I don't think that's true either. I think it was just the first such to get translated to English. I think it's popular because the premise is interesting. The Dark Forest is just part of the vocabulary now, and that's not an accident, it's genuinely worth thinking about and, if not technically new, at least newly popularized.
On a "technicality" front, I'm sure you could find something if you dug through the archives, but really there was no hard modern scifi in China that was heavily published and got any traction until TBP. The party even discouraged fantasy media. I lived there and hung out with nerds, and they were ecstatic when the book came out.
Did you read the wiki link? There's very little, and much of it is more kafka-esque political commentary rather than hard scifi.
I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.
Thank you. It’s amazing that +1bn people with theoretical access to the world’s resources didn’t spontaneously create 10000 sci-fi books. Similar isolation the other way around. Societies are still so isolated (language, culture, political leanings) despite so much integration.
