Why is Chinese classical literature as soulless as modern Chinese literature?
I just finished Water Margin and it has the same predictability as modern stuff in the same genre.
Why is Chinese classical literature as soulless as modern Chinese literature?
The Sino Blood is immutable
This isn’t an issue of blood, but of cultural norms, you blithering idiot
why would blood and spirit be unrelated? dont they affect eachother? as a cube of ice both cools the water around it and is warmed by the water. so too is blood shaped by spirit and spirit by blood.
I am Chinese by blood (can't speak Mandarin though) and I can't read anything written by an actual Chinese, even in English
Same as talking with Chinese in real life, they just repel me like magnets
The cultural barrier is that strong if you aren't raised in *that* demon's language
Why? I have always liked Chinese culture, even though China is communist.
I can't travel to China, I am an American citizen. Maybe I will get a weibo account and communicate that way. Or find a Singaporean.
You ever read Monster (the manga)? Kinderheim 551 reminds me a lot of Chinese society
*511
Self-hating ethnicities are the fricking worst. Return home young man, the west only wants to subsume you for its own selfish and self-destructive ends
My dream is to write short sci-fi stories in Chinese. Sadly I am not a native speaker of Chinese and so reaching this level is extraordinarily unlikely.
Find a translator. Make a friend.
I don't want to have it translated to Chinese, I want to write it in Chinese. Maybe I need a friend who can proofread.
Don’t be so dense. Travel their meet and practice your meager skills and eventually lead up to collaborating on this.
How’s it going to appeal to them if you know zero about them?
Fun fact: most science fiction themes are deemed 'sensitive topics' by the CCP and as such unsuitable for the Chinese market.
For instance, most stories about time travel are not allowed.
There is basically no Chinese science fiction to speak of because only the most soulless uncreative and consensual drivel is allowed.
Censorship is mysterious and unpredictable.
t. been there done that
You have outdated information that was true in the 1980s and Mao's era.
Remembrance of Earth's Past sold half billion copies in China, written by Liu Cixin, one of "3 generals of Chinese sci-fi."
>You have outdated information that was true in the 1980s and Mao's era.
I have up to date information from a close friend in the Chinese film industry.
Can't find the list (in Chinese) of the sensitive topics in question right now but that's something everybody knows about.
I'll try to post it later.
Everything was smooth sailing under Hu Jintao imho but Xi Jinping is really going out of his way to make China a backward shithole.
Do you mean things like portrayal of zombies and live skeletons ie. living dead?
Every country/culture has taboo topics that would not be shown in cinema or be published as books. For example in West you could never make movie glorifying Nazis, you would end up in jail in half of Europe and your carrier would be over. Similar thing with pedophilia.
While in Japan you could do both of those things. However if you disrespect Imperial Family you would get fricked.
Everybody knows that.
Apply that cultural relativism to China as well.
As far as I know 3 aforementioned "generals" still publish. In fact Liu Cixin is going around giving interviews shitting on democracy and Marvel.
Maybe your friend is overreacting, maybe I am wrong - but there is such a thing as Chinese sci-fi.
P.S. Another thing I remembered now, Chinese government is obsessed with making its own Hollywood and film industry empire. It goes hand in hand with promoting novels and cinema, giving them leeway.
it's not the same you moron. everything has to be approved in china by one authority. and they are pretty random about it and harsh with punishment. this is a problem because people will self-censor, play it safe, to avoid having their careers killed (e.g. banned from publishing for years). that said, 'sensitive extreme intolerance' is a big cultural problem worldwide now. its existence does not somehow absolve the issue of restricting art and culture and intellectualism, it only makes it more pertinent.
