Chinese Cultural Revolution Scene in New Netflix Series is Disturbing Parallel of Cancel Culture, Campus Struggle Sessions
“a part of history that is not written about in fiction very much, let alone filmed”
A new series on Netflix called ‘3 Body Problem’ is causing a stir on social media due to the opening scene, which depicts a struggle session early in China’s Cultural Revolution. The series is actually a work of science fiction, but the opening scene is very realistic.
A physics professor has been declared an enemy of the revolution. He is hauled in front of a rage-filled mob by leaders of the Red Guard, Mao’s revolutionary youth brigade. He is forced to wear a dunce cap. His wife is brought on stage and forced to denounce him and side with the mob to survive. The professor is then beaten to death.
FOX News reports:
Netflix showrunner says parallels between Chinese cultural revolution scene & cancel culture ‘hard to ignore’
The showrunner for Netflix’s new show “3 Body Problem”, David Benioff noted the parallels between a scene depicting China’s Cultural Revolution and modern cancel culture.
Netflix’s new sci-fi epic ‘3 Body Problem’ is based on the Hugo award-winning story of the same name by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin. While the story is about humanity preparing for an alien invasion, with an emphasis on interstellar physics, the show’s opening scene went viral for depicting a controversial historical event. The scene takes place amid China’s communist revolution, where a physics professor is interrogated and beaten to death before a crowd by Red Guards for refusing to comply with Chinese communist beliefs.
“This isn’t a commentary on cancel culture,” Benioff, who was the showrunner for HBO’s “Game of Thrones” told The Hollywood Reporter. “But we do tend to move in cycles in terms of human history, and we’re going through a certain period of the cycle right now. There are many very significant differences between the current time and the Cultural Revolution. But there are also some similarities. It was never something where we were like, ‘We should do this show because we want to make a commentary on that.’ But it is interesting that the parallels are there and are hard to ignore.”
Alexander Woo, who is also one of the series’ three showrunners alongside Benioff and Dan Weiss, noted to The New York Times that this era is “a part of history that is not written about in fiction very much, let alone filmed.”
You can watch the scene below, but note that the violence is pretty graphic:
Mao ordered the Red Guard to attack ‘the olds’, and they went about erasing history and customs, tearing down statues in the process. People who did not comply were confronted and physically assaulted. Sound familiar?
Do you think nothing like that could ever happen here? Does everyone remember this iconic moment from 2020?
When you have the time, I highly recommend watching Tucker Carlson’s interview with Xi Van Fleet. She survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution before escaping to America. Her first-person account of that moment in history is as fascinating as it is terrifying. She also offers a grave warning to America that this is exactly where we are headed if things don’t change.
Ep. 77 The Cultural Revolution is here. Just ask Xi Van Fleet. She's lived it twice. pic.twitter.com/5xFS0T5hA9
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 26, 2024
Featured image via YouTube.
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It is happening here and will get worse. The Democrat left never puts away a bad idea for long. CC will continue until its participants are put down. Hard.
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana
And those who do study history and understand it are doomed to see the repeats coming, like a runaway train.
Disturbing parallels with what happened in Nazi Germany in the 30’s as well.
Go to any towns remembrance museum and read what people got up to in the 30’s and you can see the same shit going on right now, same tactics, same outcomes!
Yes, Americans knowledge of history is mostly limited to WWII. But nobody talks about how the Nazis came into powers and were the ‘cancel culture’s of their era.
The Chinese version of the show is less graphic, but more disturbing, precisely because it is less violent.
What is central to the books, but not being talked about, is that anger toward the revolutionaries leads to a catastrophic alien invasion. A central character seeks revenge for her father’s death by inviting aliens to come straighten things out.
I haven’t seen the Netflix version, but I told it is condensed to the point of being incomprehensible.
Science fiction is frequently about the present, disguised as the future.
I’ve seen the Netflix version and it was very clear to me that Ye Wenjie asked the aliens to come because of the behavior of her people. The death of her father, the moral cowardice of everyone around her, the destruction of the forest all played into her belief that humanity needed an advanced civilization to come and rescue them from themselves.
A very progressive outlook.
Glad this is getting some coverage in conservative media. This is the opening scene for the series, which I’ve seen in its entirety. When watching it, I was surprised how unvarnished and ‘non-contextualized’ the depiction of the Chinese Communists was; usually when Hollywood depicts horrible behavior by a non-Caucasian society, it attempts to excuse the behavior in some way. This series does not do that, even a little. The Chicoms cannot be pleased.
I had no expectations going into the series and was wholly unfamiliar with the source material. So, I have no idea how faithful or unfaithful the project is to that material. On balance, I would say it’s an entertaining, worthwhile show that explores the ‘alien invasion’ trope in a surprisingly novel way…which is good because it’s been done to death. The writing is clever and the pacing is brisk. The casting is well done with one exception. There’s a Latina character who’s portrayed by an actress who’s clearly out of her depth. Other than that hiccup, it’s a solid show.
I have worked with Chinese, and blacks have no idea how cruel the little fellas are. They would beat you with a cane if they can get away with it, and they smell terrible.
“Mao went straight to the students, seeing in the young his most reliable allies. They were impressionable, easy to manipulate and eager to fight.”
— The Cultural Revolution, a People’s History 1962-1976, Frank Dikötter
And stupid in the way of the world
That’s a good book to read, btw.
I have mixed feelings about the novel. The worldbuilding is fascinating and the story is interesting, but the writing style really grated on me. I don’t know whether it’s Cixin Liu’s style, or it’s standard for Chinese writing. I don’t think it’s the translator, Ken Liu, because I like his own writing.
