The politics of printing in China

Jun 20 2025

Comics journalist Joe Sacco’s next book, The Once and Future Riot, was supposed to hit bookstore shelves in September, but it’s running about a month late. Publication scheduling delays are neither ideal nor uncommon—but the holdup on Sacco’s latest, which PW’s starred review called a “meticulous and beautifully crafted account of religious and territorial strife” in Western Uttar Pradesh, India, wasn’t due to any routine issue.

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The coolest contemporary movie star, Keanu Reeves, added to his portfolio in 2021 by creating a comic book series called BRZRKR, co-written by Reeves with Matt Kindt and illustrated by Ron Garney. The title, a vowelless “berserker”, references those Viking warriors who fought with trance-like fury. In the comic, this is “B”, also known as Unute, an immortal who looks very much like Keanu Reeves (Reeves has signed up to play the role in the forthcoming Netflix adaptation). B goes from prehistory to the present day via a series of extremely violent fights, dismemberments and killings. He can be injured, but not killed: his wounds heal, missing body parts grow back, and on such occasions as his body is entirely annihilated a giant magic egg appears out of which he later emerges.

BRZRKR, as title, suggests a word too muscular for piddling little lower-case letters, and frankly too macho for vowels. Grunt, shoot, stab, kill, rip bodies apart with bare hands, is the whole game here. And if “BRZRKR” also looks somewhat like a typographical representation of somebody blowing a raspberry, there is something ridiculous about the whole thing, too. There is little by way of actual story. The fundamental samey-ness of the conceit, with diminishing returns of ripped-out intestines and gore, knives, arrows, bullets and blood spray, flattens and banalises the telling. Still, it has Keanu as main character, and Keanu is cool.

Now Reeves has expanded the franchise into a novel by collaborating with British author China Miéville – I’d call Miéville “the coolest contemporary writer of the fantastic”, though the bar is rather lower than in movie stardom – with a title that is, at least, fully supplied with vowels. It’s Miéville’s first novel for 12 years. His previous books, from the new weird Perdido Street Station (2000) through the much-praised The City & the City (2009) to Embassytown (2011), dominated SF for a decade. His return is much anticipated by his fans.

The Book of Elsewhere revisits the material from the comics, fleshing things out, as a novel can, giving a more thoroughgoing and detailed account of the backstory. The main motor of the plot is B’s yearning for mortality. This is not a simple desire to die but a more nuanced intent to stop being immortal. The idea here is that it is our mortality, our living-towards-death, that gives life meaning and richness, and B wants that. But no matter what is tried, he cannot get past his unkillability.

Where did B come from? His mother had a painful-sounding encounter with a supernatural being, perhaps a god. Struck by a bolt of blue lightning in a sensitive area, she becomes pregnant with Unute. He learns his origin as he grows up.

“So my father is not my father?” Young B asks his mother.

“Hush, silly,” she replies. “Your father is your father, he’s your dayfather and the blue lightning is your nightfather.”

B roams through prehistory, righting wrongs, fighting and killing bad guys, then does the same thing through history, like Christopher Lambert’s Highlander, except that decapitation would not slow him down. In the present day we find him part of a US military unit that deploys him on various black ops missions. A scientific branch of this unit, headed by Dr Diana Ahuja, is also studying B’s unusual powers. This research has produced various technological and military advances (a new type of helicopter is described as “a spin-off technology”, which may be a joke), but nothing to solve B’s fundamental immortality problem.

There’s also a prehistoric pig whose mother was likewise struck by the magic lightning, and which spends immortal aeons repeatedly tracking B down in order to gore him with its huge tusks. Why the pig is so irked at B isn’t entirely clear, and there’s an off-kilter goofiness to this element of the story. B thinks if he can find a way to kill the pig then he can unlock the mystery of his own immortality, and so he brings it to the institute for further study.

“‘This pig … ’ Diana whispered. ‘This is farce. The repetition of you, the original tragedy.’” It’s not every superhero story that includes references to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, but Miéville is a scholar of Marxism as well as a writer of fantasy.

