into his hut.
M102 kept going, all the way up to the doors of Hall, which he pushed open with great effort. Nobody bothered to lock the place. It was dark inside, which made the Hall seem even more impressive than it might have during daytime. There was absolute silence. He regretted not asking the guard to come with him. He moved forward in a daze. A white statue along the way seemed to him to rise from the darkness. He kept going. Finally, he came to the spot where the body of the greatest man of two centuries prior rested in its crystal coffin. The crimson rug on which the coffin sat was lit from above by a soft red light.
M102 tried to ignore his thundering heartbeat as he rifled through his bag. He pulled out two devices that looked a bit like video cameras, as well as a folding screen. As the screen was unfurled, it began to emit a faint blue glow. M102 began arranging and adjusting his equipment. When he looked up again, two hours had already gone by.
It was M103's arrival that pulled him away from the devices.
"You scared me," M102 said. "Why didn't you tell me you were looking over my shoulder? I guess you found something worth losing sleep over, huh?"
"I come through here every night around this time," M103 said. "He could always use some company."
The guard looked at the two devices that had been arranged around the coffin. They pointed at the deceased man's head. Two red lines scanned back and forth, relaying information that showed on the screen as a blue silhouette of the skull.
"Don't worry," M102 said. "This won't hurt him."
"I'm not worried," M103 said. "The glass in that coffin's got sensors all through it. If you tripped them, the alarm would've gone off."
"You mean," M102 said, "that they don't even need a guard here?"
"Everyone needs something to do in their old age," M103 said. "Keeping an eye on the dead is a good job for the elderly."
"Don't say that," M102 began to protest. "Don't go talking about—"
"Relax, kid," M102 said soothingly. "There's no need for that to be a taboo, talking about cemeteries and the dead... You spend enough time around the dead, you start being open to the idea that's how you're going to end up, too."
"If you're so open to it, how long do you think you've got left?"
"Thirty-two years," M103 said, then paused, "and four months."
"How'd you figure that?"
"The day I retired, I bought fifty crates of sorghum wine. That's six hundred bottles. This was the last batch they made of the good stuff, the overproof... As of yesterday, I had five hundred eighty-four bottles left. What I do is, drink a cup of the stuff every two days. I get about ten cups out of a bottle. So, that adds up to eleven thousand seven hundred sixty days. I can get ten days out of that bottle of Moutai you just gave me, so I added it into the time I just gave you that I've got left."
"Your mind is still sharp," M102 observed. "I think you've got more time left than you think."
"Thanks, kid," M103 said. "I'll do my best to keep going. But I like to try to calculate the time, anyway. It makes the future feel a bit more solid. I like knowing I'm headed toward something certain. The way kids like you float through the world, you could never know how I feel. The present and the future are always changing for you. They're like clouds up in the sky. You always see something to make you hopeful. You always see something to make you fearful. You've got too much self-confidence. As far as you people are concerned, you're the center of the world. People your age get worked up about the national budget. You get thrown into a tailspin by a dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo. Every yard of sediment that builds up in the Yangtze causes convulsions in you. But you find out they signed the Lunar Treaty and you shed tears of joy. You're worried about nuclear weapons. You've got opinions on the breakup of South Africa. It goes on and on... You're worried about too many things. You wear yourselves out with all that worrying." M103 paused and gestured toward the body in the glass coffin: "In his time, they didn't worry so much. They weren't worried about what was going on in the world. They had people like this, great men, who were in charge of things. Men like this were like gods to them. They had absolute faith in them. The country and the entire world were in their hands. All that regular people had to worry about were what was under their own noses."
"History is made by the people," M102 said. "The people of his time were still making history, even if they were doing it passively. As for great men, they're what history produces. So, the people come before the great men."
"People your age don't give a damn about anything," M103 sniffed.
"Enough philosophizing, old man. I don't need history lessons. Let me tell you what I'm up to here."
"I don't care."
"This device emits two lasers that focus on the brain. The second device picks up the interference fringes."
"You're talking about holography," M103 said.
"You know your stuff," M102 said. "It's a type of holography, but it's much more precise. It can measure things on a completely different level, though. It's capable of measuring the molecular structure of an object. This is called three-dimensional recording. In my laboratory, we can then mimic the object with software. So, if I scanned a bottle of milk, I could load it into the software and mimic the molecular interactions perfectly. The milk in the machine would go sour in three days, just like the real thing."
"I'm not interested."
"Maybe you're not interested in milk," M102 said, "but what about the human brain? Imagine we uploaded a scan of a brain into our software. You must find that interesting."
"What's going to happen?" M103 asked.
"No idea," M102 said. "That's what I'm going to find out."
"Why don't you upload your own mind?"
