Netflix is banned in China — part of the government’s ongoing efforts to limit both foreign influence and Chinese citizens’ access to information about their own country. But that hasn’t stopped Chinese viewers, as well as Chinese state media, from weighing in on its highly anticipated adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning 2008 Chinese sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem. Many people aren’t happy, yet there’s more to this particular backlash than just fan disgruntlement.
The first of an esteemed trilogy sometimes known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the novel The Three-Body Problem is a high-concept fictionalization of a longstanding scientific enigma known as “the three-body problem.” It’s heavy on the science, and author Liu Cixin, a native of mainland China, takes a long view of existential problems that mirror those we’re currently grappling with today, most notably the ethics surrounding our response to advanced artificial intelligence.
One of the novel’s central themes is the question of who gets to decide the future for the rest of humanity. It takes an anti-authoritarian approach that’s bolstered by the author’s experience of authoritarianism in China. One of its central characters functions as a strong critique of the Communist Revolution, and the whole novel arguably critiques the modern-day Communist Party. This critique takes center stage, quite literally, in a controversial opening scene from the book that references a violent period of China’s history rarely shown in China itself.
Despite this, the novel The Three-Body Problem not only cleared China’s broad book ban on anti-government messaging (although before Xi Jinping’s subsequent tightening of censorship across the cultural front) but has become beloved in its home nation. It won multiple awards and gets held up by many as an example of China’s literary excellence and as a major influence in the development of Chinese science fiction. In 2023, another…
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