Ji Shaoting, head of the Future Affairs Administration, which owns the social-media account Bucunzai that runs the Sci-fi Spring Festival Gala since 2016. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Birth of a new stage

Back in 2016, when Ji was still a reporter at a State-owned media group, she helped to run the sci-fi branch, the Future Affairs Administration, under a company set up to popularize science, Guokr.

At that time, Ji, a diehard sci-fi fan, had been participating in and organizing sci-fi events for 10 years. She observed that during Spring Festival, sci-fi fans, going back to their hometowns across the country, needed their own way to celebrate the festival. Besides, she had to post new content every day during the holiday.

"So I invited sci-fi writers, who are my friends, to play a chain game. They had to create a short story within 48 hours after they read the previous works," she says.

The topic was "how an alien observer sent to Earth will record Spring Festival".

In 2017, they changed the format's rules. Writers chose titles from the 22 select performances broadcast from previous China Central Television's galas on Lunar New Year's Eve since 1983. It could be a dance, a cross-talk or a short sketch. Teng Ye's Cosmos-branded Cigarette was favored by many readers and was later published in South Korea.

In 2018, Ji created a competition for the sci-fi writers, choosing only one image related to Spring Festival as the topic-Beijing West Railway Station, since high-speed trains are a key means of transport during the festival.

"There were several brilliant works like Cosmic Spring by American-Chinese writer Ken Liu, the Hugo Award winner," Ji says, adding that Liu wrote the story for the Sci-fi Spring Festival Gala 2018. It was also his first time writing for a Chinese platform.