I wanted to collect my thoughts on the Hugos corruption scandal and some responses so here we are. Hi.
Firstly, the credulous racism and ignorance on display in those emails is shameful. I have no idea how you even go about fixing it, given a quick scan of comments on either of the linked posts makes it very obvious that such attitudes are commonplace and not just accepted but also encouraged in the community. The number of people smugly making Nineteen Eighty-Four jokes or blaming Chengdu as a whole for a corruption scandal that appears to have been enthusiastically undertaken by Western volunteers is staggering. This is a group of people who very transparently did not engage with Chinese fans, institutions, or bureaucracy with an understanding of these fans as people and these institutions as institutions run by, you guessed it, people; instead, they appear to have decided they already knew all about China and its censorship apparatus and made decisions based on the criteria that exist in their heads. It's a remarkably clear demonstration of modern Orientalism, white people shadowboxing their idea of China and Chinese people.
Beyond that, though, I find the willingness of everyone on that email chain to go along with a stated desire to subvert the will of Worldcon voters, with no questioning even in the face of what reads like a casual admission of having done so before, genuinely shocking. This is a group of people who are behaving in a casually corrupt way while agreeing with each other that they "have to" because their host country is corrupt. Really bad stuff, but also just ignorant, and the community response has been nearly as ignorant.
China's not Soviet Russia and the US is not in a Cold War with them. This is an important thing to remember because the reality is that there is travel and business between China and the "West" every day. There are norms for how to do business in China, there are many people with extensive experience of having done so, and plenty of these people are in SFF fandom. One of my political frustrations with leftists is the perception of China as this deeply other, communist place, because when I go to work and talk with guys selling and setting up software in China, the perception is very much "yeah the rules are different but we know how to work with them". The perception of utter foreignness is just that, a perception, based in ignorance and racism. There's really no excuse for this Cletus the slack-jawed yokel approach to holding a con in China. Ask around! Find people who've done it before! Or, like, take an entry-level bank teller's training on how not to get got by the FDIC, because "accepting gifts and doing corruption on behest of unnamed Chinese counterparts" is breathtakingly stupid.
This stupidity extends to people discussing how to fix it. It is not impossible to accept nominations, take votes, and award people in your industry. Industries do this every day. The first question should be "how can we bring our process in line with an auditable standard", not "how can we invent a voting system from whole cloth". Again, this is ignorance, and everyone being so ignorant should be a lot more embarrassed than they currently are.
It's just all profoundly depressing. And I can't stop thinking about the Chinese fans who wanted this event in part because they don't actually want to be isolated from Western fandom. Not only did the people actually responsible for running Worldcon screw the pooch in a dozen different ways, but Western fandom as a whole acted the racist fool towards Chinese fans. The sneering and contempt is fucking unbearable; that would be the case no matter what, but it's particularly remarkable given that the responsible Western parties used "Chinese laws" as a cover for their own cheerful corruption.
And personally, now I'm left wondering things like:
- How often has this nomination harvesting happened before? Is it even possible to prove that previous Hugos did not involve nominations being thrown away based on vibes and personal bias?
- How can anyone in SFF trust Worldcon as an institution, knowing not just that this corruption was treated so casually but also that no one in charge seems aware that there are common standards for auditing and redundancy that help prevent such issues?
- Is there any point to even paying attention to Worldcon and all it produces, including the Hugos, given the reactionary, dull-witted racism on display from its decision-makers?
Shameful.
