The censorship barrier doesn't prevent Chinese art from getting out of China, it prevents Chinese art from being particularly good in the first place. The firs

The censorship barrier doesn't prevent Chinese art from getting out of China, it prevents Chinese art from being particularly good in the first place. The first volume of The Three Body Problem is looking like the most successful work of Chinese fiction in English translation for the past thirty years (and that includes the books of a certain Nobel prize-winner). I chalk that up largely to the fact that it is science fiction: sci-fi fans know that the book is ultimately going to fit a familiar mold. The China-specific stuff is just special sauce, something unusual and interesting. Readers are still confident that they'll get aliens and physics and interstellar war, and they aren't disappointed. By the time they reach the third volume, and the story starts to fly off the handle, they may be disappointed. Chinese literary fiction leaves readers confused from the start. It's often messily written, over-ambitious, blunt-toothed, and doesn't read well in English. Some of that is attributable to a general disregard of writing-as-craft in China, some of it to poor English translations, but much of it to political pressure.