The first five minutes of the Netflix series “3 Body Problem” are hard to watch.
I tried not to close my eyes to the cold beating of a physics professor at the height of Cultural revolution in 1967. By the end of it, he was dead, with blood and horrific wounds all over his head and body. His daughter, also a physicist, watched the public execution. He lost hope in humanity.
I made myself sit through this violent scene. I’ve never seen what’s known as a fight session depicted blow-by-blow on screen. I was also compelled to watch it because of how the series, a Netflix adaptation of China’s most popular work of science fiction, was received in China.
On Chinese social media platforms, commenters objected that the series was not entirely set in China; that the main characters are not all Chinese but rather mixed race; that one of the main characters was changed from a man to a woman and, in their eyes, the actress was not good enough. They cite many other supposed flaws.
“The Three-Body Problem,” an apocalyptic trilogy about humanity’s reactions to an impending alien invasion that sold millions of copies in Chinese and more than a dozen other languages, is one of the best-known Chinese novels. in the world published in the past. several decades. Barack Obama is a fan. China does not have many successful cultural exports.
Instead of pride and celebration, the Netflix series was met with anger, derision and suspicion in China. The reactions show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public perception of China’s relations with the outside world. They are not proud where it should be and are too easily offended. They also take entertainment too seriously and history and politics too lightly. Years of Chinese censorship also silenced people’s understanding of what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
Some commentators have said that the series was made mainly because Netflix, or rather the West, wanted to demonize China by showing political violence during the Cultural Revolution, which was one of the darkest periods in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
“Netflix is just pandering to Western tastes, especially in the opening scene,” said one person on social media platform Weibo.
The blockbuster books and their author, Liu Cixin, have a cult-like following in China. That’s not surprising because Chinese society, from senior leadership, scientists, entrepreneurs to people on the street, is steeped in techno utopianism.
The English translation of the first volume was published in the United States in 2014. In the same year, the e-commerce giant Alibaba released a blockbuster initial public offering in New York, and the world began to look at China as an emerging tech and manufacturing power rather than a mere copycat of Western technologies.
The Netflix series portrays China as a scientific giant, speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s expansive imagination and his exploration of the nature of good and evil are key to the success of his books.
He doesn’t seem to view China or even Earth as strange. In a television 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 series adopted the Chinese word “Santi,” or three bodies, as the alien’s name. The English translation of the book uses “Trisolarian.” When was the last time a Chinese word entered global pop culture? But few celebrated that on Chinese social media.
Instead, many comments zeroed in on how implausibly China was portrayed and how few Chinese elements were included in the series. Netflix is not available in China but viewers have flocked to pirated versions of “3 Body Problem.”
The story in the Netflix version takes place mainly in Britain, not Beijing. The actors are racially diverse, including Latino, Black, white, South Asian and Chinese. Some comments call the diverse casting “American-style political correctness,” while others question why the series only treats ethnic Chinese as villains or poor people, which is not true.
If their main complaint about the Netflix adaptation is that the creators take too much freedom with the plot and the main characters, their other main complaint is that the opening scene about the Cultural Revolution is too realistic or too violent.
Some questioned the need to mention the political event at all. Others accused the show of exaggerating the level of violence in the struggle session.
Scholars believe that 1.5 million to 8 million people died of “abnormal deaths” in the decade from 1966 to 1976, while more than 100 million Chinese were affected by the weather disturbances.
Any discussion of the Cultural Revolution, a political movement started by Mao Zedong in 1966 to reassert authority by setting radical youth against the establishment, is heavily censored in China. Mr. Liu, the author, had to move the description of the struggle session from the beginning of the first volume to the middle because his editor was worried that it would not pass the censors. The English translation opened the scene, with Mr. Liu’s approval.
“The Cultural Revolution appears because it’s important to the plot,” Mr. Liu told my colleague Alexandra Alter in 2019. “The main character has to have absolute despair in humanity.”
In an increasingly taboo subject, it is hard to imagine that Mr. Liu of a book with such a premise today.
In 2007, independent filmmaker Hu Jie made a documentary about Bian Zhongyun, a vice principal of a middle school in Beijing who was among the first to be beaten to death by the Red Guards. His wife took pictures of his naked, bruised body, and Mr. Hu used them at the beginning of his documentary. The opening scene of “3 Body Problems” reminded me a great deal of this. The film of Mr. Hu has never been publicly released in China.
Someone recently reposted on social media an old article about Ye Qisong, one of the founders of the study of physics in modern China. In 1967, at the time the series’ struggle session took place, Mr. Ye, who shares the same family name as the physicist in the opening scene, is detained, beaten and forced to confess to crimes he did not commit. He went crazy and wandered the streets of Beijing, begging for food and money. The article was widely circulated online before it was censored.
There is a cottage industry of making videos on Chinese social media about “The Three Body Problem.” But few dare to address what led the daughter, a physicist, to invite aliens to invade Earth. A video with more than 5 million views on the website Baidu referred to the Cultural Revolution as “the red period” without explaining what happened. One more video with over 8 million views on the video site Bilibili, it was called “the what you know event.”
It is not surprising that fans of the book may have heard about the Cultural Revolution, but they have no concrete idea about the atrocities committed by the Communist Party and some ordinary Chinese. That’s why the reactions to the Netflix series are troubling to some Chinese.
A human rights lawyer posted on WeChat that because of his age, he saw several struggle sessions when he was young. “If I live a little longer, I may experience it more,” he wrote. “It’s not called reincarnation. It’s called history.”
