TBF they did a "decent" job filtering, Zhao has youtube videos with 100,000s of views where she labels Xinjiang "genocide", Kuang graduated from Georgetown Scho

TBF they did a "decent" job filtering, Zhao has youtube videos with 100,000s of views where she labels Xinjiang "genocide", Kuang graduated from Georgetown School of Foreign Policy, aka her credentials make her potential US propaganda mouthpiece. If local committee eventually got involved in censorship, they would have removed those two from nomination list. PRC nationalist (which I imagine have high overlap with scifi) love trolling PRC diasphora, especially female (especially reporters/media), who carries water for US narratives. These two are basically PRC version of sad/rabid puppies, I feel like they would have been made ineligbile at some point in the filtering process. There was no way anyone involved who did basic due diligence would have allowed either on the slate.