Join us for the International History Annual Lecture. The talk will describe some of the more frivolous fantasies of robots, androids, and clones in both East Asian science fiction and science reporting at the start of the twentieth century, doing so as part of a broader consideration of what it meant to be a modern person in an age of 'nation-building', mass production, and speculative science writing.
Modern industry brought many changes to China and Japan, including the rapid dissemination of mass-produced material objects in daily life; this was the age in which the Japanese Marxist intellectual Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke provocatively declared that culture was no longer an emergent phenomenon of social class, but made 'by the engineer's hand'.
In print media, a discourse of artificiality began to take hold of the popular imagination: man-made sunlight, silk (rayon), lungs and hearts, fake diamonds, and processed food heralded a future in which the natural would be superseded. Why not then, many speculative writers asked, artificial people? News media mixed fact and fiction when reporting foreign developments of automatons, robots, and androids, giving credence to the fantasy that the man-made person was imminently going to arrive and transform labour, warfare, and even sexual life. At the same time, changes in East Asia's scientific community, including a larger number of domestically-trained specialists and greater integration with foreign research groups, coincided with the widespread appearance of science magazines.
These science magazines dramatically visualised the artificial age, drawing inspiration from American, British, French, German, and Soviet counterparts, constituting a global culture and perhaps what one calls the 'visionary class'. Vernacularisation movements in literature, rising levels of literacy, and populist movements in the political world created a perfect storm for the consideration of the modern era's artificial person.
Whether mechanical, organic, or even inhuman in its appearance, the fantasy of artificial people pushed the boundaries of what was previously considered to be a human being, inflected by rapid changes in definitions of national subjectivity.
About our speaker:
Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is a comparative historian who has worked with materials in China, Japan, Russia, the US, and Great Britain, publishing on combat soldiers' diaries in Writing War (Harvard, 2013), civilian accounts of air raids in Bombing the City (Cambridge, 2018), and personal documents by wartime children and youth in a number of articles and book chapters.
He has co-edited two new volumes, How Maoism Was Made (Oxford, 2024), which features new work on early PRC Chinese diary writers, and Mass Culture and Intermediality in Interwar Japan (Bloomsbury, 2025), which includes his original translations of the path-breaking intellectual Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke. He is currently finishing a book on transnational wartime youth entitled What Can Be Said, and a series of articles on science fiction, wartime violence, and the memories of Japanese occupation among Taiwanese indigenous communities. His research has been previously supported by the AHRC, British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2014 he was awarded the Leverhulme Prize.
From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.
Whilst we are hosting this listing, LSE Events does not take responsibility for the running and administration of this event. While we take responsible measures to ensure that accurate information is given here this event is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation presenting the event.