Whereas Chinese actress Liu Yifei showed her support for Hong Kong police by reposting a comment made by the People’s Daily on social media, Chinese writer Liu Cixin has voiced his support for the Chinese government to suppress ethnic minorities in Xinjiang with remarks defending Beijing. In an interview with New Yorker last year, the novelist, when asked about the concentration camps in Xinjiang, said: “If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty... If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.”

Liu is China’s most influential science fiction writer. His book The Three Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award, the world’s highest honor for science fiction.

In 2019, the Chinese government shocked the world by building so-called “re-education camp” in Xinjiang, detaining millions of Uyghurs and Muslims. It was that year that Liu was interviewed by New Yorker.

Earlier this month, Netflix announced that it would adapt The Three Body Problem into a TV series and Liu would be the production consultant of the project. Five U.S. senators then wrote to Netflix’s management, saying Netflix' decision to produce an adaptation of Liu’s work can be viewed as the normalization of China’s crimes in Xinjiang. “In the face of such atrocities in Xinjiang, there no longer exist corporate decisions of complacency, only complicity,” the senators wrote. They ask Netflix to “seriously reconsider” the impact of giving Liu a platform.

In response, Netflix Global Public Policy Vice President Dean Garfield said: “We do not agree with his comments, which are entirely unrelated to his book or this Netflix show.”

Netflix actually knows that it should not support China’s suppression of ethnic minorities. That is amazing! However, even when it comes to a moral low ground, Netflix cannot be entirely honest. Is Liu’s political standpoint really unrelated to his book?

It is true that Liu does try to avoid talking about politics. But more often than not, he likes to touch on political ethics in his works. In his science fictions, a veneration for the Soviet Union’s heavy industry model, a mentality of collective despotism and social Darwinism values are ubiquitous, and they are controversial stuff.

The core idea of The Three Body Problem is about the law of the dark forest. “The universe is a dark forest, and every civilization is a hunter with a gun... If he finds other life... there is only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.”

Many commentators have already pointed out that such a law is similar to the concept of “Lebensraum”, or living space, proposed by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel more than a century ago. According to Ratzel, every country is like a living organism that needs considerable living space, and a healthy country naturally has to increase its living space through expansion. This theory later became the ideological principle guiding German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Liu has never dismissed such a comparison. He actually claims to be a maniacal technologist who believes technology can solve all problems. Technologism itself is just a political lie. Technologists advocate indifference to politics and justice and believe people should focus on technological development. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), technology is a tool for it not to solve “all problems” in Liu’s words but to tackle its own problems, which concern how to control society and maintain the party’s power.

In a dialogue with science fiction researcher Jiang Xiaoyuan in 2007, Cixin said chips could be implanted in the human brain to control the human mind for the sake of the greater interest of the human race, such as during a catastrophe where people either lived or died. During the talk, he pointed at a female journalist and said: “If only you, me and her were left in the world possessing all that the human civilization had, and if we had to eat her in order to survive, would you eat her?” His answer to the question was clear: he would devour the journalist without hesitation.

As commentators have pointed out, some parallels can be drawn between The Three Body Problem and imperialism described in the CCP’s propaganda. From “counter-revolution” crackdown in 1948 to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of peaceful student protesters and other citizens to the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, the CCP always has the same excuse: the country is at a critical juncture and resolute measures have to be taken, and so “individuals have to be sacrificed for the sake of the whole”.

The Wandering Earth, based on Liu’s eponymous novella, is a 2019 film that serves to promote CCP-ruled China as the world’s leading power in science and technology that saves the planet at a time when mankind faces an existential crisis. The film, of which Liu was a producer, was a success for China’s propaganda authority, which ordered different groups across the country to watch it. The China Film Administration even held a “celebration banquet” for the film. It is impossible that Netflix is not aware of all this. Perhaps a high TV rating is all that it cares.

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