13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
China's sci-fi industry shoots for the stars as Beijing pushes ‘quality' growth
When Alida Guo first discovered Liu Cixin's groundbreaking sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem in high school, she was captivated. The plot proved so irresistible that she hid a copy behind her history textbooks, turning classes into covert missions to decode the 'Trisolaran crisis' – named after the fictional alien civilisation that threatens Earth.
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'The physics element went over my head, but the story stuck with me – it's so Chinese that it resonates, yet so visionary that it challenges how we see tomorrow. That's why sci-fi matters,' said Guo, who is now 24 years old and works at a robotics company in the southern city of Shenzhen.
Like many Chinese of her generation, Guo discovered science fiction through the award-winning 2008 novel – the first in Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
It became her gateway into the sci-fi world, inspiring her to explore more books, TV series and films in the popular genre.
As more people chart a similar path,
China's sci-fi market has blossomed into the booming industry it is today, making it a potential growth point for consumption.
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The industry saw 108.96 billion yuan (US$15 billion) in revenue in 2024, a 65.4 per cent increase compared to five years earlier, according to a report released on March 29 at the annual China Science Fiction Convention in Beijing.
