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Opinion | Why a US senator’s attack on Chinese writer Liu Cixin and Netflix smacks of nationalistic double standards
- US senators, including Marsha Blackburn, have called Netflix out on Liu Cixin’s comments on the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang. Yet Blackburn, a supporter of Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’, is no friend of Muslims in Xinjiang or anywhere else
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In one orbit, you have a politician from Tennessee, in another orbit you have a science fiction writer from Shanxi. Though their lives have followed very different trajectories thus far, each has begun to perturb the movement of the other due to the dark tug of nationalism.
Marsha Blackburn, a US Senator from Tennessee, nominated US President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, denies climate change and rejects the science of evolution.
Liu Cixin is China’s first winner of the Hugo Award for science fiction. He worked as a computer engineer in rural Shanxi, but his creative flights of fancy have taken him clear across the universe.
Their point of contention? Netflix is adapting Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, an epic novel that is grounded in China, but imbued with a breathtaking cosmological perspective.
A China-produced version of The Three-Body Problem had been slated for a big-screen release but was postponed indefinitely due to an unsatisfactory cut. Then Netflix proposed a television series, bolstering hopes that the award-winning story would make it to the screen after all. The 2019 record-breaking box office success of The Wandering Earth , also based on a book by Liu, was encouraging.
Enter Blackburn, stage right.
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