That's the question recently posed by the Guardian.
From the article...
If western capitalism is the victim in much of contemporary science fiction, then China is often the beneficiary. Maureen F McHugh's China Mountain Zhang is surely among the most prescient SF novels of the last century. In McHugh's future, China's command economy dominates the world, and the US has become a secondary power following the Cleansing Winds Campaign, a socialist revolution similar in nature to China's own cultural revolution. At a time when the Occupy movement has taken centre stage in the battle against unbridled capitalism, it's an all too credible scenario (but one McHugh paints in both bright colours and deep shadows; she shows how many of the freedoms and civil liberties now taken for granted in the west might easily be lost in a swing back toward state socialism).
Too often, science fiction views the future from the macro scale, from the standpoints of the movers and shakers shaping its invented worlds. Conversely, McHugh opens China Mountain Zhang with a quote from Albert Camus' The Plague: "A simple way to get to know a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die." The novel's protagonist Rafael Zhang faces the dual problems of a mixed-race heritage and being a homosexual in a world where the first defines him as a second-class citizen, and the second merits "re-education" or even execution.
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