“Folding Beijing” is one of the most talked-about science fiction stories to come out of China since Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang’s story is about a Beijing divided into three parts. First Space is for the rich, Second Space is for the middle class and Third Space is for the poor, who clean up after First and Second Space Beijing. The three spaces never exist simultaneously, but rather when First Space is open, Second and Third Space are folded up and put away.

A man, struggling to put his daughter through school, agrees to take up an illegal job to smuggle a message from Second to First Space. 

This is a story that is fascinating because it is all about class, even though China has been run by the CCP for almost a century. Join the podcast as we get folded into Third Space and find ourselves in a new world. 

Want to read Folding Beijing online for free? Click here for the English version. Click here for the Chinese version.

AI Generated Transcript of this episode: 

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. I’m here in Eugene, Oregon. Spring is bursting forth here as I’m recording this podcast, more like mid-April. It’ll probably come out in later April. I’m finishing up working on that book that I’ve talked about. China’s backstory. It’s sep to come out September or October of 2025 if y’all want to sign up to get notifications on that book, and its pilgrim’s progress through the.

Painful publication process. Go to the podcast webpage, chinese literature podcast.com, and I have a thing that’ll take you to my publisher’s page, their Unsung Voices books, and you then click on something that says Pre-order. That just means you give them your email and they will update you when it gets closer to coming out.

Also, if you’re interested in getting an arc, an advanced reader copy of the book, send me an email at Chinese Literature [email protected]. My publishers ask me to find folks who are willing to read the book before the publication date. Post stuff on social media, Twitter, Facebook. Good reads. If you’re interested, send me an email.

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion for right now. Let’s get into. Something else. Farts. No. Unlike last month’s podcast, which was a very stinky podcast, I had a, a friend and fan of the podcast Tell me I will not do a podcast on farts this month, though, I was tempted to, like I said, lots of folks thought lot Month’s podcast on pu, and the most famous fart joke in Chinese literary history was far too stinky.

So I’m not gonna do another podcast on Chinese fart poetry, at least not this episode. But I will tell you, I have found other fart poems in Chinese literature. If you remember in the last podcast I mentioned that I had reached out to a professor of mine who’s an expert on Pspu, and in the podcast I said he did not get back to me about whether or not Psur was actually the.

But of this fart joke, well, after that episode aired, he did get back to me, I assume, because all of his family and friends are fans of the podcast, and they realized who I was talking about, even though I didn’t mention his name, and they emailed him incessantly telling him he had to respond, or maybe it’s just because he is a really nice guy, and so he wanted to be a good person.

He eventually responded. To, to my email, despite the farty uns scholarly nature of that email. Okay. His first email was very short. It just said, I have no other information on this. Whether or not that’s true, I just don’t know. Bye mic draw. And I was a little worried ’cause I had, in asking him about this very stinky topic, I was worried that I offended him.

He’s a really cool scholar. I, I don’t wanna. Offend him and we have a good relationship. So I sent him a follow up email, just kind of meekly apologizing for broaching the topic and he was like, oh no, it’s no problem. Also, have you seen this? And he sent me an article where someone in France translated another Chinese fart poll.

This one is called this Rhapsody of the Stinky Fart Fu, and this stinky fart Rhapsody poem is even stinkier than the PS pole fart joke. So I guess what I’m saying is if I hear a cry from more fart poetry or if I’m just, or if I’m just struggling to be inspired by something other than fart poetry, Yahoo may hear another fart podcast, but not this month.

This month we are going to talk about a short story. It’s kind of a novella. It’s a long short story or a short novella. I’m not, not really sure which. The story is called Folding Beijing. It’s by Howing Run. The story created quite a bit of stir in China a couple of years back. So Ho Jing Fang, let me briefly introduce her.

She has won several. Major awards, the Galaxy Awards, the Nebula Awards. Not only that, she’s quite the smart cookie. She was at Chinua University as an undergrad. Chiqua is kind of China’s, MIT. The, the equivalency is not exact, but that just kind of gives y’all an understanding of how highly ranked Chino is amongst Chinese universities.

How did graduate work again at Chinua, this time in astrophysics and she has a PhD in economics, in management, also from Chinua, and she works in a think tank most recently. So a really smart person folding Beijing is her most famous work. Uh, was a finalist for the Hugo Award and the Sturgeon Award. Both major awards.

In the science fiction community I’D a dystopian sci-fi novella. The story goes like this, it said in Beijing. Here’s what’s surprising though. The story is highly critical of contemporary Chinese society from a class angle. The story is about a Beijing that’s constructed out of three different spaces and all of these three spaces.

Occupy a specific period of time over a period of two days, and each of the three gets its period of time every two days. So that allows these three different segments of Beijing, which are really three different segments of Beijing society to exist at different times. There is a rich. Beijing, that’s called First Space.

It has about 5 million people. It lasts from 6:00 AM of day, one of the cycle to 6:00 AM of day two of the cycle. First space gets lots of time. Half of this two day cycle is given over to. First Space It is. First space is for rich folks. Those 5 million people who live in First Space Beijing are all rich during this time.

That first space is in existence. It’s not folded up. It’s open The. Two other spaces, space two and Space three. That is middle class. Beijing and poor Beijing are essentially shut down and everyone who lives in in second space and third space is, is asleep and their Beijing is literally folded up. So middle class Beijing, that second space wakes up at 6:00 AM on day two, middle class Beijing second space has 25 million people and it occupies the time period.

