2023 Hugos, etc

[psocoptera]

Kevin Standlee has posted on Dreamwidth - sure looks like he's indirectly confirming Chinese government interference. (Honestly I feel like he's saying fuck you to anyone who thought China could possibly run an honest Worldcon, which feels a little unfair to me, like, I don't know, maybe we-the-voters (in this case not me-the-voter, as I don't attend and don't site-vote) did not thread the needle properly between appropriate skepticism about totalitarian states and outright racism about non-Anglophone fandom, but I think it's good if people were trying to avoid the latter!) I don't even know what I think should happen at this point. A frantic group text thread of all the winners trying to decide if they want to collectively reject their Hugos in retrospect?

Comments

[muccamukk]

It's not fair to people who wanted to see if Chengdu could run the con, and the Sinophobia has been A LOT.

Also, if they wanted to not have the con in China, then they should've organised a credible alternative *before* the eleventh hour! I think a lot of people would've voted for the second racist city in Canada Winnipeg if that ConCom had their shit together six months before they did.

Is there any chance of more answers coming out of the Chengdu ConCom?

(Anyway, hi, I followed you for SF/F book recs, and am now in your comments about Hugos drama. Nice to meet you!)

[glynhogen]

Definitely underplays the outright racism surrounding the bid discussions, and the shenanigans of the attempt to counter Chengdu. (Which doesn't take away from the actual issues with Chengdu as a bid and China as a host country, pretty glaring at the time, but does increase my tendency toward eyerolling.)

[elysdir]

I feel like it’s worth noting that Kevin doesn’t have any inside knowledge about this—he’s only speculating about Chinese gov’t interference, just like the rest of us are.

[elysdir]

I feel like it’s also worth noting that a lot of the things that some people were very sure would happen wrt a Chinese Worldcon didn’t. (Which makes me even more dubious about Kevin’s and other people’s “I told you so” posts.)

In particular, if the Chinese gov’t intervened in the Hugos, they seem to have done so only wrt to the nominations process, and only in certain specific ways.

At various times last year, I saw people claiming things like: the entire ballot was going to consist only of works by Chinese authors; the voting for the final winners was going to be completely controlled by the gov’t (possibly by recruiting thousands of people to vote for only the approved finalists); site selection would result in all future Worldcons being in China; etc.

It’s not that I think those fears were completely ridiculous or that those outcomes couldn’t have happened; on the contrary, I think that if the Chinese gov’t cared enough about the Hugos and Worldcon, it could easily have engineered any of those outcomes.

But it didn’t. As far as we know, the process after the finalists were announced was pretty ordinary. If there was interference after that point, it was apparently pretty subtle. Which led me to (with relief) conclude that the central Chinese gov’t really just didn’t particularly care about the Hugos.

So that leads me to questions like:

If the blatant weirdness of the nominations info is in fact due to heavy-handed and incompetent but thorough gov’t interference, then why did the interferers interfere only in that one particular bit of the process?

The possibility of multiple authorities (perhaps at different levels, perhaps not even gov’t) sticking their hands in to try to achieve multiple different (possibly contradictory) effects might explain some of that. But I feel like the straightforward “the central gov’t stepped in and insisted on the outcome that they wanted” conspiracy theory that some people are propounding doesn’t really make sense to me.