globalization

Science Fiction Fandom and Global Power

People outside the Science Fiction world are probably entirely unaware of the current controversy engulfing the SF world. However, I think both the scandal and more to the point, the reactions to it, say quite a lot about a real lack of awareness of currents of imperialism and global soft power. “Soft power” is a term that refers to cultural forms of dominance and influence in the world system, as opposed to military-political “hard power”.

I need to (very briefly) outline what happened, at least as I understand at. I am not going to personalize this because, outside of the SF communities, the personal aspects are not really the point. The most prestigious SF award in the anglophone SF world are those given by the paying members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (or WorldCon). These are called the Hugo Awards, after Golden Age SF writer and editor, Hugo Gernsbach. Now, despite the name of WorldCon, in its origins and in its membership, WorldCon is predominantly American and anglophone. There are many other anglophone SF awards, American and otherwise, and there are many other non-anglophone awards. But both because of American imperial dominance, particularly in the field of science and technology, and the because America has historically been the largest core constituency of SF, certainly in the anglophone world, the Hugos retain a prestige out of all proportion to their actual representation of the SF world. They are my least favourite SF awards and the best comparison is the way that the Oscars still dominate popular perceptions of the film world, except that these “Oscars” are voted for by (self-selected) “ordinary fans” not by a (selected) Academy.

WorldCon moves around. Basically, fan communities in a particular city and country bid for it and increasingly it has moved outside the USA. For the 2023 WorldCon, for the first time, a Chinese city, Chengdu, was selected to host the event.

What you also need to understand about the Hugos is that while the voting may be “open” and conducted by fans, the organization of the voting, the counting and all the behind-the-scenes activity is done by “volunteers” who in many cases have retained the position by turning up and knowing how things work better than anyone else, in other words by a self-perpetuating and exclusionary system of inside knowledge.

Of course, the sinophone and Chinese SF fan community is an almost entirely different cultural-linguistic group from the anglophone American SF fan community with relatively little overlap. Add to this the difficulties and dilemmas, real and imagined, of a largely ignorant foreign volunteer-run conference in an authoritarian county, and the scene was set for a shitshow.

The conference itself went relatively smoothly at the time, but how much a shitshow it really was is only now being revealed. The nomination and voting statistics are supposed to be released relatively soon after the conference, but it was not until the last minute of the allowable time that they appeared, and not only were many of the figure dubious to the point of being impossible, several big names had been excluded from some categories, of particular note being Chinese-American authors. No reason was given for their exlcusion and inquiries to the organizers were met with a combination of obduracy, rudeness and lies.

Now, we have even more information and it seemed that even more was going on behind the scenes. Not only did the organizers know exactly why those excluded were treated this way, but many others were excluded of whom we had no previous knowledge. These latter works and people were exclusively sinophone, and the reasoning was that the largest Chinese SF magazine had published a guide to the Hugo Awards including lists of suggestions for each category. The organizers decided that this constituted a “slate” designed to influence voting en masse, and therefore excluded most of the works promoted this way.

And the anglophone works excluded? Well, yes, of course it was done because the works contained themes or politics that could be offensive to the Chinese government, or people who had made statements that could also be interpreted that way (pro-Taiwan, pro-Tibet etc.).

However, what also seems clear is that none of this was done because of any direct pressure from any level of Chinese government, but what seems to have been anticipatory conformity by the organizers: they assessed both works and people for what might possibly cause problems in China; they decided that Chinese fans voting constituted a “slate.” And in doing so they managed to offend everyone.

