Mediated Soft Power A Century of Chinese Science Fiction in Transcultural Trajectory

Imagination has emerged as an essential facet of soft power, as the effort to influence collective visions of the future becomes a key arena of global cultural competition. As the vehicle of national imagination, Chinese science fiction (SF) originated during the late Qing Dynasty through the translation of Western SF, and has developed into a strategic medium for projecting cultural narratives across borders today. Anchored in digital globalisation, media convergence and participatory culture have reshaped cultural dissemination into a decentralised and globally participatory model, which has reconfigured how soft power is acquired, cultivated and maintained, shifting the focus not merely to cultural attractiveness per se, but increasingly to the ability to expand the channels through which this attraction is shared and to establish credibility. Tracing the century-long transcultural trajectory of Chinese SF, this paper proposes a framework of mediated soft power to reconceptualise the mechanisms through which cultural influence operates across borders. This framework foregrounds a dynamic process of mediation encompassing translation, transmedia circulation and cultural appropriation, and argues that leveraging the participatory affordances of new media, mobilising international fan engagement, and fostering global (re)creations around Chinese SF IPs can endow “Chinese imagination” with enduring dynamism.