BEIJING – Disillusioned with humanity, a Chinese physicist working at a secret military base during the Cultural Revolution initiates contact with a technologically superior alien civilisation.
This sets off a chain of events that puts the fate of humanity in the balance, in a cosmic tale that has enthralled millions of readers worldwide, and is now being watched by countless others in a Netflix TV adaptation.
The critically acclaimed The Three-Body Problem, by Chinese computer engineer Liu Cixin, has been translated into more than 26 languages since it was first serialised in Science Fiction World, the longest-running professional Chinese sci-fi magazine, in 2006.
The Netflix series – which features a largely Western cast – aired on March 21, drawing renewed interest in the Remembrance Of Earth’s Past trilogy, which The Three-Body Problem is part of, and in the burgeoning Chinese sci-fi scene that has gone mainstream and become lucrative.
In 2022, the industry in China recorded 87.75 billion yuan (S$16.6 billion) in revenue, mainly from films, novels and video games.
The Chinese government has backed the industry: Beijing sees the potential for the genre to spread soft power and as a necessary ingredient in its aspiration to be a science and technology powerhouse.
China’s sci-fi ambitions were on full display with the hosting of the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, in Chengdu city in October 2023, bringing the premier gathering of sci-fi fans to China for the first time since its inception in 1939.
But ever-greater restrictions on freedom of expression in the country have also led to questions over whether the development of Chinese sci-fi could be stifled, just as its moment in the spotlight has arrived.
Sci-fi flying high
The sci-fi buzz was palpable at the five-day Worldcon, held in a museum in a 392.5ha sci-fi park that took just under two years to build.
The futuristic, nebula-shaped structure was purpose-built for the event. Hopping robot dogs and drum-beating automatons fascinated children inside the cavernous halls, which were filled with artwork depicting other-worldly cities and cyborg dinosaurs.
This surge in interest in sci-fi was fuelled by Liu’s unexpected success.
His trilogy, often simply called “Three-Body”, received plaudits from fans and critics alike for its imaginative blend of hard science with epic storytelling of the potential fates of human and alien civilisations.
Sci-fi researcher and translator Emily Jin said that before The Three-Body Problem, sci-fi as a genre in China was viewed very much as a subculture, “a small circle of people having fun on the Internet”.
That was before the series was endorsed by well-known personalities such as former US president Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which led readers in the Anglophone world to become more curious about other Chinese works, she said.
“No one predicted that The Three-Body Problem would come this far,” said Ms Jin, who is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale University, adding that there were initial difficulties in finding translators for the novel because of a lack of funding.
“Market demand played a significant role in growing the interest in Chinese sci-fi. The Anglophone audience became interested in other works (because of Three-Body).”
Ms Jin said Chinese government efforts to promote the industry were just one factor behind the sci-fi resurgence. “It’s a common misunderstanding to frame it as ‘because the government is behind this, and because it’s all going political, that’s why it has become popular’.”
It is not hard to see why such perceptions arose.
Not only did the government back the sprawling sci-fi park in Chengdu, it unveiled a national plan in 2020 for promoting sci-fi films with measures such as tax support and funds for talent cultivation. It also pushed efforts such as the China Science Fiction Research Institute – the first such institute in the country – established in 2019 in Sichuan University, to promote Chinese sci-fi literature and guide industry development.
China’s sci-fi industry revenue has ballooned over the years, despite an initial dip during the Covid-19 pandemic
Award-winning Canadian sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer, who was one of the guests of honour at the Worldcon in Chengdu, said the government support is related to a longer-term vision: China’s ambitions to be a technological superpower. The country has stepped up investment and research into areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep-sea mining and space exploration in recent years.
Sawyer said: “I’ve been told by government officials here that their concern is that so many people want to go into finance, international relations, commerce or related industries, and they feel that the future of China is in science, engineering and technology.
“They’ve seen that in the West, the whole generation that made the Apollo space programme and computing revolution possible were readers of sci-fi in their youth, so there has been an embracing of sci-fi by the government here, which is so positive to see.”
At the heart of the sci-fi scene is the sizeable youth and grassroots participation that was evident at the Worldcon in Chengdu, the capital of the south-western province of Sichuan. The event drew more than 20,000 fans from 35 countries in five days.
Billed as the spiritual centre of Chinese sci-fi, Chengdu was the birthplace of the monthly magazine Science Fiction World, which has been in publication since 1979. Along with another magazine, Science Fiction Cube, it features primarily Chinese works.
Sci-fi societies in Chinese universities date back to 1993, when the first – and still one of the most thriving today – was founded at Sichuan University. The society’s president and members manned a busy booth at the recent Worldcon, selling merchandise and a 30th-anniversary copy of their magazine.