My thoughts about this diverge markedly from most of the anglophone criticism I have seen, right or left, mostly because almost all of the critics are basing their criticism on very domestic American political assumptions about what is going on and what is at stake. So let me set these thoughts out clearly:

The Hugo Awards are fundamentally anglophone and American and have always been this way.
The awards would be better if this limitation was accepted – especially by anglophones & Americans.
The problem is that American imperialism and soft power projection is basically accepted by Americans of most mainstream political persuasions. They don’t see the problem and then are surprised when contradictions emerge.
Of course, if you try to bodge the anglophone / American SF world together with another global language / power-based SF community, there are going to be problems. And sure, the solution arrived at by the organizers (secret ballot-rigging and pre-emptive self-censorship) was the worst one.
However, contrary to what well-meaning liberal American SF critics seem to think: it simply isn’t the case that you could have just had a free and happy democratic vote comparing the best Anglophone and Sinophone SF.
This is for so many reasons. Mostly it’s not about authoritarianism versus democracy, but simply because the vast majority of both communities cannot actually read and understand the works produced by the other, and particularly not from the anglophone side.
The situation is incredibly unbalanced: if you look a statistics on global translation, there are vanishingly few Chinese to English translated fictional works of any kind, and SF is a small subset of this. There are a lot more english language works translated in Chinese but it’s still a very small proportion of the total.
And let’s look at power here. China is not an oppressed nation. It’s one of the three global power centres of the C21st (USA / China / EU). You can’t use American racial categories to judge global politics and international relations. China in the world is not the equivalent of Chinese- or Asian-Americans in the USA.
So this is not about “racism” in the American sense; it’s about how naive and idealized notions of a single global SF community that is in material reality no such thing, butt up against the limits of liberal cultural imperialism and global soft power in a tripolar world.
So: stop trying to make the Hugo Awards global. Keep them American and anglophone, not because of racism and nationalism, but precisely to acknowledge the cultural imperialism that inevitably is involved with projects to make things global when they are manifestly not so.

At the other end of the scale from my last post on miniaturization, I came across this extraordinarily forthright editorial in a Portuguese newspaper, lambasting the international financial ratings agencies, Moody’s, Standard & Poor and Fitch Ratings and calling them ‘You Bastards’. I happened to have been just writing about these bodies for my next book and a chapter on ‘Globalization and Surveillance’, in the forthcoming International Handbook of Surveillance Studies. Why I am writing about these organisations? Let me quote from my draft chapter:

“this process most certainly is surveillance as conventionally understood within Surveillance Studies and it is perhaps the single most important form of surveillance operating in the world today at the global level. The reason lies in the outcomes of such profiles and ratings. If individual credit-scoring (re)produces comparative (dis)advantage and embeds poverty and class distinctions, then credit-scoring at the global scale can condemn whole national populations to economic marginality and set an inescapably negative context for individual and collective life chances. This is especially the case for those sections of national populations whose jobs, incomes and livelihoods are still tied into the national economy, as opposed to members of the increasingly footloose transnational ruling class. These ratings systems so affect economic decision-making that even minor changes to the credit scores of governments can effectively undermine national government policy, making states that have any substantial international debt – and that is almost every state in the world – ultimately responsible not to their electorates but to the demands of the rules of competition in finance capitalism.”

The problem is, of course, that people and governments only really notice these organisations, let alone complain about them or fight back against them, when their nation-state is downgraded in the ratings. The surveillance power of these bodies needs to be challenged by those who are not (yet) negatively affected if there is to be any change. And you never know, that might yet happen, as apparently the European Commission is considering how it might control these agencies.

Controlling the outsiders

One of the most interesting meetings we had in our last week here in Japan was with two representatives from the Japan Civil Liberties Union (JCLU) and the association to defend the rights of foreign migrant workers. One thing that has always been clear to me from being a gaikokujin (or more casually, just gaijin – foreigner) in Japan is how distinct is this status. I’m a white, western European and therefore at the top of the list of acceptability in foreigners in Japan, but even so I’ve had some interesting experiences, including having two police squad cars and 5 officers deal with the matter of my ‘suspicious’ bicycle (an experience that practically all resident foreigners have had at one time or another), and just the other day I was stopped at the train station by two plain-clothes police officers, who started off quite strong, but then backed down and started mumbling apologies about ‘looking for someone’ when they realised my (Japanese) wife was just behind me. It was pretty obvious that they were conducting an immigration sweep – i.e. just stopping anyone who ‘looked foreign’ to check their immigration status.

