Quantum Computing and National Allegory: Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy and the Question of Postsocialist Modernity

This essay examines the representation of quantum computing in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, focusing on its allegorical significance that maps questions of national identity and collective consciousness in the context of China’s postsocialist modernity. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concepts of ideologeme and national allegory , the essay explores the distinct conceptual and ideological roles of quantum computing in Chinese postmodernism, as manifested in Liu’s trilogy. These roles diverge from their representations in Western postmodernism, where quantum computing often functions both as a trope and as a technological instrument for probing contingent empirical realities, promising to deconstruct the reified logic of the digital and to grant access to an unmediated truth of modernity. From the postsocialist Chinese perspective instanced in the trilogy, however, quantum computing does not symbolize a quest for the fundamental truth of modernity; rather, it carries geopolitical significance of questioning the predetermined course of neoliberal globalization and reimagining alternative telos of modernity.