What Chinese Outrage Over ‘3 Body Problem’ Says About China
The New York Times
The Netflix series showcases one of the country’s most successful works of culture, a rare cultural export. Instead, 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.
Concerns that crypto companies are being purposely cut off from the global banking system have become a political cudgel at an opportune moment for the industry.
A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Mr. Murdoch, who was trying to give full control of his empire to his son Lachlan and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant.
The move by Chinese regulators came a week after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced U.S. technology to China.
Walter Mosley talks about how his fictional hero frees himself from wage labor through America’s favorite side hustle: landlording.
Acadia Healthcare falsifies records at its methadone clinics and enrolls patients who aren’t addicted to opioids, a Times investigation found.
The law will ban the video app in the United States by Jan. 19 if its owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese company.
The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated.
Connor Sports, in the tiny mill town of Amasa, Mich., is one of the leading makers of hardwood floors for top professional and college teams.
Faltering U.S. industrial leadership has allowed China to take a harder trade stance as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office.
General Motors and other foreign automakers are selling fewer cars and losing lots of money in China, where domestic electric and hybrid cars have taken off.
Pat Gelsinger stepped down after nearly four years at the helm of the onetime highflying company, Intel said Monday.