This gave me just a tiny taste of what life can be like here for those whose immigration status is problematic. And, as the campaigners told us, this is an increasing number of people who have come to Japan because of the wealth and opportunities and because, whisper it, Japan needs immigrants. Like so many advanced industrial nations, Japan is a hyper-ageing society, with an increasingly unbalanced population pyramid. There are not enough working age Japanese people to support the increasing number of retirees, and government schemes to encourage people to have more children simply haven’t worked. The problem is that successive Japanese governments have refused to recognise the implications. The rules now make provision for ‘skilled’ immigrants, but not for those who are ‘unskilled’ and it is actually those in this latter category that Japan needs. In practice this is demonstrated by the increasing numbers of foreign delivery and construction workers in Tokyo as well as those working in the shadier areas of the ‘night economy’ – doormen, bar staff, masseurs, prostitutes etc.. The same politicians who deny the need for immigrants are probably having their personal ‘needs’ serviced by Filipino or Vietnamese women and this hypocrisy colours all the mainstream political debate about the place of foreigners in Japan, especially in Tokyo where Mayor Ishihara has never disguised his nationalist views in this area.

So, whilst the politicians refuse to deal with reality, the police are enforcing the law as it is. We have spent some time, whilst we are here (and I have gathered data on previous visits) in the night city of Kabukicho in Shinjuku. This time I was taken out to bars in the old post-war neighbourhood of Golden Gai by Professor Tonoma, who formerly led both Shinjuku-ku and Tokyo city planning bodies, and we also talked to Shinjuku community safety officers, and to the Kabukicho Town Manager, who runs the day-to-day operations of the body trying to improve Kabukicho’s image, Kabukicho Renaissance.

Kabukicho of course is famous as the first place that the Tokyo police installed CCTV, ostensibly to deal with Chinese gangs, but according to what we learned from these visits and from talking to the campaigners, as crime has declined (as it has nationally – it’s probably nothing to do with the cameras), the cameras and intensive policing (raids etc.) have been used largely to curb illegal migrant workers. And the authorities seem to make no distinction between the gangsters and the mainly South-east Asian women who work in the bars and massage parlours. They are all visa-overstayers. There is no attempt to treat the women as people in need of help and support at all. Of course this all inflates the crime figures and makes it easy to paint what the police always term ‘foreign crime’ (whatever the exact nature or seriousness of the crime) as a growing threat, as it becomes proportionally a larger part of shrinking crime rates (which were already low by global standards to begin with).

Now there is a new threat to this already massively targeted population. The inclusion of foreigners on the jyuminhyo (residents’ registry), combined with the digitisation and networking of this registry through juki-net, means that the authorities will be able to correlate residency and immigration status much more easily – the residency information for foreigners will be linked to the Houmusho (Ministry of Justice), which has entry records, and now fingerprints and facial photos too, following post-9/11 reforms. Of course, resident skilled foreigners wanted to be in the residents’ registry. They argued that not being on it was itself a form of discrimination and meant further difficulties in terms of things like buying property. However the inclusion of foreigners now opens up new forms of discriminatory practice against those who are already the most disadvantaged in Japanese society, the kinds of foreigners who more high-status ‘official’ foreigners do not generally recognise as kin to them at all.

Japan’s surveillance society, like most, is therefore a profoundly uneven one. Every society has its Others, and surveillance is deployed both to distinguish those Others and to control them. In each of the cities I have been studying the Others are different populations. In London, the Others are (at the moment) the resident Muslim community (or more particularly, ‘radicalised’ young Muslims). Here the surveillance combines repression and ‘caring’ programs to bring the disaffected back into the mainstream. In Rio de Janeiro, the Others are the urban poor, the favelados. They are largely simply excluded – walls protect the rich in their homes, and now walls are being built around the poor communities. In Tokyo, the Others are foreigners, but there are gradations of Otherness, and effectively still aping the western ‘scientific racism’ that it acquired during the Meiji period modernisation at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan’s Others are poor Blacks and Asians (for many on the right here, the Japanese are not ‘Asian’ at all, but something unique). Just as the British state is struggling with the legacy of its particular colonial and post-colonial approach to immigration, and the Brazilian state with a history of years of differentiated citizenship, the Japanese state has still not yet really come to terms with the prospect of the mixing of people at all.