If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past. In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked. Han says he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels with other themes for comparison. The alt-history fictions have an average word count of 2.88 million characters, about the length of the entire Harry Potter series in Chinese. It was a lot of work, he tells me, but he really enjoyed the process—when he was in college, online novels were some of the earliest internet content he consumed, and writing this book took him back to his roots. Like Han, my early internet life was shaped by a fixation on online novels. Call them fanfic, slashfic, popcorn novels, or web novels (which seems to be the English translation most widely accepted by the industry itself), these are extremely long, winding tales that are published in daily installments, giving readers a quick regular dopamine hit. The most popular authors have legions of highly engaged fans, who are willing to pay to unlock a chapter every day. Web novels have become a massive and highly profitable industry in China, and many titles have been adapte