'The Three Body Problem' And the Rise of Chinese Science Fiction
19:00 Share

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate, then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

This is On The Media's midweek podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. In March, an adaptation of one of China's biggest cultural exports premiered on Netflix. Every civilization ends in chaos.

There will eventually be a cataclysm from which we cannot recover. And when you know your planet is doomed, what is the solution? Flee.

"Find a new home." "Correct." The Three-Body Problem, based on a book by Leo Sashin, follows a group of modern-day scientists battling an alien invasion, triggered by a cataclysmic decision made by an aggrieved physicist during the Cultural Revolution in China. The show garnered around 15.6 million views in its first week.

And this past Saturday, Beijing kicked off the eighth China Science Fiction Conference. The theme is "Scientific Dreams Create the Future."

The event focuses on science fiction technology, science fiction creation, and industry cultivation. At the opening ceremony, an animated presenter greeted attendees on stage, and she showed off graphs detailing the meteoric rise of science fiction in China, claiming that the industry had raked in nearly $16 billion of revenue in 2023, a 29% increase from last year.

The seeds of this sci-fi craze were first planted in 2008 with the publication of The Three-Body Problem. The book became an unexpected global phenomenon. The trilogy has now exceeded the total sales of all literary works exported by China to date.

Jing Su is a professor of East Asian languages and literatures and comparative literature at Yale. She spoke with Brooke about this industrialization of science fiction in China. So why is science fiction right now so serviceable as a soft power tool?

This attention made the Chinese government sit up and think about, wow, this is really something that's worth cultivating. There's an industry around it. China is probably the only country where there are startup companies that specialize in science fiction. Imagine that Museum of Natural History in New York and paleontologists and all the universities here all of a sudden decide they're going to promote the study of dinosaurs. Mm-hmm.

And then the next day, there'll be institutes founded on this. Now that science fiction has reached a certain level of recognition globally, this is when the state then intercepts and try to give it an additional lift. And would this be too much of an embrace?

ways to be seen. You quote Wu Yan, who is a founder of a Chinese think tank that publishes an annual report on the science fiction industry, saying that, quote, it is very rare for a work of fiction to win the support of three major constituencies, the government, popular readers, and intellectuals. And Chinese science fiction now enjoys all three. And the

That's partly because the Chinese economy is driven by science and tech, and this encourages recruitment.

Certainly, this is a good moment for science fiction. And given China's reliance on science and tech, and I think it's optimism in what science and tech can do, it's a very good marriage at the moment. But I have to say, it's not the first marriage. This marriage has gone on, broken up, and come back together many times throughout the 20th century.

And in the 50s, for instance, there was a moment where that's the era of Sputnik and China was looking on the sidelines. Essentially, there's the former Soviet Union, the U.S. and the corporate race where technological supremacy, space dominance and China was taking notes. And it, too, felt that this was the future and it could see that it needed to have a role.

From that period on, there was a very strong emphasis on popularizing science. You don't just teach children and students technological expertise. You also need to get them excited about the culture to really understand how science can better society. It has a huge impact on

a lot of scientists have said that Star Trek inspired them to go into science, just like there was a huge recruitment boost for the FBI because of the X-Files. Oh, I love that. I did not know that. You mentioned that the Chinese relationship with science fiction has waxed and waned over the years. So I wonder where it began. In the early 19th and 20th centuries...

There was apparently a massive influx of translated works by Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, maybe H.G. Wells. It really happened around the turn of the century, 1905, 1907. These several years, we witnessed a burgeoning of translated works as well as inspired native works of science fiction. They saw a different worldview and a different way of telling the human experience.

And that was tremendously invigorating and really intrigued people. The idea of traveling through time, the idea of flying in the air. I mean, we should also remember that the late 19th century is also where, along with science fiction, the groundwork had been prepared by translation of Western scientific knowledge, from anatomy to chemistry to physics and so on and so forth.

And they were also interested in how stories were told. For instance, Conan Doyle's detective fiction shared a very similar timeframe as the introduction of science fiction to China. And people marveled on its narrative technique. You know how in detective fiction, you open with the scene of the crime, then you kind of backtrack.