6:00 AM on the second day to 10:00 PM on the second day. Like I said, this is called Second Space, first Space. Beijing and Third Space Beijing are asleep when Second Space is open and running. The final space is third space. This is poor Beijing. It has about 50 million people. The time period that it’s open is only from 10:00 PM On the second day of the cycle to 6:00 AM on the first day of the cycle.

Poor Beijing is forced to clean up after both first space and second space. So that’s the setting of folding Beijing. You have these class. Oriented spaces. And when one of them is open, the other two are closed down and it, it’s very much about class, like First Space has lots of time and it’s Rich.

Second Space has less time and it’s middle class. Third Space has almost no time and its poor Beijing also. Third Space is. Really dedicated mostly to cleaning up after first and second space. So when we jump into the narrative, the story begins with a guy named Lauda. He works in a waste processing station in Third space.

Remember I said third Space is mostly dedicated to cleaning up after first and second space. Beijing Laal works from 11:00 PM to 4:00 PM so he has only three hours every two days that he can take. Care of personal matters, stuff like eating, buying anything he needs. That’s it. Five hours of work every two days, three hours of of personal time, and then the rest of the time he is in third space, folded up and asleep.

Initially, the scene that the author Hoing Fung paints for us when we enter the story, I. We’re in third space, Beijing, and the the portrait that how offers us is of an older Beijing. It’s one that for those of y’all who went to China before 2010, y’all will immediately recognize this as a Chinese urban space that’s still fairly poor.

You have food hawkers, you have plastic tables. People are bargaining over how much something ought to cost. This feels like an old. Beijing, or really like a second or third tier city, Lauda, the protagonist. He’s been skipping meals in order to pay for his child’s kindergarten. Suddenly he comes upon a way to make a lot of money.

All he has to do is do something that’s illegal, that is go and carry a message from second space to first space. In order to pay for his daughter’s kindergarten, he takes on the job, he’s gonna get paid something like a hundred thousand. A REM B for this. That’s a lot of money. Even today. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.

So for someone living in third space, Beijing, that’s really quite a bit of money he takes on the job he’s offered initially a hundred thousand REM MB. That’s $1,370. At the moment that I’m recording, and if he is able to get a message back from First Space to third space without getting caught, then he’s gonna get double that.

So 200,000 MB or 2000 something dollars. So he finds a guy who’s. In Third Space, who he knows, he has this connection to a guy named P Li, a 60 something year old guy who has been to First Space before. He tries to find out from him how to go in between the worlds and P li tells him, Hey, you have to scramble to a part of Beijing where the worlds are actually being folded.

This allows for you to move between spaces. Of course. This is illegal and it’s closely monitored by the police, so you have to be very, very careful. The message he’s carrying is from a man in second space to a woman in third space, and of course it’s about love, no surprise, but the real seduction that this story focuses on is the love of money, particularly for poor folks who don’t have money.

Those poor folks who are in Third Space, I’m just gonna read you a quote. He looked at the money again. The five thin notes were spread on the table like a broken fan. He could sense the power they had over him. They were baby blue in color, distinct from the brown thousand yen note and the red hundred yen.

Note. These bills looked deeper, most distant somehow. Like a kind of seduction several times he wanted to stop looking at them and leave, but he couldn’t. What’s so fascinating about this story is it’s clearly a trenchant criticism of class in modern Chinese society, and this is a society that’s run by a communist party, a party that took over China more than seven decades ago promising it would eliminate class and make the country a classless society.

Of course it didn’t. As the story points out, class is still very much a thing and that’s one of the reasons why this story has taken off and become so popular and made Hoing Fung so famous. Another thing that’s fascinating about this story is this is a criticism of, of. Class in modern Chinese society and the CCP is generally not fond of criticism.

It has a censorship regime that can normally censor criticism like this. So how is it that Hoing Fang is able to get away with this? As far as I know, this story has not been censored at all. Why? So Megan Walsh, who is a friend of the podcast, she was on an episode we did way back in 2022. Walsh has a great book on contemporary Chinese fiction called The Subplot, where she argues that there are two reasons that Chinese science fiction has found a place on the bookshelves of Western readers, whereas other forms of.

Chinese literature haven’t really gotten to the bookshelves of Westerners quite as much. One of the things she argues is that the science fiction genre in China is less censored. So stories like folding Beijing are to censors in the CCP not as threatening, despite the fact that this is clearly about. A real world.

It literally has the name Beijing in the story’s title. But because it’s not about the real Beijing, it’s about some made up futuristic Beijing. It’s not dealing in the realism of typical literary fiction, but rather it’s, it’s, it’s basing the setting on a science fiction form of Beijing. That somehow makes it less threatening to the Chinese state.

I’m not gonna say too much more about this story, it’s fairly long. You should definitely go check it out. Link in the podcast [email protected], where you can find a free translation of it. There’s a science fiction magazine where it was translated in. There’s also a, a collection of short stories where it’s been translated in which you can buy if you like.

I’ll put both of those up. This is a good place to start. To wrap up the podcast. If you liked the show, send me an email, Chinese literature [email protected]. If you hated it, also please send me an email at that same email address. Normally I end the show with a Chung Yu. This time I’m gonna end with something that’s technically not a Chang Yu.

It’s a famous line from a poem. This is from a FU poem called

The Line, and I’m translating it here is within the red gates. The booze and the meat are rotting and going to waste. Outside on the road. There are the bones of those who have frozen to death.

This is a poem that is commonly brought up when Chinese writers want to criticize economic inequality in the poem. The rich have so much that, that they’re letting it go to waste while just outside the poor are struggling so much that they’re there freezing to death. It’s a fascinating poem and like how Jing Fong’s folding Beijing.

It’s a criticism of economic inequality. That’s a good place to end it. My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.