Science fiction has an important mission to revive China's scientific spirit, a senior official with the China Association of Science and
Technology has said.To get more
china news in english, you can visit shine news official website.
Speaking at the recently concluded Another Planet Science Fiction Convention,
Bai Xi, the head of the CAST's department of science popularization,
praised Hugo Award winner Liu Cixin and other Chinese writers for
unleashing a sci-fi fever that is inspiring the nation's youth. Bai also
highlighted the role of sci-fi in popularizing science, especially as
China strives to become a more innovative country. "Science fiction has
the task of promoting a scientific spirit and way of thinking in
society," he said in a speech to sci-fi writers and fans at the event
held over Saturday and Sunday in Beijing.
The official says that only 16.1 percent of Chinese children wished to become scientists,
citing a People's Daily survey, and added that the figure was lower than
1978 when it stood at 22 percent. Now, China has set the goals of
pushing the scientific literacy rate from 8.47 percent in 2018 to 10
percent by 2020, and to reach an advanced level globally by 2035, and a
leading position by 2050, according to Bai. The Chinese market for
sci-fi literature was valued at 900 million yuan ($130.2 million) in the
first half of 2018, nearing the 970 million yuan figure for 2017, while
sci-fi box office takings in the same period of 2018 was 9.5 billion
yuan, said a report by the Shenzhen-based Southern University of Science
and Technology. Earlier this year, the China-made sci-fi blockbuster,
The Wandering Earth, adapted from Liu Cixin's short story of the same
name, ignited a nationwide craze. And with box-office takings of about
$690 million, it has become the country's second highest-grossing film
of all time. The groundswell of public interest in sci-fi has been
partly attributed to the recent stream of scientific breakthroughs
achieved by China amid a tech boom, including sending the first probe
and rover to the far side of the moon earlier this year. At the
convention, there were discussions whether the sci-fi "Golden Age",
which saw the rise of many sci-fi heavyweights like Isaac Asimov and
Arthur Clarke between the 1940s and the 1960s, could be repeated in
China.
Speaking on the issue, Liu says that if history was a guide, the boom in sci-fi literature and industry accompanied the modernization
of countries like Britain and the United States predicts a similar boom
in China. "In today's China, the future denotes the vast changes of the
present. This strong sense of future is a fertile land for the growth
of sci-fi," says the author of The Three-Body Problem at the conference.
But Ji Shaoting, the founder of the Future Affairs Administration, an incubator for sci-fi writers and the organizer of the conference,
sounds a note of caution: "While now is an ideal era to ponder the
relations between man and technology, we should also guard against the
trend as rapid changes can also make people numb to technology." The
two-day convention attracted China's leading sci-fi writers including
Han Song, Wang Jinkang and Chen Qiufan, as well as an international
line-up including Michael Swanwick and Allen Steele from the United
States; Kelly Robson from Canada, and Taiyo Fujii from Japan.