Reeves has made clear that it was Miéville who wrote the novel, but it has to be said that The Book of Elsewhere is unlikely to take its place among his masterpieces. There is the daftness of the premise, the bittiness and repetitiveness of the narrative, the need to revert to scenes of tiresomely extreme ultraviolence.

There are, though, nice touches. At one point, Diana and B discuss establishing an objective scale for hatred.

“What’s the most universally hated thing in the world?” she said. “Child molesters? Hitler?”

“Not Hitler, unfortunately.” They were both silent awhile. “Mosquitoes,” he said.

“OK,” she said. “That’s good: they’re small, so they’re good for units. So, let’s say the hate aimed at one member of the Culicidae family measures one, I don’t know, culicid. A cull! Which means,” she said, “that if you hate something as much as you hate 10 mosquitoes, your hate is 10 culls. A decacull. That’s, say, dog shit on my shoe. Now, the Westboro Baptist church, say, I probably hate … ” She shrugged. “A good seven or eight kiloculls.”

But Miéville’s supple, inventive imagination gets stretched thin on the rack of Reeves’s original idea. Enter the Miétrix, but be prepared to be underwhelmed.

When Yuan Yang was four years old, she tells us, her parents brought her from China to the UK as they pursued new educational opportunities. Although Private Revolutions, her vivid and detailed memoir, is not primarily the story of her own family, they, too, exemplify the theme of the book: a close look at how China’s citizens responded to the potentially transformative opportunities that four decades of rapid growth afforded.

Under Mao, Yang’s father’s family laboured as peasants in western China; as a child, her father paid his school fees with sweet potatoes, and when the sweet potato season was over he ate watermelon. From this unpromising beginning, he made it to university and later to a doctorate in computer science in the UK. Yang writes of his departure from China: “It was a simple decision for him: all the students who could leave were doing so. Chinese academia lagged behind the west, especially in the sciences, and the Beijing government’s massacre of students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had left many questioning the future of China’s universities.”

Her mother’s family had been a couple of rungs up the social scale, working in a state semiconductor materials factory buried at the foot of the holy Mount Emei in Sichuan province, hidden from China’s then hostile neighbour, the Soviet Union. Hers was an equally remarkable progression – secondary, then tertiary education as a means of advancement and eventual escape.

Brought up in the UK, Yang returned to China each year to visit grandparents, and in 2016 moved to Beijing to serve as a correspondent for the Financial Times. The stories she tells in this book describe the responses of a series of young women to Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening”, launched after Mao’s death in the 70s and renewed in the early 90s following the Tiananmen massacre.

Over just a couple of generations, an overwhelmingly agrarian society with deep attachments to family and clan became a mostly urban society composed of single-child families. Girls, who in the countryside are seen as a burden, could now go to city factories and earn cash, that rarest of assets in rural societies. The young men, previously bound to the land, migrated to the booming urban building sites. For the first time they had a measure of agency and the opportunity to change their fate. This is both a study of a moment of social mobility that the author considers now over, and a window into the realities of a changing social and political system, in which cultural prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions continued to obstruct the hopes of its citizens.

Four young women – Leiya, Siyue, Sam and June – battled poverty, poor diets, bad schools, repressive attitudes and family separation as they tested the limits of the new possibilities that the Deng era offered. In China, citizens remain tied to their place of birth through a registration system that now allows them to travel and work elsewhere but denies the adults social rights and denies their children access to education other than in their place of origin. This forces migrant workers to live apart from their children, often for many years. That is a battle that Leiya took on: she escaped a village that saw her only as a potential mother of the next generation of males and the many injustices suffered by migrant factory workers spurred her to organise on their behalf, setting up a series of help centres to support them and to demand labour protection and other rights.

Siyue rebelled against a repressive education system and became an educational entrepreneur; Sam became a radical Maoist out of indignation at the treatment of the workers, only to find that China’s revolutionary party does not want any more revolutions; June acted on the realisation that there is a world beyond her native mountain village that she could explore.

