‘Because of sleepwalking, over one billion Chinese people have awakened’

In the seventy second episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast I’m facing down a bleak reality: My Country Does Not Dream (我的祖国不要做梦 / wǒde zǔguó bù zuò mèng). But I’m not doing it alone! The London Chinese Science Fiction Group have deployed a team of Han Song aficionados (and one critic) to console my exhausted brain as the daytime hours fall away, revealing a sombre somnambulant city behind the city: Beijing.

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// NEWS ITEMS //

Article in Sixth Tone: Infinite Scroll: The Making of China's Web Fiction Epics
Words from Shen Yang in Telegraph article: What life's really like in locked-down Shanghai
Short story Meta-Shanghai by Angus himself is published in Ab Terra 2021
Watch/Listen as Jack Hargreaves reads from Chen Chuncheng's Submarines in the Night

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// WORDS OF THE DAY //

(梦游 - mèngyóu - sleepwalking)

(吊儿郎当 - diào'er lángdāng - sloppiness)

(躺平 - tǎngpíng - lie flat, as resistance to the 996 work system)

(闭眼 - bì yǎn - eyes closed)

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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //

New wave scifi, and emergence of the New Weird in the 90s
Guangzhao’s writeup of his group’s event on this story
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
The forthcoming English translations of Han Song’s Hospital trilogy
China 2185: Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel

Ep 72 - Han Song and My Country Does Not Dream with the London Chinese Science Fiction Group