‘3 Body Problem’: What Social Media Response Says About China

The primary 5 minutes of the Netflix sequence “3 Body Problem” have been laborious to observe.

I attempted to not shut my eyes on the coldblooded beating of a physics professor on the top of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. By the tip of it, he was lifeless, with blood and grotesque wounds throughout his head and physique. His daughter, additionally a physicist, watched the general public execution. She went on to lose hope in humanity.

I made myself sit via this violent scene. I’ve by no means seen what was generally known as a wrestle session depicted blow-by-blow on the display. I additionally felt compelled to observe it due to how the sequence, a Netflix adaptation of China’s most celebrated works of science fiction, has been acquired in China.

On Chinese language social media platforms, commenters objected that the sequence is just not set completely in China; that the principle characters usually are not all Chinese language however as an alternative racially various; that one of many fundamental characters has been switched from a person to a lady and, of their eyes, the actress was not fairly sufficient. They cited many different supposed flaws.

“The Three-Body Problem,” an apocalyptic trilogy about humanity’s reactions to a coming alien invasion that bought thousands and thousands of copies in Chinese language and greater than a dozen different languages, is likely one of the best-known Chinese language novels on this planet revealed previously few a long time. Barack Obama is a fan. China doesn’t have many such massively profitable cultural exports.

As an alternative of satisfaction and celebration, the Netflix sequence has been met with anger, sneer and suspicion in China. The reactions present how years of censorship and indoctrination have formed the general public views of China’s relations with the surface world. They don’t take satisfaction the place it’s due and take offense too simply. Additionally they take leisure too severely and historical past and politics too flippantly. The years of Chinese language censorship have additionally muted the individuals’s grasp of what occurred within the Cultural Revolution.

Some commenters stated that the sequence obtained made primarily as a result of Netflix, or relatively the West, needed to demonize China by displaying the political violence through the Cultural Revolution, which was one of many darkest durations within the historical past of the Individuals’s Republic of China.

“Netflix is just pandering to Western tastes, especially in the opening scene,” stated one particular person on the social media platform Weibo.

The blockbuster books and their writer, Liu Cixin, have a cultlike following in China. That’s not shocking as a result of Chinese language society, from senior management, scientists, entrepreneurs to individuals on the road, are steeped in techno utopianism.

The English translation of the primary quantity was published in america in 2014. The identical yr, the e-commerce big Alibaba pulled off a blockbuster preliminary public providing in New York, and the world began viewing China as an rising tech and manufacturing energy as an alternative of only a copycat of Western applied sciences.

The Netflix sequence portrays China as a scientific big, talking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s huge creativeness and his probing of the character of fine and evil are key to his books’ success.

He doesn’t appear to view China and even the Earth as distinctive. In a tv interview in 2022, he said that the crises described in any science fiction novel are shared “by humanity as a whole.” He added, “From the perspective of the universe, we are all part of a whole.”

The Netflix sequence adopted a Chinese language phrase “Santi,” or three physique, because the alien’s identify. The e book’s English translation makes use of “Trisolarian.” When was the final time {that a} Chinese language phrase made it into the worldwide popular culture? However few individuals celebrated that on Chinese language social media.

As an alternative, many feedback zeroed in on how unflatteringly China is portrayed and the way few Chinese language parts are included within the sequence. Netflix isn’t accessible in China however viewers flocked to see pirated variations of “3 Body Problem.”

The story within the Netflix model takes place primarily in Britain, not Beijing. The actors are racially various, together with Latino, Black, white, South Asian and Chinese language. Some feedback name the various casting “American-style political correctness,” whereas others query why the sequence casts ethnic Chinese language solely as villains or poor individuals, which isn’t true.

If their fundamental grievance concerning the Netflix adaptation is that the creators took an excessive amount of liberty with the plot and the principle characters, their different main grievance is that the opening scene concerning the Cultural Revolution is simply too truthful or too violent.

Some doubted the need of mentioning the political occasion in any respect. Others accused the present of exaggerating the extent of violence within the wrestle session.

Students believe that 1.5 million to eight million individuals died in “abnormal deaths” within the decade from 1966 to 1976, whereas greater than 100 million Chinese language have been affected by the interval’s upheaval.

Any dialogue of the Cultural Revolution, a political motion that Mao Zedong began in 1966 to reassert authority by setting radical youths in opposition to these in cost, is closely censored in China. Mr. Liu, the writer, needed to transfer the depiction of the wrestle session from the start of the primary quantity to the center as a result of his editor was frightened it couldn’t get previous the censors. The English translation opened with the scene, with Mr. Liu’s approval.

“The Cultural Revolution appears because it’s essential to the plot,” Mr. Liu told my colleague Alexandra Alter in 2019. “The protagonist needs to have total despair in humanity.”

With the subject more and more taboo, it’s laborious to think about that Mr. Liu would have the ability to publish a e book with that premise now.

In 2007, the impartial filmmaker Hu Jie made a documentary about Bian Zhongyun, a vice principal of a center college in Beijing who was among the many first to be overwhelmed to loss of life by the Crimson Guards. Her husband took pictures of her bare, battered physique, and Mr. Hu used them initially of his documentary. The opening scene of “3 Body Problem” jogged my memory quite a lot of it. Mr. Hu’s film was by no means publicly screened in China.

Somebody on social media lately reposted an previous article about Ye Qisong, one of many founders of the examine of physics in fashionable China. In 1967, across the time that the wrestle session of the sequence happened, Mr. Ye, who shared the identical household identify of the physicist within the opening scene, was detained, overwhelmed and compelled to admit crimes he didn’t commit. He went loopy and wandered the streets in Beijing, begging for meals and cash. The article was circulated broadly on-line earlier than it was censored.

There’s a cottage trade of constructing movies on Chinese language social media about “The Three Body Problem.” However few dare to handle what led the daughter, a physicist, to ask the aliens to invade the Earth. A video with greater than 5 million views on the web site Baidu referred to the Cultural Revolution as “the red period” with out explaining what occurred. One other video with greater than 8 million views on the video website Bilibili referred to as it “the what you know event.”

It is not shocking that followers of the e book might have heard of the Cultural Revolution, however they don’t have a concrete concept concerning the atrocities that the Communist Occasion and a few strange Chinese language dedicated. That’s why the reactions to the Netflix sequence are regarding to some Chinese language.

A human rights lawyer posted on WeChat that due to his age, he noticed some wrestle periods when he was a toddler. “If I lived a bit longer, I might even get to experience it firsthand,” he wrote. “It’s not called reincarnation. It’s called history.”