Another booth featured the Chinese Science Fiction Database, an online passion project started in 2020 by a group of Chinese fans to register all sci-fi works published in the Chinese language. It recorded 655 sci-fi books published in China in 2023 alone.
Compared with the sci-fi fans in North America, which still dominates the global sci-fi scene, Chinese sci-fi fans are younger. An estimate by a dedicated fan called RiverFlow, who runs the award-winning Zero Gravity Newspaper fanzine, said that more than 350 college sci-fi societies have been established in China, including 97 that are currently active.
“Sci-fi must be sci-fi for sci-fi fans. The group that buys the largest number of sci-fi books and magazines in China each year is young,” RiverFlow told industry magazine Clarkesworld in a recent interview.
Attending the Worldcon was a moving experience for university freshman Kyrie Yang, whose interest in space and aviation started in primary school.
“Typically, sci-fi fans are all around the world, and in a class or even a school, there aren’t usually so many of us in one place. Coming here, I feel that we, sci-fi fans, are not alone,” he told The Straits Times at the convention.
Though he did not get to meet Liu because of the long line at his book-signing session – stretching into the thousands at one point – Mr Yang said: “It’s okay, at least I caught a glimpse of him in the flesh.”
The new wave of fans marks the remarkable resilience of the genre, which dates back at least 120 years in China.
Scholars trace it to the publication in the late Qing Dynasty of The Future Of New China, which imagines a “New China” in 1962 that is a technologically advanced world power. This unfinished 1902 novel by official and intellectual Liang Qichao is now seen as the first Chinese sci-fi novel.
Chinese sci-fi received a boost in 1978 with the opening of the Chinese economy to the outside world. Science and technology were given national-level attention in the late 1970s as one of the Four Modernisations announced by China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai.
At the time, however, Chinese science fiction was written neither as high literature nor for mass consumption. It was basically limited to children’s literature and seen primarily as a means of disseminating scientific knowledge, wrote Professor Wu Yan in a 2022 book on the history of Chinese sci-fi in the 20th century.
But since the 1990s, efforts have been made by practitioners to take sci-fi beyond its didactic purpose to be read for its own sake, said the academic at Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology. He himself is an accomplished sci-fi writer and the first scholar to design a science fiction studies course in China.
“We wanted to shift the thinking: The value of sci-fi is not in spreading scientific concepts, but in cultivating new ways of thinking, innovation and imagination,” said Prof Wu. “In these few years, I feel that we’re seeing some results. Now, nobody really says that sci-fi is just science popularisation.”
Notable Chinese sci-fi titles, including novels and films, that have gained recognition in the last two decades
A tightening regime?
Despite the successes, a recent controversy over the unexplained disqualification of works and authors from the prestigious Hugo Awards, whose winners are decided by Worldcon members and honoured at the yearly convention, has thrust the issue of censorship in China into the spotlight.
Four nominees, including Babel by Chinese American author R.F. Kuang, which was tipped for the Best Novel award, were announced as ineligible when the full results were released on Jan 20. None of the excluded nominees were Chinese citizens, although two have Chinese ancestry.
Babel is a historical fantasy novel that follows a Chinese boy raised in England. In this alternate timeline, the study of languages creates magic that sustains the 19th-century British Empire, which clashes with China in the First Opium War.
While no reasons were given by the administrative committee for the exclusions from the awards, the unprecedented event sparked outrage among international fans, who believed the entries had been dropped on political grounds. The committee included members of the Chinese sci-fi community.
A February 2024 investigative report by two American journalists, published in sci-fi fanzine File 770, concluded that foreign members of the committee may have helped to disqualify the nominees.
One of the journalists, sci-fi writer Jason Sanford, said that while it was clear that censorship had taken place, it was unlikely to have been done at the behest of the Chinese government or the local authorities.
“It appears that it was the Western members of the team who had assumed what would be politically sensitive in China,” he said.
While the dust has yet to settle fully on the episode, the Chinese government has in recent years stepped up control of narratives, including how China and its actions are viewed internationally, and operates an extensive censorship regime over online access.
But an award winning Chinese sci-fi writer, who declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, says the fear of censorship need not be a hindrance to the flourishing of the genre.
In China, censorship is tight over issues that are perceived as able to incite social unrest or political dissent, such as protests and demonstrations, as well as criticism of government policies, for instance, about Covid-19.
Some works of sci-fi do deal with political events, or address socio-political issues squarely.
In Wang Jinkang’s The Reincarnated Giant (2006), the protagonist is a ruthless industrial tycoon who is obsessed with the search for eternal life, and whose brain is transplanted into the body of an infant so that he can continue living.
But he eventually eats so much that his body becomes as big as an island and collapses upon itself. The novelette has been read as a critique on capitalist market reforms in contemporary China by one of Chinese sci-fi’s most prominent writers.
