"Making China Great Again" One Web-Novel At A Time
6/10/202621 min
China is home to over one billion internet users, and about half are consumers of internet literature. While the industry started as a group of hobby writers, it's now a multimillion dollar industry that has spawned adaptations to TV shows, films, and games. One of the most successful genres has become a phenomenon in and of itself. It's called "alt-history" fiction, which typically follows a contemporary man traveling back in time to save ancient China from a crisis. Brooke sits down with Rongbin Han, a Chinese cyberpolitics expert at the University of Georgia, about why this particular genre of web novel has grabbed so many readers' attention, what it can teach us about how Chinese people are imagining China's rise on a global stage, and how it's an illustration of a state and its people co-producing, or negotiating, a shared vision of an ideal, powerful China.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMicah Loewinger· Host0:00
[gentle music] Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Last month, President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in Beijing amid growing tensions around both Taiwan and the war in Iran. During Xi's opening remarks, however, he brought up a third, much older war.
Speaker 2· Soundbite0:19
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, reached deep into history to frame the future of US-China ties as he met his US counterpart, Donald Trump, yesterday.
Speaker 3· Soundbite0:28
President Xi warned against what's known as the Thucydides Trap, the idea that conflict can erupt when the rising power challenges an established one.
Speaker 4· Soundbite0:38
The name refers to the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, who suggested the war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable because a rising Athens seriously threatened to displace the ruling power of Sparta.
Micah Loewinger· Host0:52
So in this case, Athens is China and Sparta is the United States. The term Thucydides Trap was coined in 2012 by Harvard Professor Graham Allison, who looked at 16 similar rivalries in history and found that 12 ended in conflict. Xi's tone that day seemed to be one of both warning and conciliation. At a state banquet that evening, he said, quote, "Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can totally go hand in hand and advance the wellbeing of the whole world." The key idea that Xi kept repeating