Five former Oxford students are reunited due to the suicide of their teacher in The 3-Body Problem by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. They are Will (Alex Sharp), Jack (John Bradley), Jin (Jess Hong), Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Augustina (Eiza González). In terms of racial diversity, they are two whites, an Asian, a black and a Latina whose origins we barely know anything about and who communicate with each other in perfect English.
And, if we base ourselves on a principle of representation as Hollywood has told us it should be contemplated, they are a success: they allow the diversity of society to be reflected on screen. For this article, whether they are perceived as puppets of the writers rather than well-rounded characters driving the plot is not relevant.
Readers of Cixin Liu's trilogy on which the Netflix series is based, however, may at first be a little taken aback by the cast. It's simple: they must spend a few minutes or chapters understanding which characters in the novels they are, since the writer conceived a fictional universe that looked at the universe in search of extraterrestrial life but, when it came to supporting the terrestrial plots, He did it mostly from China and with Chinese characters.
Thus, little by little, one can realize that Will is inspired by Yun Tianming, Jack by Hu Wen, Jin is a combination of some characteristics of Wang Miao and Cheng Xin, Saul is Luo Ji and, finally, Augustina remains the most of the journey of Wang Miao, the protagonist of the first novel.
It is not necessary to have read the 1,294 pages of the trilogy to understand where the shots are going. Those five physics experts from Oxford are the mutation of five Chinese characters in the original work. This makes The Three-Body Problem limit its Chinese identity above all to two elements: the Cultural Revolution carried out by Mao Zedong, which persecuted dissent and any citizen with ties to the West or capitalism, and the character of Ye Wenjie (younger Zine Tseng, older Rosalind Chao).
In the introduction of the series, faithfully following Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, we are shown the injustices carried out during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards can even murder a physicist on stage and in front of a crowd for teaching the Theory of Relativity in his classes. Since it is from Albert Einstein, they argue that it is reactionary and Westernist thinking.
Afterwards, the viewer can follow the daughter of the executed man, Ye Wenjie, who is isolated in a military base from where she commits the original sin: asking a hostile extraterrestrial civilization to come to Earth, disenchanted as she is with humanity.
The Chinese presence, therefore, is limited above all to telling the trigger of the story: the one that leads to the not-exactly-imminent invasion of the Trisolarians and the race against time of Earthling scientists to be able to confront it. the threat. This has a clear consequence: for the sake of a diversity that contributes absolutely nothing to the story, China becomes the villain of the story.
Showing one of the darkest chapters in China's recent history when the story is told from there is not the same as having an American production proclaim the umpteenth “oh, how bad communism is!” while using the Cultural Revolution as the origin story of the only character who can be clearly defined as a villain.
Villaining China, for the record, is the least of The 3-Body Problem's problems in focusing on diversity. Nor will I put my hands on my head because a country has the role of bad guy in an audiovisual narrative when, let's be honest, we have swallowed this resource countless times (and many times we read it as justified, other times as soft propaganda).
The real problem is that, by transferring the conflicts and plots of Chinese scientists to an ideal representation of diversity (possibly following closely some Harvard sociological study with an American historical, social and cultural perspective), the strength of the view is diminished. by Cixin Liu.
One of the main virtues of the science fiction trilogy is precisely its local perspective. In Wang Miao, the protagonist, there is a scientific curiosity and determination that makes more sense when understanding the society in which he has grown up. No conceptual proclamation is needed to grasp that, for example, happiness is not part of the equation of human existence, but rather a sense of duty that leads one to try to solve problems of orbital mechanics and unravel the mysteries that arise. And, while the Cultural Revolution is addressed, a less Manichean relationship with power is also exposed.
Rather than portraying the communist dictatorship as bad, it shows how to live in a society where freedom of choice and expression are not part of the vocabulary of citizens. There are codes to address power, an idiosyncrasy to be heard or ignored, a spirit of obligatory resilience, a belief in the common good above personal gratification or a sense of concrete duty and responsibility.
They are elements that make up the implicit essence of this fictional universe, that help distinguish it from other similar stories (along with Cixin's ultra-scientific vocation) and that also allow us to understand from which point the invasion is approached. There is a clear example: the wave of suicides in the scientific community (because, suddenly, experiments fail and a debate opens about whether science is dead) can only be understood from this perspective.
With this decision by Benioff and Weiss to dilute the original Chinese essence to reduce its weight and diversify it in a superficial way, a sacrilege is committed: Netflix does not contribute to Chinese representation on television but rather erases it, also to the detriment of history (and taking away layers of reading as if the extraterrestrials, in reality, represent the West in its historical desire to civilize other societies).
It is the paradox of this American idea of diversity: sometimes, by imposing quotas on stories that did not ask for them, the authenticity of the whole is diminished and, above all, the opportunity to contribute to representation from a global perspective is eliminated.
