LET A HUNDRED SINOFUTURISMS BLOOM

This chapter reviews two decades of discourses and debates around the term sinofuturism. After connecting the term’s emergence to China’s rise on the world stage and contextualizing it in a longer history of techno-orientalist representation, we outline other articulations of China and the future, including futurist ideas in Chinese politics, imaginations of futurity in Chinese science fiction, and sinofuturist aesthetics in contemporary art. By tracing the circulation of this term from its othering formulation through local reappropriations, we conclude that the complex history of sinofuturism reflects the contested and at times contradictory role of future temporalities in China.