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'Steel is the most romantic thing in the world': Industrial party time-travel novels and the digital fantasy fiction boom
This talk examines the intersection of China’s ‘Industrial Party’ (gongye dang 工业党) ideology and time-travel fiction in contemporary Chinese popular culture. The ‘Industrial Party’ refers to a distinctive composition of Chinese netizens who champion technocratic governance and rapid industrialization as pathways to national strength. Sharing similar conservative views as the US and European alt-right, they also position themselves as critics of the identity politics of what they term the ‘Emotional Party’ (qinghuai dang 情怀党). One of their most prominent cultural expressions is speculative time-travel fiction, in which protagonists leverage future knowledge to accelerate China’s development. My analysis focuses specifically on Qi Cheng’s 齐橙bestseller novel Daguo zhonggong 大国重工 (Great Power Heavy Industry, 2021), which, although formally a work of speculative fiction, combines a technomodernist pretense to scientific objectivity and rationality with the mythologization of (infrastructure) metrics as indicators of economic and political success. Reading Qi’s novel within the metric-driven logics of online literature platforms and the broader fantasy fiction boom, this talk argues that speculative fiction has become a key meta-political site for negotiating history and national identity, and considers the implications for how we conceptualize popular literary culture in China today.
Jessica Imbach is Assistant Professor of Sinology/contemporary China at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, narrative theory, new media, and the aesthetics and politics of genre fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction. Her recent publications include Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and Rethinking Literary China: Essays in Honor of Andrea Riemenschnitter (DeGruyter, 2025). She is the PI of the ERC-funded research project SINOFANTASY, which investigates the contemporary Chinese fantasy fiction boom.
Date:
24 February 2026, 17:00
Venue:
Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details:
Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker:
Dr Jessica Imbach (University of Freiburg)
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser:
Professor Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Dr Bingbing Shi (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
