The first five minutes of the Netflix series “3 Body Problem” were tough to watch.
In the midst of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, I tried not to turn a blind eye to the cold-blooded assault on a physics professor. By the end of it, he was dead, bleeding and with severe wounds all over his head and body. His daughter, also a physicist, witnessed the public execution. She continued to lose her hope for humanity.
I sat and watched this violent scene. I have never seen a so-called struggle session depicted point by point on screen. Also, considering how this series, Netflix's adaptation of his most famous sci-fi work in China, has been received in China, I felt I had to watch it.
On Chinese social media platforms, commenters objected, saying the series was not set entirely in China. The main characters are not all Chinese, but rather racially diverse. One of the main characters had been swapped from a man to a woman, and in their eyes the actress was not beautiful enough. They cited a number of other possible deficiencies.
The Three-Body Problem is an apocalyptic trilogy about humanity's reaction to a coming alien invasion that has sold millions of copies in Chinese and over a dozen other languages, and has been published worldwide. It is one of the most famous Chinese novels. Decades. Barack Obama is a fan. China has few cultural exports that have achieved such great success.
In China, instead of pride and celebration, the Netflix series has been met with anger, ridicule and suspicion. These reactions demonstrate how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public's view of China's relationship with the outside world. They naturally have no pride and get angry too easily. They also take entertainment too seriously and history and politics too lightly. Years of Chinese censorship have also clouded people's understanding of what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
Some commenters have suggested that the main reason this series was made was because Netflix, or rather the Western world, was trying to influence political violence during the Cultural Revolution, which was one of the darkest periods in the history of the People's Republic of China. He said that he wanted to demonize China by showing this.
“Netflix is just pandering to Western tastes, especially in the opening scene,” said an official from the social media platform Weibo.
This blockbuster book and its author, Liu Cixin, enjoy a cult following in China. This is not surprising, since Chinese society is steeped in techno-utopianism, from senior leaders, scientists and entrepreneurs to people on the streets.
The English translation of Volume 1 was published in the United States in 2014. That same year, e-commerce giant Alibaba successfully completed a major initial public offering in New York, and the world began to see China as an emerging technology and manufacturing powerhouse. It's not just an imitation of Western technology.
The Netflix series depicts China as a scientific giant speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu's vast imagination and exploration of the nature of good and evil are key to the success of his books.
He doesn't seem to think of China or even the Earth as special. In a 2022 TV interview, he said the crises depicted in science fiction novels are shared “by all of humanity.” He added: “From the perspective of the universe, we are all part of the whole.”
The Netflix series adopted the Chinese word “Santi”, or three bodies, as the alien's name. The English translation of this book uses “Trisolarian”. When was the last time a Chinese word entered global pop culture? But few people celebrated it on Chinese social media.
Instead, many comments focused on how unflatteringly China was portrayed and how little Chinese elements were included in the series. Although Netflix is not available in China, viewers flocked to watch pirated versions of “3 Body Problems.”
The Netflix version's story takes place primarily in England rather than Beijing. The actors are racially diverse, including Latinx, black, white, South Asian, and Chinese. Some comments call the diverse casting “American-style political correctness,” while others question why the series only casts Chinese people as villains or poor people, but that's not true.
If their main complaint with the Netflix version is that the producers took too many liberties with the plot and protagonist, another major complaint is that the opening scene about the Cultural Revolution is too true or too violent. is.
Some doubted the need to mention this political event. Some criticized the show for exaggerating the level of violence in the fighting sessions.
Scholars believe that between 1.5 million and 8 million people died from “unnatural deaths” in the decade from 1966 to 1976, and that more than 100 million Chinese people were affected by the turbulent times.
Discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the political movement launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to reassert authority by turning radical youth against those in charge, is heavily censored in China. The author, Mr. Liu, had to move the depiction of the struggle session from the beginning of the first volume to the middle because the editors were worried that it would not pass the censors. With Mr. Liu's approval, the English translation began with that scene.
“The Cultural Revolution appears because it's essential to the story,” Liu told colleague Alexandra Alter in 2019. “The protagonist must have complete despair towards humanity.”
The subject is increasingly considered taboo, and it is difficult to imagine that Liu would be able to publish a book on that premise today.
In 2007, independent filmmaker Hu Jie made a documentary about Bian Zhongyun, a Beijing middle school vice principal who was first beaten to death by the Red Guards. Her husband took a photo of her naked and battered body, which Hu used at the beginning of the documentary. The opening scene of “3 Body Problem'' really reminded me of that. Hu's films were never released in China.
Recently, someone on social media reposted an old article about Ye Qishong, one of the founders of modern Chinese physics. In 1967, around the time of the series' fighting sessions, Mr. Yeh, who shares the same last name as the physicist in the opening scene, was detained, beaten, and forced to confess to a crime he did not commit. He went crazy and wandered the streets of Beijing, begging for food and money. The article spread widely online before being censored.
There is a cottage industry on Chinese social media of making videos about the “three-body problem.” However, few people dare to mention the reason why their daughter, a physicist, inspired aliens to invade Earth. The video, which has been viewed more than 5 million times on the website Baidu, referred to the Cultural Revolution as the “Red Era” without explaining what happened. Another video of his, which has been viewed more than 8 million times on the video site Bilibili, calls this a “What you know event”.
It's no wonder that fans of this book have heard about the Cultural Revolution but have no concrete idea about the atrocities committed by the Communist Party and some ordinary Chinese. This is why some Chinese people are concerned about the reaction to the Netflix series.
A human rights lawyer posted on WeChat that he witnessed several struggles as a child due to his age. “If I lived a little longer, I might even be able to experience it firsthand,” he wrote. “That's not called reincarnation. That's called history.”
