I grew up reading SciFi in both Mandarin and English. In my impression, though not flawless, this series is the only long-form novel produced in China that can stand among the best SciFi literature in the west.
To those who want to try something else, here is an incomplete (personal) list of famous contemporary Chinese Sci-Fi novel authors:
Wang Jinkang (王晋康, quite productive), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆, just started to publish books recent years), Han Song (韩松)
To my surprise, when I wrote this list, I suddenly realized how few names I could think of, even after I looked up in a Chinese website Douban ( http://book.douban.com/tag/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A7%91%E5%B9... ). The truth is: there are quite a few good Sci-Fi writers with a whole bunch of brilliant Sci-Fi short stories in China, but few of them ever writes full-length novels, not to mention "good" or "famous" ones.
So you would say that the article is correct about the lack of science fiction authors in China? Are there any other Mandarin SF novels that you would recommend, even if they don't measure up to the level of "The Three-Body Problem"? I grew up reading exclusively western SF (Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein, Vinge, etc) and reading SF is still one of my favorite pastimes. I took some Mandarin language classes in College, and I'd like to try reading some Chinese SF.
It deserves to reach a larger audience :)