It’s impossible to believe that a pro-China author might have been censored at a western organized and operated media event. There’s no way that a wildly popular domestically written and published and Galaxy Award winning sci-fi novel “We Live In Nanjing” got left off the list because it was too pro-China!
No. If novels and authors were excluded from the list - if R. F. Kuang and Jiang Bo didn’t make the list - it must be due to the villainous Chinese censors doing Evil China Stuff, and not a bunch of elderly Euro-Americans felt like trimming the pool back to an almost exclusively western and white author pool.