"That would be great," M102 said, "but living things are hard to model, since they're unstable at a molecular level. We just got past the point where we had to put anything we scanned into liquid helium to thermal vibration. Now, we can do it at room temperature, but not with living things."
"Why not pull a body out of a morgue freezer?"
"I did that already, three times. I got two other scans from bodies waiting for the oven at the crematorium. I've got six brains loaded into the system. This will be the sixth."
"How much longer are you going to be here?" M103 asked.
"Watch the screen," M102 said. "The part in red is what I've already scanned. If it keeps going the same way, it'll take about three hours. If there's any disruption however, I'll have to start from scratch. The slightest vibration of the device or the glass of the coffin would ruin everything. Just yesterday, one of my colleagues was two hours into scanning a trilobite from the Cretaceous when an underground nuclear test in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic threw everything off. He had to start all over. I hope they don't have another test scheduled for today! If we eliminated those things a long time ago, we'd have world peace—and I wouldn't have to worry about this scan getting thrown off."
It was half past twelve. The light of a new moon fell softly on Tiananmen Square. Fireflies flickered. An advertising blimp high overhead switched off its lights and floated like a black olive across the sky. At the edges of the Square, ancient buildings slumbered. Further, clusters of skyscrapers were visible. They had been built long after the Hall and the Square, but their age was hard to tell. They had been built in steel and glass to mimic the towers of a much earlier age. Their mirrored facades gleamed faintly. The ancient city took on a dreamlike aspect.
It was June the 10th, 2185.
The Earth was still merely another body in the Heavens.
Beijing was still merely a city upon it.
<CHAPTER 1: chief executive>
The cream colored Dongfang sedan flew down Chang'an Avenue.
Despite the fact that the ground underneath Beijing was riddled with subway tunnels, and a comprehensive network of maglev tubes had already been thickly knitted above the city, surface traffic was still saturated. It had gotten to the point that taking in Beijing's traffic jams was listed by guidebooks as a required activity when visiting the city. Every day, loaded with tourists that came from the other side of the planet, dozens of helicopters with glass observation bubbles took off over the city. The descendants of the men that had unleashed the automobile on the world were given a chance to view the chaos below. City officials and local residents routinely petitioned the China International Travel Service to halt promotion of traffic jams as a tourist attraction, but their appeals fell on deaf ears.
The Dongfang sedan met with no resistance, however. The lights at each intersection it approached turned green immediately. Several traffic enforcement officers had already been disciplined for manually overriding the computer system to ensure that the sedan always had the right-of-way, but this had not dissuaded others. The opportunity to grant the cream colored sedan quick passage through the city was taken as a blessing.
Everyone knew the car.
The driver was a beautiful woman that was known around the world.
She was born in 2166, making her twenty-nine that year.
She was a gentle and wise young woman, but many noted a childlike gleam in her eyes.
And what eyes they were! They drew people in. They were big and dark, with an Eastern cant. They seemed capable of speech, or even of music. Those that stared into her eyes often imagined that they had heard in those moments the soft tinkle of piano. The music was gentle, but there was no romance in it. It was an aimless melody. The piano came from those dark eyes, just as photons fly from stars.
She was a woman among women: it was as if the gentle beauty of thousands of years' of women, left behind like sediment on this ancient land, had been concentrated in a quartz filter and crystallized into feminine perfection. She was a woman among women: if you came up with a device to measure the amplitude of a woman's feminine temperament, it would surely catch fire because the reading would be so high. The year before, the President of the United States witnessed her stroking the steel columns of the recently completed Bering Strait Bridge that linked Asia and North America, and remarked, "My God! That steel might turn to putty in her hands!" A commentator from a European television network, taking in the scene of the woman caressing the steel of the bridge, which rose five hundred meters over the waves below, and stretched over a hundred kilometers, summed up it up this way: "The jutting columns of the Bering Strait Bridge seem invincible against the winds blasting down from the Arctic, and its rock hard piers seem unperturbed by the icebergs rolling against them, but the moment that she walked onto its span and reached out a hand to lightly finger its steely firmness, the Bridge became a feminine thing. From that point on, people admired it for its soft beauty more than its magnificent strength."
The Eastern femininity with which she was suffused seemed never to be restricted simply to herself; her femininity was like a magnetic field around her, drawing everyone and everything nearer, making what was previously rigid immediately flaccid, and turning the coarse smooth. At that moment, lightly gripping the steering wheel of the Dongfang, it seemed as if the high tensile plastics in her hand, as well as the chromoly steering column it was connected to, had turned as pliable in her hands as a bundle of boiled noodles, which she could deform with the slightest exertion.
It was precisely those hands, however, wrapped in snow-white gloves, that controlled one of the three major superpowers in the world. She was in complete control of an ancient East Asian nation that spanned nine and a half million square kilometers and encompassed two billion people.
