Australian Centre on China in the World, The Australian National University

This talk examines how intimacy becomes a site of governance in contemporary Sinophone speculative fiction. Rather than treating intimacy as a private or purely affective domain, I explore how it is increasingly regulated by state power and techno-capitalist systems. Focusing on works by Hon Lai-Chu (韓麗珠), He Jing-Bin (賀景濱), and Chi Ta-Wei (紀大偉), I analyze how intimacy and interpersonal relations are monitored, structured, and controlled through technological intervention, often in ways deeply entangled with corporate and governmental power. In some cases, technology appears to open up new forms of agency; in others, it traps subjects within increasingly complex systems of state regulation, technological surveillance, and the instability of identity. In dialogue with these earlier works, the second part of the talk turns to my own speculative fiction—Contactless Intimacy and my work-in-progress, Unquantifiable Distance—as a form of critical practice. By imagining a system in which intimacy is quantified and translated into social value, my writing explores how dominant sexual and romantic scripts are produced, naturalized, and enforced, while also asking how alternative modes of relationality might be imagined. By bringing together literary analysis, critical theory, and creative practice, this talk proposes a speculative framework for understanding intimacy as a contested, governable, and programmable domain in the Sinofuturist world.

About the Speaker

Hsin-Hui Lin is a science fiction writer and researcher, currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. She received her Ph.D. in Taiwanese Literature from National Chengchi University and was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (2022–2023). Her doctoral dissertation, Porous Bodies: Rethinking Taiwanese Science Fiction through New Materialist Politics, examines how Taiwanese science fiction imagines bodily permeability, disaster, and shifting boundaries between the human, the nonhuman, and the environment through a new materialist framework. She is the author of the sci-fi novel 'Contactless Intimacy' (2023), with an Italian translation, Intimità senza contatto, published in 2025. Her debut book, 'Human Glitches' (2020), won the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award for Books, one of Taiwan’s major literary prizes. Her creative and critical work explores the blurring boundaries between humans and nonhumans in the contemporary technological era. Lin also frequently publishes reviews and essays in major media outlets, examining the intersections of literature, visual art, and technology.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.