there's a reason good chinese media is typically made by chinese people outside of mainland china, and that same good media is often not approved for sale or viewing in mainland china. due to the type of media allowed under socialism (media for social purposes, not fantasy), chinese people actually have a strong tradition of highly realist media with lots of pertinent social exploration and criticism. today it is censored by the mainland but the drive holds in chinese media. the mainland would rather the most meaningless, childish kind of media and that is also what's most popular (because the masses of chinese people are very uncultured, much more so than any equivalently wealthy and developed country)
i'm not sure about sci-fi though. i think part of the problem is that it touches too much on cyberpunk and dystopia stuff. really bad idea to criticise what is aggressive policy of the state in an authoritarian country. also they've fully adopted western universalist utopianism, with china at the heart of the world taking the baton from the west ofc. but there is problems with it because it also involves democracy and liberty, and deemphasising nationalism and ethno-centrism to some extent (although ultimately nationalistic in function despite the universalism). the aesthetic and its legitimacy is all too appealing, but the other stuff is incompatible. when scifi is nationalist or just meaningless and wishwashy, then it should be fine. but the problem is scifi usually involves pointing at social and political stuff that is a no-no for mainland china except in some limited cases like criticism of the cultural revolution and whatnot.
and realist chinese stuff you think is great?
I thought they just don't allow ghosts and magic and other explicitly religious/supernatural things
>genre
Ok, you answered your own question. News flash, essentially the whole of pre-modern literature was incredibly "predictable" relative to modern stuff, it all existed to some extent within generic forms and followed a more predetermined template. If you read modern Chinese authors of serious literature (of whom there are not many relative to their population size, for obvious reasons, but there are still plenty of prominent ones), you will not encounter these "Chinese" problems.
Of course there are probably things that can be said about the possibly somewhat greater homogeneity of their cultural heritage but the issue is immensely complicated and I wouldn't presume to judge one way or the other without a deep knowledge of the subject. And you can say that modernity came from the west first and then other cultures got it from them, but I don't think this makes those China incapable of seriously engaging in "modern" thought, they assimilated Buddhism from India and they can assimilate modernity from the west.
>Water Margin
There's your problem, you are reading novels ie hackwork for plebs written in late degenerate periods, read the poetry instead
Share some of the good stuff
Read the Songs of Chu, read the Tang dynasty poets like Du Fu and Li Bai, those are canonically the greatest
Here's a poem by a less famous poet called Li He
I think the problem is, at least for me, that it doesn't work in another language, so there's no incentive to read it in English over all the English language poetry we already have. We can read the Chinese aloud via Pinyin and get some feel for how it sounds, but we also know that words were pronounced differently in Middle Chinese, so it's like reading a modern English translation of Chaucer as an ESL in order to get a feel for Chaucer's poetry. So unless you dig the English translation, you're left with a study of the (unchanging) characters, which won't appeal to or interest everyone.
IMO the imagery translates pretty well, you lose the sound true but that is anyway the less important aspect of literature
personally the only stuff i can get into are the ones that share a little glimpse into human life, e.g. picrel
are you willing to die on the hill of hongloumeng being hackwork for plebs?
>hongloumeng
beyond based
Why is Western classical literature as soulless as modern Western literature?
I just finished Iliad and it has the same predictability as modern stuff in the same genre.
It got co opted into modern capeshit. Scratch that, it was the capeshit of its era.
This was basically Plato’s criticism of Homer. “Stop reading capeshit and start using your brains to think about things that are actually real for once.”
The same reason as to why they are filling our schools with STEM students, brilliant at math, poor at lit. There I made a race comment, come at me
Chinese are the Black folk of IQfy, while blacks are the Black folk of IQfy.
Ever wondered by Francis Fukuyama was so good at being a thinker and why South Korea is now having an artistic boom? I wonder if it's Christianity...... HMMMMM
Never thought about it
That is what Sino-Christian theology advocates have been pushing for.
> Francis Fukuyama
> good at being a thinker
Abrahamic religions are the only reason any country doesn't suck
How do you explain that majority of Abrahamic religions countries suck compared to China.
Latin America, Africa, Middle East, half of Eastern Europe, the -stans.
Would you rather live in Buenos Aires or Beijing? South Americs has bad pockets but is fixing itself - obviously favellas are real real bad
If you don't like water margin you are a soulless virgin with no life in you and no sense of adventure in your life
We cannot be friends
what's the best english translation?