ABOVE: The opening scene of Netflix’s “3 Body Problem.” The negative reactions in China show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public’s perspectives. NETFLIX.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3350 - Three Body Problem - What Chinese Outrage Says About China
Not intentionally, though I saw it happening a few days ago, this week is MEDIA week on my blog: TV shows and movies!
I ADORED Three Body Problem, both the book and the TV show's first season. A bit more on this next week in yet another post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/business/3-body-problem-china-reaction.html
THE NEW NEW WORLD
What Chinese Outrage Over ‘3 Body Problem’ Says About China
The Netflix series showcases one of the country’s most successful works of culture. Instead of demonstrating pride, social media is condemning it.
The first five minutes of the Netflix series “3 Body Problem” were hard to watch.
I tried not to shut my eyes at the
coldblooded beating of a physics professor at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. By the end of it, he
was dead, with blood and gruesome wounds all over his head and body. His
daughter, also a physicist, watched the public execution. She went on to lose
hope in humanity.
I made myself sit through this violent scene.
I have never seen what was known as a struggle session depicted blow by blow on
the screen. I also felt compelled to watch it because of how the series, a
Netflix adaptation of China’s most celebrated works of science fiction, has
been received in China.
On Chinese social media platforms,
commenters objected that the series is not set entirely in China; that the main
characters are not all Chinese but instead racially diverse; that one of the
main characters has been switched from a man to a woman and, in their eyes, the
actress was not pretty enough. They cited many other supposed flaws.
“The Three-Body Problem,” an apocalyptic
trilogy about humanity’s reactions to a coming 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 few decades. Barack Obama is a fan. China doesn’t have many
such hugely successful cultural exports.
Instead of pride and celebration, the Netflix series has been met with anger, sneer and suspicion in China. The reactions show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public perspectives of China’s relations with the outside world. They don’t take pride where it’s due and take offense too easily. They also take entertainment too seriously and history and politics too lightly. The years of Chinese censorship have also muted the people’s grasp of what happened in the Cultural Revolution.
Some commenters said that the
series got made mainly because Netflix, or rather the West, wanted to demonize
China by showing the 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 the social
media platform Weibo.
The blockbuster books and
their author, Liu Cixin, have a cultlike 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.
 |
| Actors in the “3 Body Problem.” Some commenters on social media in China have complained that the main characters in the series are not all Chinese but instead racially diverse.Credit...Ed Miller/Netflix |
The
English translation of the first volume was published in the United States in 2014. The same
year, the e-commerce giant Alibaba pulled off a blockbuster initial public
offering in New York, and the world started viewing China as an emerging tech
and manufacturing power instead of just a copycat of Western technologies.
The Netflix series portrays China as a scientific giant, speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s vast imagination and his probing of the nature of good and evil are key to his books’ success.
More on China
- Xi Jinping Meets With Taiwan’s Ex-President: China is using talks between its top leader and Ma Ying-jeou to signal a willingness to engage with Taiwan — but only on its terms.
- ‘3 Body Problem’: The Netflix series showcases one of China’s most successful works of culture. Instead of demonstrating pride, a writer posits, Chinese social media is condemning it.
- An Effusive Welcome: As tensions fester between China and Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of the island democracy, is receiving warm treatment from Beijing during a rare trip to the mainland.
- Business with Elon Musk: Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship that made Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage.
He doesn’t seem to view China
or even the Earth as exceptional. 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 a
Chinese word “Santi,” or three body, as the alien’s name. The book’s English
translation uses “Trisolarian.” When was the last time that a Chinese word made
it into the global pop culture? But few people celebrated that on Chinese
social media.
Instead, many comments zeroed
in on how unflatteringly China is portrayed and how few Chinese elements are
included in the series. Netflix isn’t available in China but viewers flocked to
see 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 casts ethnic Chinese only as villains or poor people, which is not true.
If their main complaint about
the Netflix adaptation is that the creators took too much liberty with the plot
and the main characters, their other major complaint is that the opening scene
about the Cultural Revolution is too truthful or too violent.
Some doubted the necessity of
mentioning 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 eight million people
died in “abnormal deaths” in the decade from 1966 to 1976, while more than 100
million Chinese were affected by the period’s upheaval.
Any discussion of the Cultural Revolution, a political movement that Mao
Zedong started in 1966 to reassert authority by setting radical youths against
those in charge, is heavily censored in China. Mr. Liu, the author, had to move
the depiction of the struggle session from the beginning of the first volume to
the middle because his editor was worried it couldn’t get past 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.”
 |
| “The Three-Body Problem,” an apocalyptic trilogy about humanity’s reactions to a coming alien invasion, is one of the best-known Chinese novels in the world.Credit...Netflix |
With the topic
increasingly taboo, it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Liu would be able to publish
a book with that premise now.
In 2007, the
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. Her husband took photos of her naked, battered body, and Mr. Hu
used them at the start of his documentary. The opening scene of “3 Body
Problem” reminded me a great deal of it. Mr. Hu’s movie was never publicly
screened in China.
Someone on social
media recently reposted an old article about Ye Qisong, one of the founders of
the study of physics in modern China. In 1967, around the time that the
struggle session of the series took place, Mr. Ye, who shared the same family
name of the physicist in the opening scene, was detained, beaten and forced to
confess crimes he didn’t commit. He went crazy and wandered the streets in
Beijing, begging for food and money. The article was circulated widely online
before it was censored.
There’s 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
the aliens to invade the Earth. A video with more
than five million views on the website Baidu referred to the Cultural
Revolution as “the red period” without explaining what happened. Another video with more
than eight million views on the video site Bilibili called it “the what you
know event.”
It's not surprising
that fans of the book may have heard of the Cultural Revolution, but they don’t
have a concrete idea about the atrocities that the Communist Party and some
ordinary Chinese committed. That’s why the reactions to the Netflix series are
concerning to some Chinese.
A human rights
lawyer posted on WeChat that because of his age, he saw some struggle sessions
when he was a child. “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.”
Li Yuan writes the New
New World column, which focuses on the intersection of technology,
business and politics in China and across Asia. More about
Li Yuan
A version of this article appears in print
on April 9, 2024, Section B, Page 1 of the New York
edition with the headline: China Greets Netflix Show With Anger.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2404.20 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3214 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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