Time travel (chuanyue) romances in Chinese cyberspace

Abstract

The recent few decades have witnessed a boom of online literature in mainland China. This thesis explores the subgenre of time travel (chuanyue) romance, a most celebrated category of Chinese online fiction that emerged in the mid-2000s. By analysing a selected corpus of time travel romances and the internet-based fan communities developed around them, this thesis probes how the desires and anxieties of their predominantly female readership find expressions in these works and how a microcosm of contemporary Chinese society unfolds in these worlds of fantasy. While the (female) protagonists may time travel to China’s imperial past, to the Sino-Japanese war, to a dystopia future, or to an imaginary Otherland, the stories are deeply anchored in the complex political and social landscapes of contemporary China. Taking the dual role of what Henry Jenkins called “aca-fan” (both an academic and a fan), I inquire into this rich archive of imaginations, uncovering the themes of feminist consciousness, queerness, social mobility, nationalism, developmentalism, and posthumanism. My central argument is that web time travel romances make “hidden” aspects of contemporary Chinese society visible. The “hidden” refers not only to “serious” social issues which are often neglected in presumably “frivolous” romantic tales, but also to realms beyond ordinary perceptions, such as online games and imagined books. The time travel genre permits female netizens to transcend their real-life experiences, posing serious challenges to social norms, discipline, and hegemonic power. By constructing emancipatory female subjects, fans have also created and advanced their desired and idealized selves, traversing heteropatriarchy, the western-centric global order, and the anthropocentric framework.