Angela YT Chan 
My paper, delivered at the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) conference ‘Beyond Borders’ (2020), is now published in the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) journal, the SFRA Review. I explore the ecological, socio-political, and cultural processes relating to climate change, with the specific context of China’s type of environmentalism and I outline the thematic portrayals of climate and environmental issues in key contemporary Chinese SF stories.
‘This paper explores the need for and potential of Chinese SF to address climate justice beyond the current borders of mainland China, to reflect on the country’s own environmental practices internationally, and to gesture towards long term cultural dialogues with the global climate justice movement. Whilst I only focus on one culturally and geographically specific area, my aim is to also offer a critical view on the growing global environmental and climate SF subgenre. I believe it is essential to situate these narratives within the urgent consequences deriving from the realities of geopolitical problems and the worsening climate crisis. Fundamentally, it should reiterate how the global climate injustices that many already disproportionately experience daily are far from being speculative fictions.
I illustrate this through my title frames for discussion: the invisible, extractive, and uneven boundaries that shape the ecological, socio-political, and cultural processes relating to climate change. I also briefly indicate why it is necessary to understand how environmentalism works differently in China compared to other places, in order to better orient our reading of Chinese climate and environmental SF. I then outline the thematic portrayals of climate and environmental issues in key contemporary Chinese SF stories.
For this specific paper, I focus on authors in mainland China, rather than other Chinese-speaking geographies. Drawing from combined literary, social science, and anti-colonial climate research, I explain why Chinese SF writers should look beyond domestic Chinese environmentalism and include geographies of China’s extractive practices in Africa and Southeast Asia. Reflecting on contemporary Chinese SF authors’ and scholars’ ambitions to redefine global SF, I close by encouraging Chinese climate SF to recognise and tell the kinds of worldbuilding stories that defy hegemonies and to develop an intersectional approach to global climate storytelling from one region of the world to another.’
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