Xianxia, Light Novels, and Cultural Models of Competition

The world is, of course, full of competition. Yet there are profound differences in how competition itself is understood. Generally speaking, when one frames a problem, different models produce different definitions of demand and optimization targets, which in turn reshape the subsequent choice of path and mode of optimization. Competition can likewise be modeled through two sharply divergent logics. For convenience, I will call them stock thinking and growth thinking.

The contrast between Chinese xianxia fiction and Japanese light novels makes this difference easy to perceive. Japanese light novels are especially fond of farming stories and merchant stories, such as Spice and Wolf and Ascendance of a Bookworm. Their protagonists usually do not acquire resources through plunder; instead, they accumulate wealth by introducing new technologies: making paper in another world, producing soap, improving crops, and so on. Behind this lies a relatively stable consensus in developed societies: wealth can be created, rather than merely seized from the hands of others.

Broadly speaking, Chinese popular fiction over the past period reflects a society of rapid growth and violent class mobility. People believe that “kings, nobles, generals, and ministers are not born as such,” while also fearing, with equal intensity, that falling behind means being beaten. Its system design is therefore often extremely aggressive and extremely cruel. Japanese works, by contrast, reflect a mature, solidified, even nearly stagnant society. People are already accustomed to the idea that everyone has a place, that is, a division of labor. They are less inclined to fantasize constantly about becoming omniscient and omnipotent gods; they would rather find a comfortable position within a system that still functions reasonably well: opening a cafe, perhaps, or becoming a mid-level adventurer.

What is even more interesting is that the economy of cultivation fiction is, in essence, a worship of hard currency. Spirit stones are the gold standard, and in fact more primitive than the gold standard: they are both a general equivalent and a consumable. Within this worldview, institutional imaginaries such as lending, futures, and insurance are almost entirely absent. Since there is no financial leverage, the main mode of resource circulation is reduced to a single word: seize. Murdering someone and taking their treasure therefore becomes the most efficient form of “asset restructuring.” This is precisely the smallholder economic mentality produced by a deflationary spiral: total resources are limited; if I do not take yours, I will starve. The great powers of xianxia can live for tens of thousands of years, yet they still seem incapable of understanding compound interest, investment, or credit. They merely seal spirit stones away layer upon layer in the depths of their caves.

Why do Chinese authors so rarely write a “Wall Street of the cultivation world” or a “social security bureau of the cultivation world”? Because in the database of the Chinese collective unconscious, there are roughly only two mature architectural blueprints:

1. The Qin-Han commandery-county system and bureaucracy
2. The clan system of rural society

Civil society, contractual spirit, and modern banking are things that have only been hastily patched in over the past few decades.

When authors construct fantasy worlds, they instinctively roll back to the old kernel they know best, the one that feels most “authentic.” Even with an iPhone in hand, the logic running in their heads remains that of the imperial court, the martial world, and the county office. This exposes a kind of cognitive poverty: it is difficult to imagine a society that possesses both supernatural power and modern civilizational institutions. In this sense, China’s modernization remains, to a large extent, a modernization of implements. It has by no means fully reached the modernization of thought structures and social institutions.

Different understandings of competition naturally produce radically different modes of action. If we keep thinking only about how to seize opportunities from others, we will keep reenacting the primitive omnipotence fantasy of the xianxia protagonist: forever anxious about whether we lag behind others on some metric, forever terrified of even the slightest so-called “falling behind.” Yet modern industrial society is, at its root, anti-omnipotence. Each person and each enterprise should do its own work in a highly cohesive and loosely coupled way; abundant middleware, layers of abstraction, and professional specialization are the real face of the modern supply chain. The right question is not “how many things can I do,” but “where am I positioned in the supply chain,” and then how to push the depth of that one thing to its limit until it becomes a moat.

This is why the competitive anxiety of many Chinese people, and of Chinese-style parents in particular, is fundamentally meaningless. They know only that one should outperform others on some metric, yet rarely think seriously about one’s own ecological niche or one’s own track. Their optimization target is always “how omnipotent am I,” rather than “what specific demand can I satisfy.” This is the fundamental fracture between premodernity and modernity, and it is indeed the psychology of an overgrown infant that cannot relinquish the fantasy of omnipotence.