So that kind of flashback was not common in Chinese literature at all. So they were stunned by that, gradually then tried to master the genre for themselves. There were a massive number of indigenous works that tried to reinvent or try to try their hand at writing science fiction. They ended up rewriting a lot of traditional Chinese fiction in the genre of fantasy, which is actually quite in abundance in Chinese literature tradition.

And they basically tried to reinvent the past with use of Western science fiction, which was very common at the time, given that the society as a whole was going through such radical change. They were basically looking to the West as a model for the future to come. But after the Revolution of 1949 and the Civil War in China...

Writers were believers in the socialist communist ideology. They wrote about the Great Leap Forward, dreams of giant crops, no more famine in the world. But the opposite happened during the Great Leap Forward. So in the 1950s, there was a moment of convergence between what science fiction writers were writing about and the state's propagation and desire to promote science.

But then when the science fiction writers got a little too creative, for instance, this dinosaur egg, what was in question was whether the dinosaur's egg can still hatch after thousands of years. But at the time, you know, when Ye Yonglie wrote about this, the scientists didn't take it well. They're saying, wait a minute.

That does not really accord with science. And if it doesn't accord with science, then what exactly does science fiction do? That in some ways, maybe we need to streamline it more with only what science is able to prove. But if you do that, of course, then the fiction part of it is sacrificed. In the late 70s, with Mao's death, and of course, with the devastation of the Cultural Revolution,

That's when the leadership under Deng Xiaoping decided that it would be better to quietly distance China from this very brutal and tragic chapter of class struggle and to look towards science and technology as a new creature that will unite its people and lead them to look forward.

There was this opening up in China where science fiction once again had new life breathed into it because of the atmosphere of liberalization, modernization. But then in 1983 or so, there was a backlash against all this market reform liberalization. It was concerned that, yes, it's all fine that we have in some ways very limited capitalists coming to China, but we don't really want a spiritual influence anymore.

And so in 83, science fiction was once more vilified. The genre of science fiction recaptured China's good graces in the late 90s when Liu Cengxin wrote The Three-Body Problem, started serializing it. You call him sort of the Yoda of the whole thing, and the rest is kind of recent history. Yes, it really was three bodies that...

once again put the spotlight on Chinese science fiction. It was just so unusual in its grand narrative, the scale and the enormity of the topic that it was taking on, basically the future of humanity, the future of the world as we know it. A couple of years ago, in a conversation at the New York Public Library, he talked about the segmented history of science fiction in China.

that it seems that there wasn't a continuous line. It kept getting reborn anew.

That is true, and which is why the current generation of writers, it's actually relatively recently that they reconnect with this late 19th century antecedent of Chinese science fiction. Most of them grew up on Asimov, on Clarke. That is why you see these young writers that are reconnecting with a deeper kind of Chinese history, like 16th century novels, right?

They are trying to build Chinese science fiction from within the Chinese context. And one could say that the greatest contribution and the most important contribution of Three Bodies is not a successful series, is not a film, it's not even a cultural industry, but it's the fact that it allowed and it opened up the space for writers to now really build and really recreate what it would mean to have science fiction in China.

So what are your favorites? Give me a few and tell me how they might epitomize what's going on in the genre. I'm a big fan of the late 19th century science fiction genre. Because they were at the very early experimental stage, they were labeling themselves in all kinds of different ways. Genres that don't exist in the Western tradition. So for instance, one of my favorite was a particular genre called animatronics.

anarchist female assassin. And the reason I loved it is because it was just so outlandish in what it was trying to do, but at the same time, it was limited by its own historical circumstance. So for instance, you have this female heroine who travels on an electric horse

And she nourished herself on these food that would just come out of a machine that you can create any food without just pressing a few buttons. Well, that was like Star Trek. Earl Grey. Yes, exactly. Comes out of the replicator. Exactly. But of course, the way she imagines it is still sort of traditional Chinese dishes also mixed with kind of Western nutrients. This awkward conjunction between Chinese food and a kind of Western concept of how red meat is really good for you.

