Chinese sci-fi fans divided over Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’

The streaming service isn’t officially operational in China, but that hasn’t stopped devotees from accessing the show, likely via VPN services or illegal streaming sites.

Hashtags relating to the show have over two billion views on the X-like social media platform Weibo.

Among the tens of thousands of commentaries left on a reviewing platform, reactions ranged from disappointment at plot and character changes to nationalistic outrage, to optimism the show’s profile would boost the representation of Chinese literature and film.

The series is based on the three-part Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Liu Cixin, a domestic superstar whom readers sometimes jokingly call “God”, and his trilogy “the bible of Chinese sci-fi.”

“The original works have a huge influence. Many fans of the books know all the details of the characters in the books by heart, so they have a hard time accepting changes,” Li Dongdong, founder of Chinese sci-fi film community Geek Movie, told AFP.

Previous Chinese-produced adaptations have taken this obsessive attention to detail into account – Liu told a conference recently he had suggested making a small visual change to a recurring plot device, only to be told: “You can’t change it beyond recognition!”

For many, the Netflix adaptation has very much done that. Spearheaded by the team behind the megahit series Game of Thrones, it transfers most of the action to the United Kingdom and changes the nationalities and genders of some of the key characters.

One Chinese reviewer likened the series to “a plate of General Tso’s chicken,” a Westernized Chinese dish that can be used as a metaphor for inauthenticity and cultural misunderstanding.

Disagreement with the showrunners’ creative choices is not confined to China. The series was the most watched on Netflix by its second week, but reviews have been mixed, with Rolling Stone calling it “one great big miss”.

Some of the Chinese criticism though is tinged by politics, against a backdrop of tense US-China relations.

Many commenters questioned the motive behind the decision to keep the villain Chinese while the heroes are mostly played by Westerners. Others have taken issue with the show’s portrayal of Chinese history.

The show starts in the 1960s, with an ugly scene from the Cultural Revolution in which a physicist is killed by a mob for refusing to disown key scientific theories. Its use as the opening scene led some online nationalists to accuse Netflix of making the entire show purely to portray China in a bad light. — AFP