China’s sci-fi industry shoots for the stars as Beijing pushes ‘quality’ growth
With successes like The Three-Body Problem, the genre has never been more popular – and authorities have taken note
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.
“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.
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.
While slightly down from its 2023 peak of 113.29 billion yuan, the size of China’s sci-fi market rivalled the annual profit of live-streaming giant Netflix last year.