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The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

WIRED·Zeyi Yang·about 2 months ago
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If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past. In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism , Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked.…

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