乔治亚大学的中国政治学教授Rongbin Han在其著作《Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism》中，研究了一种流行的科幻类型。他查看了一个顶级网路小说评论平台上最受欢迎的2,100部作品，发现其中有238个故事，主角把技术知识、先进的政治理论和经济改革理念带回古代中国或较近的历史时期。Han说，他本人已经读过其中70多本这类另类历史小说，另外还读了几十本其他网路小说作比较，并表示这些另类历史小说的平均字数为2.88百万字，约等于整套Harry Potter中文版的篇幅。
Han分析了每部小说的线上评论，并研究政府如何审查、吸纳并宣传它们。他说，主导性的叙事结构本质上就是「Make China Great Again」，并得出结论：这些小说透过呼应民族主义宣传、并适应审查压力，成为普通人为中国共产党及其权力正名的一种方式。他还说，这一类型大多由男性作者写给以男性为主的读者，而那些让女性回到历史中的故事则大多被排除在外，因为它们并没有试图拯救中国脱离危机。
Han说，中国的明朝成为最受欢迎的时代之一，在他所看的标题中约占四分之一。他谈到《The Morning Star of Lingao》，其中500人回到明朝，试图更早把工业革命带到中国；也谈到《Red Dawn》，其中一名主角回到1905年，试图比中国真实历史更早发动共产革命。Han说，因为讨论政治意识形态往往被视为敏感，《Red Dawn》已被网路小说平台下架，但它仍在盗版网站上广泛被阅读；他还说，审查甚至可以延伸到PRC统治下的前30年。
Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examined a popular science fiction genre in his book Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism. Looking at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform, he found 238 stories in which main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Han said he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels for comparison, and said the alt-history books have an average word count of 2.88 million characters, about the length of the entire Harry Potter series in Chinese.
Han analyzed online comments on each novel and studied how the government censored, co-opted, and promoted them. He said the dominant narrative structure is essentially 'Make China Great Again,' and concluded that the novels function as a way for ordinary people to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party and its power by echoing nationalist propaganda and adapting to censorship pressures. He also said the genre is mostly written by male writers for majority-male readers, while stories with women traveling back in history were mostly excluded because they did not try to save China from crises.
Han said China’s Ming dynasty emerged as a favorite, appearing in about a quarter of the titles he looked at. He discussed The Morning Star of Lingao, in which 500 people traveled back to the Ming dynasty to try to bring the industrial revolution to China earlier, and Red Dawn, in which a main character goes back to 1905 to start a Communist revolution earlier than in actual Chinese history. Han said Red Dawn was removed from web novel platforms because discussion of political ideologies is often deemed sensitive, but it remained widely read on pirated websites, and he said censorship can reach the first 30 years under PRC rule.