[COLUMN] 3 Body Problem is Proof We're Living in the Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This week saw the release of 3 Body Problem, the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s beloved novel, The Three Body Problem. Although Netflix offers a much more global adaptation of the source material, this seems like a good opportunity to acknowledge the interesting history of Chinese science-fiction.

There is a long tradition of science-fiction in Chinese literature. There are plenty of early examples of the genre, notably including Lao She’s Cat Country. Published in 1932, the novel uses a trip to Mars as the backdrop for a satirical commentary on contemporary Chinese culture. However, following the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, understanding the genre’s capacity for subversion, there was a clamp down on science-fiction. Lao She took his own life during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

This wave of repression continued for decades. The “Anti-Spiritual Pollution” campaign of 1983 targeted speculative fiction. As recently as 2011, China implemented a ban on films featuring time travel. “The rationale [for the time travel ban] is that whatever isn’t possible in the real world belongs to superstition,” explained film critic and journalist Raymond Zhou Liming, while acknowledging the device could still be employed in literature and theatre.

However, the past few years have seen an explosion in blockbuster Chinese science-fiction, particularly the films and novels reaching global audiences. In 2019, the cinematic adaptation of Liu’s short story The Wandering Earth powered the Chinese box office to its biggest month and its biggest year ever. It even earned an IMAX 3D release in the United States. 2019 was also Hollywood’s biggest year ever, but The Wandering Earth performed well-enough to land 13th at the global box office.

To be fair, Chinese audiences have always hungered for science-fiction. In the past, they’d enthusiastically embraced American films. In 2013, Gravity outgrossed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at the Chinese Box Office. Gravity earned a total of $70 million in China. The following year, Interstellar grossed over $120 million in China. The big shift was that China was no longer importing science-fiction. If anything, the country was shifting towards export.

China bet big on science-fiction. In November 2023, the China Golden Rooster Film Festival announced the formation of the Science-Fiction Film Working Committee of the Chinese Film Association. That same year, China announced that The Wandering Earth II would be its official submission to the Academy Awards. The sequel would go on gross $600 million, becoming the 9th highest-grossing movie of 2023 at the global box office.

This explosion in Chinese science-fiction was not simply cinematic. Novels and short story collections began to flood the American market. President Barack Obama boasted about reading The Three Body Problem in an interview with The New York Times. Online articles pointed eager readers to contemporary Chinese science-fiction novels. In 2023, the Hugo Awards were hosted in Chengdu, China, in a ceremony that was riven by controversy.

Indeed, 3 Body Problem is not even the first television adaptation of the source novel. Last year, Chinese television adapted it as Three-Body, a thirty-episode series. Rather cynically, American streaming service Peacock announced that it would be streaming Three-Body as counterprogramming to Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. The market is so saturated with Chinese science-fiction that there are dueling adaptations of the same material.

It is, in short, a Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction. Indeed, there are certainly echoes of the sort of science-fiction that dominated American pop culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Notably, many of these stories involve the conquest of space in one form or another. Naturally, there’s also something of a jingoistic and triumphalist subtext to these stories. After the success of The Wandering Earth, a headline in People’s Daily - the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party - declared, “Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!”

This is not so far removed from the sensibilities of mid-twentieth-century American science-fiction. These feel like modern blockbusters built around the same underlying ideas as films and shows like Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M, Forbidden Planet, The Conquest of Space, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Lost in Space, Star Trek, and so many others. These are the dreams of a nation not just looking outward at international rivals, but upward towards the stars.

The Golden Age of American Science-Fiction reflected the national mood of the era. The economy was booming. The country was prosperous. America had emerged from an extended period of isolation to find itself a global superpower. It had the industrial might and scientific know-how to rebuild the world in its own image. These were the ideas that pushed America towards the moon, but that’s almost too narrow a framing to capture the mood of the era.

Every aspect of American life was advancing at a tremendous and previously unimaginable rate. This was obvious even in the cinema. These science-fiction films didn’t just depict the future, they were the future. They were presented through innovations like 3D, elaborate special effects, widescreen aspect ratios to compete with television, and vivid technicolor. Pop culture is a window, but it is also a mirror. It reflects a culture’s vision of itself back.

