According to London-based science-fiction scholar Lavie Tidhar, China has experienced a rise in the production of, and interest in, science fiction since the late 1980s. Mao Zedong and his supporters encouraged science fiction as a "literature of development" in the 1950s as China embarked on a program of industrialization. However, the idiom went into decline during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), only to undergo a revival with the rise of Chairman Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in 1997, Deng proclaimed "science and technology is the number one productive force" and science fiction as a way to spark the scientific imagination.

This practical aesthetic continues to this day, according to Sawyer. "Chinese readers prefer hard science-fiction, with real science rigorously extrapolated," he observed, and "and they're partial to optimistic views of the future." In fact, "the domestic science-fiction is very much at the stage science-fiction was in the 1950s in the United States - lots of spaceships, robots and aliens." Moreover, when it comes to foreign authors, whatever courses taught on science-fiction in Chinese universities tend to focus on "old-guard" authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, instead of Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, homosexuality, AIDS, drugs, religious practices and positive references to Taiwan are avoided as topics or, if addressed at all, are presented as "a foreign problem," according to Tidhar.

Still, the situation is ripe for change, Sawyer noted. William Gibson's pioneering cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was authorized for official publication in China in 1999 - 15 years after its debut in North America - and it's spawned a host of Chinese emulators. Moreover, "with its tools of disguise and metaphor - setting stories in the future or with alien civilizations - the genre allows discussion of issues that might not be otherwise openly broached," Sawyer said.