Contagion and Communication: Immunity, Information, and Reflexive Futurity in Ye Yonglie’s Outbreak Narratives

Abstract

This paper reads Ye Yonglie’s two stories about China’s encounter with future pandemics—“Performance is Not Postponed” (1979) and “Disease of Love” (1986)—as critical comments on post-Mao China’s reform and a vital sign of Chinese science fiction’s transformation in its understanding of the future. The paper first analyzes the representation of index patients and logistical infrastructures to reveal the tension between contagion and communication in Ye’s pandemic stories. While contagion triggers speculation about the nation’s biological and ideological immunity, it nonetheless foregrounds communication as necessary for China’s desired modernization. The paper then examines communication as the central theme of China’s reform by reading Ye’s two stories as narratives of information flow and control. Comparing them with Ye’s Little Smarty Travels to the Future (1978), the paper discusses how Ye’s pandemic stories disrupt and interrogate a utopian vision of communication that underlies post-Mao China’s political and technological reorientation. The paper finally associates the critical awareness of modernization in Ye’s outbreak narratives with a shifting understanding of the ontological condition of the future. Despite not being entirely freed from the Maoist-styled future as a destination of voluntarist and triumphalist progress, Ye’s outbreak narratives begin to conceive of the future as an uncertain and imposing horizon where crises generated by past development break out and demand our response.