Naturally, this space-age optimism could not last. The moon was not a viable space colony. There was nowhere further for America to go. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the country was shaken by economic downturns, the Vietnam War, and the disillusionment of Watergate. The clean and sterile futures of Forbidden Planet and Star Trek gave way to the apocalyptic nightmares of Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run and Soylent Green. Even Star Wars offered a famously “used future.”

In contrast, it seems safe to suggest that this modern boom in Chinese science-fiction reflects a similar sentiment. In 2019, China became the first nation to send a rover to the dark side of the moon. In 2021, it began construction of its first space station – completing it in 2023. It has announced plans to become the second nation to land a man on the moon, with a target of 2030. China currently hopes to build a research station on the southern lunar pole by 2040.

Liu acknowledges the popularity of Chinese science-fiction is tied to this context. “China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science-fiction in the ’30s to the ’60s,” he told The New York Times in November 2014. He told The Wall Street Journal, “Chinese people are increasingly considering the world not from the perspective of their own nation, but from the perspective of all mankind. They are concerned with the problems of all humanity.”

“In recent years, China's science-fiction industry embraced rapid development and received wide attention,” the author stated in September 2023. “This couldn't have happened without the overall progress of society, including advancements in the aerospace industry and the wide application of Internet technologies.” He elaborated, “These all provide a fertile ground for the prosperity of the science -fiction industry.”

In the past decade or so, China has closed the gap with the United States in terms of dominance in space. It recently launched a cleaner satellite, demonstrating impressive dexterity in interacting with other objects in space. There are concerns about the infrastructure that China is building in outer space. Just as with the Golden Age of American Science-Fiction, there is a sense of a dark side simmering beneath the surface of this explosion of interstellar fiction.

As much as the American science-fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was optimistic about space, it was paranoid about a more earthbound adversary. Fear of communist subversion and infiltration permeated the films of the era, bubbling to the surface in movies like Tobor the Great, Invasion U.S.A., Red Planet Mars, Them!, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The threat of the alien was often fear of something lurking much closer to home.

3 Body Problem depicts a cold war waged by two enemies incapable of understanding one another, as characters struggle to balance their own personal autonomy with the collective good, in a way that critic James Kidd argues might “describe China’s efforts to balance the restraints of communism with the freedoms of capitalism.” Author August Cole contends Liu’s work is crucial to understanding the facets of contemporary China, “from the anthropological to the political to the social.”

Noah Elbot argues that the “Dark Forest” worldview that underpins the cold logic of the alien menace in Liu’s source novels, in which every other intelligence must be treated as an existential threat, reflects the Chinese perception of “a global system defined by competition between the Western great powers.” Even in adaptation by American screenwriters David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo, the show retains some of that specificity.

In 3 Body Problem, humanity is doomed by the choice of one individual, Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao). Disillusioned with Communist China, Ye reaches out to a race of alien beings, knowing that they will destroy humanity. As she offers self-serving justifications for her treachery of the entire human race, another (Jess Hong) mockingly cuts her off, “I… I… I… I… who gave you the right to decide for all of us?” Auggie (Eiza González), a scientist, protests at attempts by her employer to capitalize off her research. “It shouldn’t belong to anybody,” she protests. “It should belong to everybody.”

Of course, this is perhaps a reductive lens through which to view things. The series opens with a depiction of the Cultural Revolution, which is now perceived as “a mass embarrassment”, which the Chinese government acknowledged as “entirely wrong in both theory and practice.” Throughout the show, the aliens refer to “chaotic times” on their home planet, a phrase that very specifically echoes Liu’s description of the Cultural Revolution as an “abnormal time.” Indeed, the alien menace could be read not as a metaphor for external enemies, but as “a subtle parody of Maoism.”

While the show and its source material open themselves up to various interpretations through the prism of Chinese culture and history, there’s something refreshing specific in The Three Body Problem and its various adaptations. Like all great science-fiction, it not only offers a vision of a speculative future, but also a perspective on the present. Even as an American adaptation, 3 Body Problem is a window into the modern Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction.