The Dark Forest: The Economized Hunting Ground for Human Capital in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy

Abstract

Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy has become more than a work of science fiction. The Dark Forest discourse Liu proposes in the stories has reached beyond the domain of literature, becoming a broader social and cultural phenomenon during China’s historical economic transformations. The Dark Forest has even been dubbed the ‘Bible’ by a group of leading entrepreneurs for its seeming ability to provide inspiration for how people behave and make decisions in a post-socialist modernity developed by market-oriented reforms. This article examines how the Dark Forest metaphor relates to China’s post-socialist transition, where the subject is remade into human capital and where competitive market principles penetrate every social sphere. Through investigating the dehumanizing impulse in the Dark Forest, I will argue that this process of turning people into ‘non-people’ is a literary representation of the process of ‘economization’ in China’s current reality. Building on this point, I will demonstrate that in this Dark Forest only the ‘bestial nature’ of the post-socialist subjects could lead to eventual victory. The popularity of Liu Cixin’s ‘Dark Forest’ theory in China, therefore, provides an important viewpoint through which to perceive the conditions of post-socialist Chinese society.