‘Flat and shallow’: Netflix’s 3 Body Problem divides viewers in China

The TV series was co-created for Netflix by the Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, and the True Blood writer Alexander Woo, working with the director Derek Tsang.

Those who favour the latter have described Netflix’s work as “General Tso’s chicken” – a Chinese dish served in and rarely seen in China – compared to Tencent’s “banquet”.

The Netflix series opens with a scene of brutality: a Communist party struggle session during the Cultural Revolution targeting the father of the main character.

The director of the Netflix series told Radio Free Asia it was becoming increasingly difficult to portray the period of the Cultural Revolution in China.

The English translation of the first novel opens with the struggle session, while the Chinese version buries that scene in the middle, a decision Liu and his publishers reportedly made to make the book less politically sensitive in China.

A Chinese film review site, Mtszimu, said the adaptation was “not only a new interpretation of Liu Cixin’s original work but also an important contribution to global science-fiction literature”.