Watch the first trailer for 3 Body Problem on Netflix

[thomdunn]

@docosc

I think it refers back to the “legitimately” modifying the horrible comments by the author. It awkward phrasing, but I think that’s it.

This is what I was going for, yes.

[micah]

@Mungrul

The first book surprised me with how critical it was of the cultural revolution, but at the same time it was very nationalistic and isolationist. But it also made me look at Western sci-fi from a different angle, realising that a lot of it must appear the same way to non-Western readers.

Some China scholar friends pointed out to me that Three Body Problem was published in a very specific window of time where that kind of criticism of the Cultural Revolution was tolerated. It would be very hard to get it published today. Some of China’s most senior leaders today were Red Guards in their youth.

I found the China-centrism of the whole series one of the best parts. I don’t think I’ve ever read/watched any scifi where the Earth leaders weren’t American or maybe British. And I love that the good guys here include the Chinese military and a noir-ish chain-smoking Chinese detective, and that in the later books

the language of future Earth is a hybrid of English and Mandarin.

I did find the second (and maybe third? they blur together) book(s) a bit of a slog, but there are some really neat ideas in there that made it all worthwhile.

So I’m looking forward to the TV show, although I kinda wish it were primarily in Mandarin with subtitles for that extra measure of bias disruption.

[Otherbrother]

@micah

Some China scholar friends pointed out to me that Three Body Problem was published in a very specific window of time where that kind of criticism of the Cultural Revolution was tolerated. It would be very hard to get it published today. Some of China’s most senior leaders today were Red Guards in their youth.

I figured that criticisms of (at least some parts of) the cultural revolution were OK now because of Xi Jinping’s family history with it?

Xi Jinping: from ‘counter-revolutionary’ to absolute power

Then came the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when violent gangs of ideologically crazed teenage “red guards” held all of China ransom. At its peak, the elder Xi was beaten, publicly interrogated and paraded through the streets. He spent most of the following decade in prison.

His downfall meant the next generation of his family became targets too. Xi Jinping’s half-sister is thought to have killed herself after intense persecution.

At one point the future national leader was in a small group ambushed by club-wielding red guards at school and had to literally run for his life.

[bluehenbear]

The link for the serialized podcast seems to be broken?

[Mungrul]

@micah

a noir-ish chain-smoking Chinese detective

I loved that too

[GagHalfrunt]

The lesson that Xi took from the Cultural Revolution was that you should be on the side of the powerful.

“The lesson that Xi had learned was that by being a good and obedient communist, you could survive and even thrive, even if that meant forgetting the party’s treatment of his father,” said Prof Michel Bonnin, an expert on the Cultural Revolution at the Paris-based École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. “It was better to be a good child of Chairman Mao than a rebel.”

He never turned on the organisation that had presided over his early misery and loss, applying for party membership seven times. He was only granted it after his father’s political status had been downgraded from its Cultural Revolution extremes*.* Instead, after university he set out on an initially uneventful career as a young cadre, his path smoothed by his parents – who reportedly put in calls to his first boss in central China and then pulled strings to have him moved to coastal Fujian province.

[micah]

@Otherbrother

I figured that criticisms of (at least some parts of) the cultural revolution were OK now because of Xi Jinping’s family history with it?

All three books were published during Hu Jintao’s presidency. Xi’s family suffered during the CR, but criticism of the CR implies that CCP leadership is fallible, which is a no-no in Xi’s China.