Bao Shu’s What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear, published in English in 2015, is a Chinese man’s narration of how his life intersects with major global events, including a first-hand account of the bloody Tiananmen protests of 1989 – a topic which remains heavily censored in China.
The Chinese sci-fi writer who declined to be named said that any choosing of topics or themes must be done with serious consideration, adding that the limitations and boundaries may, ironically, help to stimulate creative expression.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of frame you’ve been given, because there is still a very large canvas you can work on – it’s just that there are a few potholes which you don’t want to step into. You can build all sorts of things in the remaining space.”
With competition between the United States and China growing in recent years, reading Chinese sci-fi via a political lens has become increasingly common, especially by an Anglophone audience.
In particular, there has been much debate among academics and political observers on how Chinese sci-fi works can provide insights into Chinese politics as well as Beijing’s view of the world.
Ms Jin, the Yale researcher and translator, takes issue with the assumption that Chinese sci-fi should be read primarily through a political lens, noting that international audiences may be primed to do so because of geopolitical events.
People try to shoehorn Chinese sci-fi into the model that’s created for their image of contemporary China, such that these works are no longer read as sci-fi – whose entire premise is still fiction, entertainment and literary expression. A lot of that has fallen under an effort, by readers both in and outside China, to view it as some kind of tortured political allegory.
The Netflix adaptation of Three-Body has also divided Chinese fans. Some were unhappy with the raw portrayal of a Maoist struggle session during the Cultural Revolution. Others felt the use of an international cast and basing the story in London glorified Western countries for saving the world.
Author Chen Qiufan, one of the leading voices in the field, believes that reading Chinese sci-fi works purely through the political lens of contemporary China risks undervaluing their universality.
While his 2013 debut work, The Waste Tide, bases the fictitious Silicon Isle on the real town of Guiyu in Guangdong province, the novel could have been set anywhere, he argued.
The novel tackles the theme of the pollutive effects of electronic waste recycling, of which Guiyu, near where he grew up, was the epicentre. The government has since made efforts to clean up the industry.
“This is the value of sci-fi – it could be set in a very specific location, nation or society, but it’s about everyone on this planet. It’s beyond China-US relations, even beyond humans; it’s talking about universal stories, not only about humans but also about AI, machines and other species,” Chen said.
The shadow of Liu Cixin
Censorship aside, the success of Chinese sci-fi’s biggest superstar has cast a long shadow.
At the Worldcon, rock star treatment was reserved for Liu, who arrived at his three-hour book signing session amid tight security. Spontaneous cheers erupted when he appeared, sporting a characteristically low-key black blazer and black square glasses.
“He can sign for only 400 people, and there are already 3,000 people in the queue at this point. Please do not queue any more!” a crowd-control worker told undeterred fans.
The search for the next Three-Body – something that would have a similar impact on literature and the industry – continues. An industry report in 2022 found that 70 per cent of Chinese science fiction reading can be attributed to Three-Body.
Where the next such smash hit would come from, and the form it would take, has been actively debated in the industry.
Associate Professor Wang Yao of Xi’an Jiaotong University, who researches contemporary Chinese science fiction literature, believes The Three-Body Problem may be the last of its kind in a writing tradition concerned with adherence to Golden Age conventions, such as space travel and technological advancement. Such “hardcore sci-fi” has been on the decline, she noted.
The problem of finding the next Three-Body is not one that is limited to Chinese sci-fi writers. It extends to those writing in other countries, she said.
We are not really seeing narratives that are really new, revolutionary, and can overturn current ways of thinking and allow us to see hope for the future. It’s more like repeating classic prepositions – it’s old wine in new bottles.
Prof Wang said it was difficult to think of another work replicating what Three-Body had done – being original and ground-breaking while achieving widespread recognition and success. Instead, science fiction scholars should cast a wider net for work of value, she said.
“We must encourage works that are different from Three-Body. For us as researchers, we should look at different territories and uncover the meaning behind works and authors that are more niche and on the fringes – these might be the sci-fi of the future.”
For now, Chinese fans remain hooked on the trilogy, which is still discovering new audiences.
Construction engineer Zhang Yuqing, 24, who took leave from work to attend Liu’s book signing but was disappointed because she had not joined the queue early enough, said she started reading The Three-Body Problem in high school.
Asked if she would consider herself a sci-fi fan or a Liu Cixin fan, she said: “Currently, I’m only a Three-Body fan – I don’t even read much of Liu’s other works. Once I fell into the rabbit hole, my loyalty was sewn up.”
In an earlier version of the story, we said that terrorists struck the World Trade Centre twin towers in 2011. This is incorrect. It should be 2001. This has been corrected.