Chinese food, you don't eat steak. But then there's this idea at that time that, oh, things like protein, egg white, being out in the sun, being physically active. And these are not values that were celebrated in traditional Chinese society. I love science fiction for the reason that it's very much about the future, but a future that's only imagined with reference to the present. And it's always an attempt to try to change or shape or

or try to better understand the present by casting a kind of alternative life or world somewhere in a time that has not yet transpired. So let's talk about the

The problem of adaptation. The Taipei Times quoted a reviewer likening the Netflix adaptation of the three-body problem to a, quote, plate of General Tso's chicken, a westernized dish and a metaphor for inauthenticity and cultural misunderstanding.

Others saw the adaptation as villainizing China's history. It's like making a whole tray of dumplings merely for tasting a bit of vinegar, one viewer wrote. Why do you think some Chinese viewers reacted that way?

I think all this is making me very hungry for some reason. Well, I think there's a couple of things. One is imagine Harry Potter after we've seen it, loved it, built a whole industry around it. It gets remade in China to a different cast, different setting. And no matter how good it is or how bad it is,

we're not going to be terribly disposed to thinking that is the Harry Potter we love and the Harry Potter that should be. Very similar with Three Bodies. Chinese viewers, what many of them did not like was why they had to open up with Cultural Revolution, right? So touch a kind of a sore spot once again. That's not so different from the book.

It's actually where the scene of cultural revolution was placed that made the difference. Putting cultural revolution first did not make it into the published version. It was moved back to later in the book. To stay on the subject of adaptations for a moment, you say that it's an interesting lens through which to look at different cultures, right?

What, if anything, does the adaptation of the three-body problem reveal about the way Chinese society works or our society? It's as much a glimpse to how Chinese society works as it is to how we tend to think how Chinese society works, right? The fact that we preface it with the Cultural Revolution, which will appear nowhere else in the novel, that itself tells us that when we think China, we still tend to think of it as Cultural Revolution.

And for someone in China, that's not the case. Cultural revolution is very distant, if that well known at all to younger generation. To them living in China every day, the more worrying concern on their mind is how they're going to get a job given the 25% of youth unemployment rate. So, you know, there's a difference between looking at a country from afar

And inevitably, when we see from a distance, we lose the kind of detail or interest in the granularity that is actually the reality on the ground. And I think same in the reverse. You know, when China looks at America, they think gun violence, racism, and that's about it. There's a lot of flattening of one another and this process of mutual perception.

The reason that Three Bodies is so valuable in my mind as a cultural historian is because it provides this double mirror where both sides get to see themselves in it as well. So what can we learn about the way the Chinese government and society work through the lens of science fiction? And what about the content of the science fiction? Does that tell us anything about Chinese society today?

Absolutely. There was a film in 2019 called Wondering Earth. It was bought up by Netflix. The premise is basically the sun is dying and it's about to engulf its nearby planets, in which case Earth would be completely destroyed. The Chinese scientists were trying to put boosters on Earth and try to push it away and sail away like a starship.

I was out in Hollywood a few years ago, right before COVID, looking into China in Hollywood. And this is one of the films that I was talking about with them. When the Chinese are trying to film Wandering Earth, there's a reason why it ended up being filmed in China. Because they tried to think about whether it would be better with Hollywood studios. But it turns out one of the difficulties is just completely different ideas of the hero.

One of the questions that was raised to the Chinese side was, you know, why do you have to move the entire Earth? Why don't you just build a spaceship? As you said, this is Star Trek. This is Star Wars. This is Deep Space Nine. This is the trope. Of course, the solution is you build a spaceship and take off. But the Chinese part said, if you have the end of civilization as we know it, of course you take everybody with you. That's fascinating. Yeah.

What kind of role do you think storytelling and science fiction will play in the relationship between China and the West? Why is it important for people outside of China to understand what's going on inside this phenomenon of science fiction in China right now? Both countries, no matter where you are, aspire to a future of stability and prosperity and peace in their own ways.

Now, the problem is when one side's future does not accord with the other side's idea of the future. And that is the place where we should look. And I think what science fiction does is simply point the direction in which we can look, but it doesn't provide a definitive answer. Thank you very much, Jean. Thank you, Brooke.

Jing Su is a professor of East Asian languages and literatures and comparative literature at Yale and the author of Kingdom of Characters, the language revolution that made China modern. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Keep up with the show by following us on Instagram and threads. I'm Michael Ellinger.