Also, despite the opening chapter’s seeming promise of an anti-communist point of view, the story itself struck me somehow as having a collectivist sensibility. I couldn’t exactly put a finger on it, but it didn’t have the sense of freedom and sense of life that good SF often has. Again, I thought, maybe that’s just what Chinese literary conventions are like, but if so I don’t like it. Give me a good old RAH juvie, or Poul Andersen, or even a Dick Francis.
But isn’t the novel very China/Chinese-centric (unlike the show that has a larger scope, to play better for an American audience)? A sense of “freedom” isn’t generally found in Chinese history or culture. I wouldn’t expect to see a sense of freedom in a book that’s written by a Chinese author realistically portraying (mainland) Chinese culture and politics.
BTW, I attempted to read David Wingrove’s “Chung Kuo” series, that depicted a world dominate by China. It was dreadful and uninteresting enough that I didn’t finish the first book, although it had been very highly praised. Is it something about Chinese culture or politics that just rubs the European American reader the wrong way?
I would say there is a small element of “freedom” in play in some Chinese stories. But the wanderer who is beholden to only himself is often portrayed as a crazy man – but maybe one who should be listened to.
PS: I haven’t seen the video version, and don’t plan to.
PPS I haven’t read the sequels and don’t plan to. Reading the first one was too much work.
“Disturbing parallel”? It’s way more than that. It’s a high resolution copy. And many have been talking about it for a decade now.
Yeownmi Park also notes the same parallels when she attended college here in America and her childhood in North Korea. Yes, higher indoctrination has gotten that bad.
Like it or not, it’s destined to have the same level of impact on science fiction as Asimov’s Foundation.
The people are caricatures, and the science is just a hodgepodge of every trendy bit of speculation, but it’s a whole, coherent universe. And that universe will be inhabited by new fiction, for decades to come.
It is tedious to Americans, which is why Netflix abridged it. I was unable to read past the first book, but did finish the audiobooks.
Asimov’s Foundation is another highly-acclaimed series that failed to inspire me to finish the first book. I never cared for Asimov’s fiction, and much preferred his popular science books (in particular The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar).
I read most of the series and was disappointed that there was seemingly no discussion of whether the Seldon Plan was ever a good idea — if disrupting the natural cycle of human events was even a net positive in the long run. I think Asimov in general had a blind spot for his own technopositivism.
The parallel is not a coincidence: People are trained to use this method of bullying to cancel culture. Ye Olde Marxist training (although the name for the bullying has changed).
I am surprised the Chinese censors allowed this. I am more surprised the Chinese censors allowed the book to win awards. Its a good book, and IMO realistic about the 60s. The 2nd, meh, DNF.
The author buried the scene in the middle of the book, and it was written in a low-key manner specifically to evade the censors. The Netflix Series shows events from the book in chronological order, placing this scene first.
No doubt this will be taken as an instructional film by the academic crowd.
Video with subtitles.
https://twitter.com/ChannelSharons/status/1771040621983043596
Xi Van Fleet’s memoir is pretty good. Ask your local branch library to buy and shelve it.
I found the 3BP translation clunky, which is typical when translation Chinese literary works. (The Water Margin)
Name a Hollywood film showing a cultural revolution public struggle meeting. (Not EotS.)
It seems depicting a Chinese struggle session in films is so rare as to be nonexistent, which is striking.
The 1989 Russian film The Chekist is free to watch on utoob.
Barky’s junta was infested with Maoists, most of whom are now running Traitor Joe The Vegetable.
They were running 0bama, too.
Mostly true. Barky still took control of a few things. The push to press BarkyCare after the 7th time it was “killed” with Scott Brown’s election was straight from Barky. It was something that only someone with no American sensibilities, at all (even subconscious) would think of doing. Even Stuphalufagus and his sorts were openly saying how Scott Brown’s election had put the final nail in BarkyCare’s coffin. But it was the Indonesian who showed Americans that one can run roughshod and destructive over every single American tradition and sensibility and the America-hating dems followed him and then learned and copied him. That was all Barky.
Barky was hoisted into the Oval Office by others (and he couldn’t get out of his own way on the campaign trail) but he took control of things he cared about (things that would help bring America to its knees) and ran things himself. Lucky for him, destruction doesn’t take much intelligence or skill, and he had the all-protective skin coating that the GOP was deathly afraid of – to the point of letting America’s sure suicide take off in earnest.
What the useful idiot students used by Mao failed to realize was that as soon as the revolution succeeded, they would be the first to be eliminated. And you can be sure that the useful idiots in today’s cultural revolution are equally ignorant as to this fun factoid.
There are 4 types of Communists:
1) The ones stupid enough to genuinely believe they are fighting for ‘workers’ and ‘equality’
2) The ones that think they’re going to be in power after the revolution
3) The ones that don’t think about it at all but support them anyway
4) The ones that are going to kill #1 and #2 and rule over #3 after the revolution
“Chinese Cultural Revolution Scene in New Netflix Series is Disturbing Parallel of Cancel Culture, Campus Struggle Sessions”
Campus struggle sessions are a direct lift from the Chinese Cultural Revolution programmed into Cancel Culture useful idiots, by people who know exactly what they are doing — as did Mao.
This real photo from the Cultural Revolution is very revealing of the blind obedience these delusional, dangerous youngsters professed.
https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097694c14b3c606c108a74/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Osnos-TheCostofChinasCulturalRevolution2.jpg
I recommend (again):
Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai.”.
Non-fiction. Biographical.
So I’m guessing it’s already been banned in China