Sam’s parents had moved from Sichuan to the boom town of Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong and one of the first “special economic zones” that became the engines of China’s industrial revolution. Shenzhen became a huge city within 20 years, but Sam was forced back to the village in her early teens since she was not entitled to sit university entrance exams outside her home province.

The transformation of China that resulted from Deng’s reform and opening was astonishing, but it was also hard-won by millions of China’s citizens, each trying to carve a new path, as Yang’s subjects did. It was an era of possibility but also one of cruel inequalities in which the already powerful appropriated land, profits and more power. All were open to self-transformation, but were also exploited in brutal working conditions and abused by greedy bureaucrats; all were vulnerable to reversals of fortune and changes in policy: Siyue’s highly successful private tutoring company was closed down overnight when Xi Jinping decided the sector had to go.

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The stories Yang tells are the fruit of a set of close relationships that would be difficult to achieve now in China’s changed mood. It is the tale of a unique time and an intimate picture of what it was like to live through, and learn to navigate, the storm.

Isabel Hilton is founder of the China Dialogue Trust

About the author

“In a border town where multiple imperial projects have soared and collapsed, Ed Pulford looks about the ruins and asks, ‘What time is it?’ Written with theoretical sophistication and fierce sympathy for local peoples’ realities, Past Progress untangles Chinese, Russian, and Korean perspectives on a century of development history. Will be essential reading for anyone interested in the post-socialist condition, the dreams of empire, and the tangled problems of modernity.”

—Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University

“Past Progress is a compelling ethnography of memory and time emerging from everyday encounters with ‘progress’ in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-national border region of Northeast China. Utilizing a deliberately non-linear approach that extensively draws upon historical and contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Russian sources, Pulford demonstrates how to think flexibly across shifting discourses of nation, state, culture, and history while foregrounding local, lived experiences of political revolutions and their ensuing social transformations.”

—Jenny Chio, University of Southern California

“The first book-length study of a vital location in the Far East where Europe and Asia have long met to create a unique Eurasian culture. A huge achievement by a gifted anthropologist that will appeal to readers interested in new global history.”

—Heonik Kwon, University of Cambridge

About the author

“This is an important book, both for its conceptual sophistication as well as for its rich empirical detail. It makes a convincing case for the centrality of radio-based (and intermedial) communications for understanding how mass politics and mass media became intertwined in modern China, and provides unique contributions not just to new understandings of twentieth century Chinese history, but also to broader discussions in global media history and global histories of technology.”

—Arunabh Ghosh, author of Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China

“News and propaganda have been central to China’s 20th century story. John Alekna’s deeply-researched book gives the inside story of how that ‘newsscape’ was made, providing a powerful new insight into the formation of a society through war and revolution.”

—Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

“Seeking News, Making China is a fresh, ambitious, and engaging meditation on the intersection of mass politics and mass media in twentieth-century China. By charting the emergence of a distinctive Chinese ‘newscape,’ it effectively challenges venerable assumptions about the relationship between technology, nationhood, and the news.”

—Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

A prestigious literary award for science fiction, which was hosted in China for the first time, has come under fire for excluding several authors from the 2023 awards, raising concerns about interference or censorship in the awards process.

The New York Times bestseller Babel by RF Kuang, an episode of the Netflix drama The Sandman and the author Xiran Jay Zhao were among the works and authors excluded from the 2023 Hugo awards, which were administered by the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Chengdu in October.

Babel, which won fiction book of the year at the British book awards in 2023, is a speculative fiction novel by Kuang, a Chinese-American author also known for her novel Yellowface.

No reason was given for the exclusions, which were only revealed on 20 January when the Hugo awards published the full nomination statistics for last year’s prize. Certain titles were listed as having been given votes, but were marked with an asterisk and the words “not eligible”, with no further details given.

The Hugo awards are the premier accolade for sci-fi and fantasy fiction. They are administered by the World Science Fiction Society, a loose collective of sci-fi fans who vote for their favourite works or authors across more than a dozen categories before the annual conference, Worldcon, which is held in a different city each year. Last year’s event was the first time it had been held in China.

