On The Media

Chinese science fiction has gone from a niche, underground genre to the country's hottest new export. On Saturday, at the 8th China Science Fiction Conference hosted in Beijing, an animated presenter unveiled graphs detailing the meteoric rise of the genre, claiming that China had raked in nearly $16 billion in revenue from its sci-fi industry in 2023. And in late March, an adaptation of one of China's  biggest cultural exports, 'The Three Body Problem,' premiered on Netflix. The show, based on a book by Liu Cixin, follows a group of modern-day scientists battling an alien invasion, triggered by one cataclysmic decision made by an aggrieved physicist during the Cultural Revolution in China. The show garnered roughly 15.6 million views in its first week. But the seed of this science fiction craze was first planted in 2008, with the publication of the book, which quickly became an unexpected global phenomenon. The book and its two sequels have exceeded the total sales of all literary works exported by China so