“If We Don’t Face Our History Squarely, How Can We Hope to Have a Future?”

Chinese language social media has been awash with curiosity in Netflix’s new sequence “3 Physique Downside,” an adaptation based mostly on the Hugo Award-winning novel by Chinese language creator Liu Cixin. On the day of its launch, there was a big spike in on-line piracy of the Netflix sequence in China. (Neither Netflix nor any of its exhibits are formally obtainable in China.) Hashtags related to the present have racked up 2.3 billion views on Weibo, and Chinese language-language web sites equivalent to Douban and Zhihu have attracted tens of 1000’s of consumer evaluations.

Evaluations have been decidedly combined, with some Chinese language viewers praising the manufacturing values and particular results of the Netflix sequence, whereas others complained that the present’s portrayal of China was skewed by the recasting of initially Chinese language heroes as international characters, and by the outstanding inclusion of scenes set throughout the Chinese language Cultural Revolution. (These scenes have been downplayed within the novel, and solely briefly alluded to within the domestically produced sequence adaptation by Tencent.) However the depiction of the Cultural Revolution was praised by different Chinese language viewers, with one commenting, “The largest benefit Netflix’s model of Three-Physique Downside has over the home model is no censorship, no taboos.” 

At present’s quote of the day comes from Weibo consumer 上城太子 (Shàngchéng Tàizǐ, “Prince Shangcheng”), who factors out that the Chinese language individuals ought to already be properly conscious of the occasions of the Cultural Revolution, and that quibbling over their inclusion in a Netflix sequence is, in itself, a type of historic bias:

Do we actually require the companies of foreigners to ferret out the reality about that ridiculous, frenzied, and turbulent period? That period was an unlimited scar, an absurd joke. If we don’t face our historical past squarely, how can we hope to have a future?

In case your argument is that portrayals [of China by foreigners] are biased in opposition to you, then I’d counter that it’s you who’re extra biased than anybody. [Chinese]