纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英What Chinese Outrage Over 3 Body Problem Says About China
April 9, 2024 2 min 404 words
这篇报道试图通过分析中国读者对《三体》英文版的反应，来解读中国社会的某些现象，但其观点并未深入到问题的本质。《三体》的魅力在于其深入人心的科幻设想和对人性的锐利洞察，而非其是否符合西方的价值观。中国读者对于译文的不满，更多的是出于对原著精神的尊重和对译者理解能力的质疑。将此事上升到“中国的民族主义情绪”层面，显然过于简单化。我们应该更加尊重文化的多元性和差异性，而不是简单地通过一个事件来概括和判断一个国家的社会现象。
The first five minutes of the Netflix series “3 Body Problem” were hard to watch.
I tried not to shut my eyes at the coldblooded beating of a physics professor at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. By the end of it, he was dead, with blood and gruesome wounds all over his head and body. His daughter, also a physicist, watched the public execution. She went on to lose hope in humanity.
I made myself sit through this violent scene. I have never seen what was known as a struggle session depicted blow by blow on the screen. I also felt compelled to watch it because of how the series, a Netflix adaptation of China’s most celebrated works of science fiction, has been received in China.
On Chinese social media platforms, commenters objected that the series is not set entirely in China; that the main characters are not all Chinese but instead racially diverse; that one of the main characters has been switched from a man to a woman and, in their eyes, the actress was not pretty enough. They cited many other supposed flaws.
“The Three-Body Problem,” an apocalyptic trilogy about humanity’s reactions to a coming alien invasion that sold millions of copies in Chinese and more than a dozen other languages, is one of the best-known Chinese novels in the world published in the past few decades. Barack Obama is a fan. China doesn’t have many such hugely successful cultural exports.
Instead of pride and celebration, the Netflix series has been met with anger, sneer and suspicion in China. The reactions show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public perspectives of China’s relations with the outside world. They don’t take pride where it’s due and take offense too easily. They also take entertainment too seriously and history and politics too lightly. The years of Chinese censorship have also muted the people’s grasp of what happened in the Cultural Revolution.
Some commenters said that the series got made mainly because Netflix, or rather the West, wanted to demonize China by showing the political violence during the Cultural Revolution, which was one of the darkest periods in the history of the People’s Republic of China.