3 Body Problem, a new Netflix series based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin, is provoking a backlash.
The fantasy-drama series is set during China’s Cultural Revolution, and centers on a mysterious threat from space that is heading towards the Earth. Audiences in China are not happy with the show’s depiction of the Chinese Communist Party. Nationalists on Chinese social Media are complaining that it is an example of yet another American company trying to cast their homeland in a bad light.
While China does not allow Netflix to its people, Chinese citizens are nonetheless accessing the show through pirate sites and through the use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), which allow them to access Netflix servers through intermediaries outside of the Chinese government’s Great Firewall.
The show is headed by the creative team behind last decade’s hit Game of Thrones, and has received an 81 percent audience score and a 78 percent overall ratings on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Despite the story’s legacy as a celebrated example of recent Chinese literature, social media users in China are accusing the show of harboring a political agenda—among other things, they allege that casting decisions were motivated by political correctness. The eight-episode series opens during a rally during the Cultural Revolution, fomented by Mao Zedong beginning in 1996 and persisting until the dictator’s death in 1976. The show includes, among other thing, a scene in which students at Beijing’s Tsinghua University beat their physics professor to death for the alleged offense of teaching lessons that implied opposition to the revolutionary movement. The physics professor is also denounced, in the story, by his wife, daughter, a colleague, and an up-and-coming prodigy who serves as a witness to the event.
This sequence provides context to the rest of the story, which takes place in modern-day England and centers on the suicides of several prominent scientists.
