China's sci-fi blockbuster wows audiences, boosted by sci-tech development

A scene from The Wandering Earth II. More than 50 days into its release, China's sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth II has scored big at the box office and aroused heated discussion on social media platforms, drawing attention to the technologies and stories behind the movie. Since its release on Jan 22, the Chinese sci-fi adventure movie remains one of the top trending topics on China's Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo, with views of related topics hitting 250 million. In February, the 2022 China sci-fi industry report was launched, jointly developed by the Beijing-based China Science Fiction Research Center and the Research Center for Science and Human Imagination under the Southern University of Science and Technology in south China's Guangdong Province. Liu Cixin, China's famous sci-fi writer and Hugo Award winner, wrote on his Sina Weibo page: "The creators of The Wandering Earth II are very similar to their characters in the movie, taking great courage and innovative spirit as the engine to push the planet of sci-fi movies into the future."