EVENTS

In 2015, Liu Cixin became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, propelling The Three-Body Problem — serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006 — into a global literary phenomenon. This presentation argues that the novel cannot be adequately understood apart from the socio-political and cultural forces that shaped its author: the trauma of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which Liu Cixin experienced as a child; the Reform and Opening Up era from 1978, which created the institutional conditions for Chinese science fiction's revival; and his own career as an engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant in Shanxi. Employing a Marxist literary-theory framework and a comparative reading of the original Chinese text alongside Ken Liu's English translation — a methodological gap in existing Western scholarship — this study situates Liu Cixin within a century-long tradition of Chinese science fiction stretching from Liang Qichao's 1902 reformist fiction to the post-1991 "New Wave." Close analysis of the trilogy traces how Ye Wenjie's transmission to an alien civilization originates in Cultural Revolution violence, and how the novel's "Dark Forest" hypothesis restages Hobbesian and Waltzian realist logic at cosmic scale — before showing, through its resolution, what that logic cannot explain: a Confucian ethics of particular relationship and generational responsibility. The presentation further examines the trilogy's domestic and international reception, its function within Chinese cultural soft power, and the contested 2023 Tencent and 2024 Netflix adaptations. It concludes that The Three-Body Problem marks a qualitative transformation in Chinese science fiction's global standing — the point at which a historically suppressed and periodically revived national tradition produced a work of genuinely universal literary and philosophical power.

Speaker

Shanky Chandra is an Assistant Professor at Doon University and a Harvard-Yenching Institute Fellow. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His doctoral research, "Socio-Political and Cultural Factors in the Making of Chinese Science Fiction Writer Liu Cixin's Understanding of The Three-Body Problem 《三体》," examines the intersections of Chinese literary history, Marxist literary theory, and translation studies through a close reading of Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning trilogy against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, China's Reform and Opening Up era, and the century-long development of Chinese science fiction. His broader research interests include contemporary Chinese literature, science fiction studies, and Sino-Western comparative literary and political theory.

Chair

Hemant Adlakha is Vice-Chairperson and Honorary Fellow at the ICS, Delhi. He was professor of Chinese at the Centre for Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies, JNU, New Delhi. His areas of research include political discourse in the PRC and modern Chinese Literature and Culture. He is on the editorial board of China Report.

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