Aquatic Imaginations: Interrelation of Fiction and Policy in Shaping a Sustainable Future

Water-related issues such as floods and droughts, water rising and water pollution, are global concerns and have all been central targets of Chinese Governmental policy implementation in the last decades (Lee 2021).

Starting with the recognition that finding solutions to water related problems is vital for humanity’s present and future, this study examines the Chinese case as extreme rather than simply exemplary, one particularly significant for its global ramifications.

Building on studies on ecocriticism and Chinese literature and on Climate Fiction in China, IDRA wants to explore the interplay between literary studies and policy studies focusing on what I refer to as “aquatic imaginations”.

This term alludes to both governmental policies marked by a promissory tone aimed at building the best of all possible worlds, one in which “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” (Xi 2022), and the fictional representation of these policies’ aftermath, whether direct or figurative, which end up expressing environmental preoccupations and “ecoambiguities” (Thornber 2012).

By collecting a large corpus of representatives water-related fictional works from the Sinophone world and analyzing them through an ecocritical lens, IDRA's first section will demonstrate how these representations of ravaged oceans, magical tides, rising sea levels and polluted rivers, imbued in varying degrees with a dystopian undertone suffused with hope, represent a measurement of public anxiety towards the limited foresight of the previously mentioned political visions.

IDRA's second section, also focusing on present and future water-related issues, builds on the CoFUTUREs methods to approach “aquatic imaginations” from a different angle: its goal is to showcase, differently to what was seen above, how literary studies can inform policy studies related to the environmental crisis and raise public awareness.