Poison and politics: The bizarre backstory to Netflix’s latest blockbuster

If the fictional world of Netflix’s new blockbuster 3 Body Problem is weird, then its journey from Chinese sci-fi novel to millions of TV screens is even stranger.

On March 22, Xu Yao, a former executive at the company that owns the rights to the series, Yoozoo, was sentenced to death by a Shanghai court. His crime: poisoning Lin Qi, the billionaire sci-fi enthusiast who had spent $150 million buying the rights to the novel to transform it into the next Star Wars.

Lin, an executive producer on the Netflix adaptation, was obsessed with 3 Body Problem. Xu was obsessed with Breaking Bad. Chinese business magazine Caixin reported he tested more than a hundred toxins in his lab and then fed them to cats and dogs in Shanghai before killing Lin with probiotic pills laced with poison.

The court found professional jealousy was the motive behind the murder.

Lin, known in China as the “billionaire millennial” never got to see 3 Body Problem hit 11 million views in its first four days. The 39-year-old was murdered in 2020 just after Netflix signed the $200 million deal with Game of Thrones creators David Benioff, and Dan Weiss to transform author Liu Cixin’s mind-bending Chinese epic for the small screen.

The series is almost incomprehensibly ambitious. It takes viewers from the first decades of Communist rule in China through to a global mission to stop an alien invasion. Now it is dividing fans in China and around the world.

That’s because it opens in the grips of the Cultural Revolution – Mao Zedong’s violent struggle for ideological purity in Communist China that cost at least one million lives between 1966 and 1976.

Hong Kong-born director Derek Tsang does not hold back. His depiction of a “struggle session” in which a scientist is beaten to death after teaching physics is brutal. So too is Tsang’s window inside Chinese labour camps where “thoughts are dangerous” and prisoners are forced into confessions through torture.

“Who is the heart of the sun in the mind of the people,” cadres yell as they cheer on the Communist Party’s purge of China’s intelligentsia. “Mao.”

“I don’t know if I expected to see such an agonisingly realistic recreation of a Cultural Revolution struggle session, on Netflix of all places,” said Yuan Yi Zhu a professor of International Relations at Leiden University.

Tsang interviewed refugees who fled mainland China during the 1970s and leaned heavily on Chinese socialist realism to reimagine Liu’s dense novel for the screen. The result is visceral and authentic.

Liu would never have been able to write his sci-fi epic in the 1970s. God, sci-fi and aliens were all banned by the Chinese government because they threatened the power of the party. By the time Liu’s novel was released in 2006, China was in a brief period of relative creative liberty under president Hu Jintao. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution had come to be widely regarded as a mistake by the party leadership.

Still, Liu had to be careful. In the Chinese version of the novel, the chapters focussing on the Cultural Revolution were moved to the middle to avoid drawing the ire of Beijing’s censors.

Since then, the repression of Chinese art, criticism and media has intensified under Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao. Crackdowns have seen freedom of speech eliminated and human rights advocates thrown in jail. In 2013, time-travel narratives were censored by the party because they distort history. Only the party has the power to do that

“This is a new era. The past is finished,” one of the San-Ti aliens poignantly observes in 3 Body Problem. At the same time, Chinese films including a remake of one of Liu’s other novels, Wandering Earth, increasingly emphasise Chinese heroism and exceptionalism, drawing in patriotic young Chinese viewers in droves.

That clash of ideals and the vivid depiction of one of the darkest periods in Chinese history in Netflix’s version of 3 Body Problem has provoked nationalists who can only watch the show through virtual private networks (VPNs) because the streaming service is banned in China.

Chinese fans on Weibo have lashed the series as “tyrannical” and “dark”. One accused the creators of “making a whole tray of dumplings just for a bit of vinegar sauce,” suggesting it was filled with malice towards Beijing.

But their biggest criticism is of Tsang’s choice, backed by Liu, to broaden the series beyond its original Chinese context and set a significant part of it in Britain, with Latino, Black, British and Asian actors all taking on major roles.

Fans in China have accused Netflix of “shooting a Chinese story while engaging American political correctness”.

The 3 Body Problem hashtag on the Chinese social media site Weibo has now been read more than 2 billion times.

“It’s like using Liu’s wine bottle to brew a contemporary American story,” The Beijing Youth Daily said in its review.

Others have been more generous. TV review blog Mtszimu said the series was a fresh interpretation of Liu’s work, but it is “also an important contribution to global science fiction literature.”

Importantly, while the series makes Liu’s cinematic universe global, it retains many Chinese characteristics, including using Mandarin for all its Chinese scenes.

It is the latest big-budget mainstream show to tackle difficult narratives in their original language. Danish political thriller Borgen and French spy drama The Bureau were early foreign hits last decade. Since then, mainstream audiences have become more comfortable viewing TV shows in different languages.

Shogun, the historical epic now screening on Disney, is mostly in Japanese. Nicole Kidman’s Expats on Amazon oscillates between English, Cantonese and Filipino.

The result is richer casting, diverse characters and an immersion in foreign worlds that had for too long been missing from Western screens.

Before he was murdered, Lin dreamt of bringing this Chinese epic into the global mainstream. If the billboards now flickering above Times Square in New York and Shibuya in Tokyo warning of an alien invasion are anything to go by – 3 Body Problem has achieved that goal.

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