In China, there are alternate histories. In ‘Dhurandhar’, there’s an alternate present
After carefully analysing web novels, he demonstrates that alternate history has become one of the most popular genres in China’s online fiction landscape, in which protagonists travel back in time to intervene at pivotal moments in Chinese history. Narratives in these novels are not just imaginative entertainment but a unique cultural field in which one can feel the constant reinvention of the Chinese nation and its collective aspirations. Han argues that the alt-history fiction in Chinese culture operates through a process of explicit historical divergence in that the characters go back in time and change key outcomes in history, creating alternative trajectories for the Chinese nation. However, the underlying narrative structure remains similar whether in the form of imperial China’s imagined industrial modernisation, the occurrence of a communist revolution in a much earlier period, or the making of China into a capitalist country. In such a retelling, history is treated as malleable and national decline is reconfigured into a problem that could and should be technically and politically fixed. There is a desire for “counterfactual repair” of history, which also resonates with the dominant state narratives of national rejuvenation and with widespread yearning for China’s greater global visibility and power. The rise of ‘pop hegemony’ and state-sponsored nationalism What stands out in this emerging genre is that it is not blatantly propagandist in nature, yet finds common ground with state-sponsored nationalist discourses. Han shows that even the most radical and institutionally challenging aspects of these narratives echo official accounts of national rejuvenation. The legitimacy of the Communist Party is hardly ever contested. On the contrary, it gets strengthened by imaginative enactment of alternative routes to Chinese greatness. In this sense, this alt-history fiction is a site of popular creativity interspersed with state-defined nationalism. Han stresses that these stories are not subversive or anti-establishment. Instead, they often stabilise political imagination by reducing historical complexity into actionable clarity. The intelligible causal chains take the place of structural failures, contingency and randomness, with informed agents able to alter the course of history. Since many Chinese believe that national revival is imminent under the leadership of the Communist Party, they willingly tolerate authoritarian rule. Entertainment and popular culture foster public consent or “pop hegemony” by making authoritarian rule appear appealing through narratives of national revival. At this level, one may find an interesting parallel with the recent two-part Hindi blockbuster Dhurandhar. While the political and cultural contexts are certainly different, there still lies in Dhurandhar a version of a similar narrative. It does not seek any displacement in time or a literal alternate history. Instead, it creates what can be termed “the parallel present,” a re-imagination of what happens in the present world, but in a far more strategic fashion than the actual world out there. From Chinese web novels to ‘Dhurandhar’: Mapping the ‘parallel present’ Unlike standard alt-history narratives, which have an obvious departure from known histories, the divergence in Dhurandhar is implicit and structural. A shift in the past does not change the present; rather, it is a reorganisation of the presentation of causality itself. Geopolitical situations, which include intelligence operations, tensions with neighbouring countries and internal bureaucratic bargaining, are streamlined into linear and legible sequences. This creates a compressed picture featuring more causal agency and predictability than is actually the
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