Unfulfilled Future Perfect? Comics as a Site of Liberty in Post-Mao China

ABSTRACT

This study examines the changing ideological landscape of post-Mao China through the prism of the science fiction work, The Three Courts, published in the late 1970s. This work and its comic adaptations are not landmark works of literary history and popular culture but rather a utopian fable addressing the profound issues of the reform. We demonstrate how the comic version received a temporary ideological license to support the popular liberty movement, which reflects the cooperation of officials and civil society in the face of the socialist faith crisis and how such collaboration broke down in 1979. By analyzing the two revisions made to this work, we argue that the comic can be seen as a site of liberty that contains radical political content, but its visual output has not been censored. Thus, before the new myth of post-socialism took shape, this text reveals the unfulfilled expectations of democratized reforms by pro-democratic knowledge elites and cultural bureaucrats standing among the ruins of Mao-era China.

KEYWORDS:

• The three courts
• Chinese science fiction
• lianhuanhua
• utopian narrative
• democratization
• post-Mao China

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the two reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).