The Dongfang sedan glided past Tiananmen, headed for the Press Building on West Chang'an Avenue. In a moment, the Chief Executive spotted the impressive building, which dated to the 2130s. It was constructed to look like an immense letter-A, with its two halves leaning to meet over a middle portion. Its glass facade gleamed with the soft orange light of the setting sun.
Five years prior, the Chief Executive had stood in the building to meet her public, which numbered two billion. Her predecessor shook her hand and then took his leave. She noted a mysterious smile on his lips as he turned.
The design of the main hall was quite modern. Its main feature was that it was not a hall in the conventional sense, but a space without clear boundaries. Except for the architects, nobody knew precisely where the walls were. The floor was transparent, and the spaces above and below were symmetrical. People within the hall could feel as if they were suspended in space, with no firm point of reference anywhere around them. The area above and below could be turned black or blue, or they could display a pattern of stars or a map of the country. The architects had designed it so that everyone within might have a sense of a limitless space, with no boundaries.
There was a convention that each new Chief Executive should have a minute and thirty seconds in the hall to broadcast a message out to the two billion citizens of the country. Many of the past Chief Executives had racked their brains trying to come up with the right things with which to fill those ninety seconds. A few of the speeches had gone down in history for one reason or another, but most were not particularly memorable, with the incoming Chief Executive simply celebrating themselves and trumpeting their coming accomplishments. She was an exception.
It appeared at first that she was unprepared for the minute and thirty seconds. She seemed on the verge of speaking, but there was silence.
She stood against the deep blue backdrop with one hand on the transparent podium.
She looked out on her two billion subjects with her large eyes, and they looked back at her. The people and their new leader took each other in, speaking a silent language of the heart.
All of the major cities in the country had prepared mammoth video screens on which to broadcast the speech. Her eyes gazed down on this ancient land from thousands of meters off the ground. There was in that gaze deep thought; there was confidence in those dark eyes; and, everyone had to admit, there was also a hint of melancholy in the way that she looked at her subjects.
After that minute and thirty seconds, her eight-year term as Chief Executive officially began. During that period, the people had the right to recall and replace her at any time.
"You did not say anything," a soft voice behind her spoke.
The mood was broken. "I'm sorry," she said. "It was childish. I'm really sorry." Her voice was even softer than the one that had chided her. It was no stronger than a light breeze.
The reporters began to file in. They congealed around the new Chief Executive.
"In our present society," one began, "which group of people do you admire most?"
"What is your greatest wish for your term?" another said.
"It is the children that I care about most deeply," she said. "I have recently married, and my greatest hope for my term is that I might have a beautiful child."
"Do you want a girl or a boy?" a reporter asked.
"Wait a minute!" a voice cried. It was the shaggy reporter that had asked the first question. "I can't take an answer like that to my audience. It’s frivolous!" She scowled in the direction of the young woman that had asked the desired gender of the unborn child. "A tabloid like hers can print it, but I want a serious answer."
The young woman that had been scolded frowned at the shaggy journalist. She had to hold herself back from tossing her microrecorder at the side of his head.
Before the shaggy reporter had set out, his editor had told him to make sure that the new Chief Executive knew that they meant business. "That's all I care about accomplishing today," he said.
The Chief Executive was silent for a moment. She let out a sigh that most of the journalists did not notice.
"My friend," the Chief Executive said to the shaggy reporter, "why do you think my answer is frivolous? I spoke from my heart. I know that you wanted me to say that I admire all people of this nation. I know that you wanted me to proclaim that I will turn this ancient land into a blazing sun rising in the East. I know what you want, but what I want is to speak from my heart to two billion people. I want them to know what is in my heart. I will not lie to them. So, I will repeat myself: I care most deeply about the children, and I hope to have one for myself."
Her voice was carried to every corner of the planet by countless satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
A journalist spoke up: "Is your answer intended to speak to some difficulty that the country will face?"
"As you are aware," she replied, "this is only my first meeting with the people and the press as Chief Executive. It will likely be the first of many during my term. I will have many opportunities to talk about national affairs. Let's just enjoy this moment together, all right?"
A journalist cut her off: "Can you state your views on traditional culture?"
"There will be plenty of time for that in the future," the Chief Executive said. "Thank you."
"Chief Executive," called a reporter in English, "I'm from ASP. Can you tell me your greatest accomplishment, other than winning this election?"
"I have," the Chief Executive began, replying in the same language, "subverted a belief that goes back to Aristotle, which is that only beauty be expressed by women, but never charisma and power."
There was laughter in the hall.
"Are you going to avoid all of our questions today?" the English-speaking reporter called back.
The Chief Executive smiled. "I apologize," she said. "I have only just taken the job."
A journalist in the back raised his voice: "Does your answer to the question before last mean that you believe you were elected based on charisma alone?"