Recently released documents showed that several works or authors – some with links to China – had been excluded from the ballot despite receiving enough nominations to be included on their respective shortlists. The excluded nominees include Kuang and Xiran, authors who were born in China but are now based in the west.

Concerns have been raised that the authors were targeted for political reasons, connected to the fact that the ruling Chinese Communist party exerts a tight control on all cultural events that take place inside its borders.

Dave McCarty, the head of the 2023 Hugo awards jury, wrote on Facebook: “Nobody has ordered me to do anything … There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”

McCarty did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment, but shared what he said was the official response from the awards administration team on Facebook: “After reviewing the constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.” He declined to elaborate on what the rules were.

“I can only guess to why I was excluded, but it probably has something to do with my critical comments about the Chinese government in the past,” said Xiran. “You would think that as a big, powerful country, China would be graceful about criticisms, but they in fact take it very personally, and doubly so when it’s from Chinese diaspora.”

Kuang debuted as an author with the Poppy War trilogy, an award-winning fantasy series inspired by modern Chinese history that imagines Mao Zedong as a teenage girl.

Episode six of The Sandman, which is based on a comic book written by Neil Gaiman, was excluded from the best dramatic presentation category, despite receiving enough nominations to be on the final ballot. Gaiman has publicly criticised the Chinese authorities for imprisoning writers.

In an Instagram post published on 22 January, Kuang wrote: “I wish to clarify that no reason for Babel’s ineligibility was given to me or my team. I did not decline a nomination, as no nomination was offered … I assume this was a matter of undesirability rather than ineligibility.”

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Paul Weimer, a hobbyist sci-fi writer, discovered last week that he was excluded from the best fan writer category, despite receiving enough nominations to be shortlisted. “I had the highest of hopes for Chengdu,” said Weimer, who has been nominated for Hugos in previous years. “I thought it was amazing that a number of Chinese fans had got together to get this bid together.”

The organising committee of Chengdu Worldcon did not respond to requests for comment. Some people in the sci-fi community had raised concerns about the event being hosted in China when Chengdu won the bid to host the event in 2021.

“My Hugo acceptance speeches would have gotten me arrested in China. I have said things on record that are just illegal,” said the writer Jeannette Ng in 2021.

The Worldcon organisers “should have taken our concerns about the awards being held in China seriously from the beginning. We knew something like this was going to happen,” said Xiran.

Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: “Until now, one of the things that’s always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process … This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don’t damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years.”

Canadian actor Keanu Reeves will publish his first novel this year in collaboration with British author China Miéville.

Their joint novel is titled The Book of Elsewhere and is set in the world of the BRZRKR comic book series created by Reeves, first published in 2021. It follows an immortal warrior on a millennia-long journey to understand his immortality.

The novel is due to be published on 23 July by Penguin. Reeves, who is best known for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick franchises, said it was “extraordinary” to work with Miéville. “China did exactly what I was hoping for – he came in with a clear architecture for the story and how he wanted to play with the world of BRZRKR, a world that I love so much. I was thrilled with his vision and feel honoured to be a part of this collaborative process.”

Miéville novels include The City & The City, Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. He is the only writer to have won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction three times.

“Sometimes the greatest games are those you play with other people’s toys,” said Miéville on the collaboration. “It was an honour, a shock and a delight when Keanu invited me to play. But I could never have predicted how generous he’d be with toys he’s spent so long creating,” he added.

Upon its release, BRZRKR, created with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney, became the highest-selling original comic book series debut in more than 25 years. The comic will also be adapted into a live-action Netflix film starring Reeves and an anime series.

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“Keanu Reeves and China Miéville are a dream writing partnership,” said Ben Brusey, publishing director at Del Rey, the Penguin imprint publishing the novel in the UK. “Both are master storytellers who have thrilled, surprised and won the hearts and minds of audiences and readers for decades.

“The Book of Elsewhere is science fiction at its very best – dazzling high-concept, beguiling characters and a profound, original plot that blends action, drama and existentialism in a bravura way that will leave readers moved and amazed,” he added.