Neil Gaiman on reading SF in China

I used to read a lot of fiction, poetry, and plays and then I went through a period where I didn’t read them at all. Over the past few years I’ve been slowly returning to literature. One the things that’s driving my curiosity is the question of whether and how reading literature can influence strategic thinking and creative thinking in general. When I came across the following quote from writer Neil Gaiman it piqued my curiosity:

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.