"Voters select people they like," she replied. "I have won the support of the older generation, as well as the young people. That pleases me."
The same reporter called back to her: "Do you lack confidence in your mandate?"
"A leader's confidence comes from the people," the Chief Executive said. "I have won the support of a nation of two billion people. I would like to shake all of their hands. Although they are not here, in front of me, I keep them in mind. I think back to two paintings in my collection, both from sometime in the 1980s... In one of them, there is a farmer, out on the yellow earth. His face is deeply tanned, so that he looks like a black man. His labors out on the loess soil have carved deep wrinkles into his cheeks. And his eyes—what eyes he has! They are kind, but there is a deep desire in them for something more. Those eyes shake my soul. The other painting is of a thin old woman. I have studied the image carefully and cannot see even a thread of black in her white hair. Her eyes are invisible, because she is bent over her work, sewing a shoe sole. Her hands are gnarled like driftwood. They are holding the sole with immense effort. Her body is crooked. She will never be able to straighten her spine. It seems, looking at the picture, that she must have spent her entire life on the same labor. She is sewing soles for soldiers. She is fighting in her own way for the birth of the Republic that I now represent."
"Do you consider it appropriate to represent the people of this nation with images from when they were at their weakest?"
"Maybe it is inappropriate," the Chief Executive said. "In my heart, however, the lives of the people in these paintings cannot be separated from the lives of people in the present. Our prosperity and strength is incomparable with that time, but we still carry the burden of those years. We still face dilemmas as we progress toward the future. People say that I am too childish! I admit that I can be. Why do the older generation look down on me for that? I am young, after all, if we take into consideration the average age of citizens of this nation. I always kept these two paintings in my heart. I took these two souls as my father and my mother. I say now to the two billion people of this nation: I am your daughter."
As she drove past Tiananmen on that day, she was in the fifth year of her term.
Those five years had been glorious for the Republic. They had been glorious for her. Even before her election, she had correctly predicted the energy crisis of 2183, and once in power, she moved the government to address key issues. Although she had come under pressure in the first year of her term for restricting the expansion of power-intensive heavy industry, she successfully pushed legislators to accept her 2181 budget bill that promoted solar, nuclear, and hydrogen power. Alternative energy in automobile and aviation industries was promoted, as well, which showed great foresight. The Northwest was converted from heavy industry into the world's major software production center. Her nation was not seriously affected by a global panic over fossil fuels, and benefited instead from her predictions, which allowed the Republic to double its share of the industrial market. The Republic was able to swiftly pay off an immense foreign debt accrued at the beginning of the century. The economy was strong. Her nation built a nationwide digital network, which was the largest on the planet; it was made up of five hundred thousand supercomputers, eighty million mid-sized servers, a hundred million small servers, six hundred million microservers, and one point three billion personal terminals. This astonishingly massive and complex system was akin in its function to an immense brain. It represented the birth of the planet's first informatized society. She carried out greening projects on the loess plateau that led to the first decline in sediment in the Yellow River. The rebirth of this mighty river, whose sedimentation was taken as a metaphor for the ancient nation, was a powerful symbol. The population problem, a hangover from days past, continued to be a problem, but her government managed the first downturn since the baby boom at the end of the previous century.
Over those five years, the world, also, had come to understand her. 2181 had been a troubling year for the planet. It had seen a crisis over sovereignty over the Moon and other planets of the solar system. This had been brewing since the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 2003. That was followed by a joint Soviet-American landing on Venus in 2065. The landing of the Soviet Union on Mercury in 2082, followed quickly by the arrival of the United States, created issues too pressing to ignore. Three days after 2183 was rung in, China, the United States, and the Soviet Union became embroiled in an armed conflict on the Moon. A mere ninety-eight astronauts lost their lives in the fight, but the seriousness of the war led to some commentators terming it, despite the fact that it occurred so far from the surface of the Earth, a Third World War; the meeting of the three powers soon after was even referred to as a Second Yalta. There were differences between the two conferences: the Second Yalta was held in Geneva, in fact, and the Chief Executive of China replaced Winston Churchill as the head of the third power to meet the Soviet Union and the United States. China was not a major space power, however, and its base in Copernicus, one of the larger impact craters on the Moon, was mostly destroyed in the conflict. This had presented serious problems for the new Chief Executive. Although she failed to gain any diplomatic advantage from the Second Yalta meeting, she left an impression on the world. During the second session, journalists noted the American President was visibly drained as he came out of a conference with her.
"What are we dealing with here?" the head of the Soviet Union asked the American President. "Have we met an adversary equal to Churchill?"
"You need to think of it another way," the President said. "She is like a faraway star. Seen from that distance, the soft light is peaceful. Get a bit closer, however, and you will be scorched by nuclear fusion sending out power many times stronger than our own Sun."