Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw

"Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw should be commended for its innovative approach to China’s literary and cultural history."

Yingying Huang, Lafayette College, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

"Li provides well-researched historical, comparative literary, and national policy contexts, and she explains tie-ins of fiction, comics, and small- and large-screen media productions."

J. C. Kinkley, Portland State University, CHOICE

"This is a solid, rich and inspiring book that complements existing literature in many ways. It is recommended to readers with interests in twentieth-century Chinese literature and popular culture, as well as students of world science fiction."

Qiong Yang, The China Quarterly

"Before Chinese science fiction gained international recognition in the twenty-first century, the genre had first flourished splendidly during the post-Mao thaw. No other scholar has offered such a powerful and sober reflection on this old golden age of Chinese science fiction as Hua Li has in this masterful study of the genre’s history. It is a must-read for anyone interested in modern China and its science fiction culture!"

Mingwei Song, Associate Professor of Chinese, Wellesley College

"In Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw, Hua Li reminds us of the wonders of Chinese science fiction beyond the confines of the ‘boom’ years, tracing the rise and fall of Chinese science fiction production and consumption in the interregnal period between the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the 1983 campaign to eliminate ‘spiritual pollution.’"

Nathaniel Isaacson, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies, North Carolina State University

"Hua Li has filled a lacuna in book-length English-language studies of a turning point in the historical development of Chinese science fiction. By probing representative works of several key science fiction writers and multimedia artists who achieved prominence around 1980, this book reveals that many of the characteristics associated with present-day Chinese science fiction actually appeared in as early as the post-Mao thaw era."

Wu Yan, Professor of Chinese Science Fiction Studies, Southern University of Science and Technology

"After the Cultural Revolution, science fiction and its offshoots enjoyed an astonishing but short-lived resurgence in the People’s Republic of China as both a popular genre and an instrument of the nation-state. Hua Li’s groundbreaking study is an elegantly organized and critically astute cultural history of this moment, demonstrating how it laid the foundations for the twenty-first-century New Wave of Chinese science fiction that has captured the global imagination."

Veronica Hollinger, Co-editor of Science Fiction Studies