Five Republican US senators have confronted Netflix over the streaming giant’s plan to adapt a Chinese sci-fi book trilogy, expressing concern over the original author’s comments about claims of forced labor in Xinjiang.
Liu Cixin’s bestselling “The Three-Body Problem,” which tells the story of humanity’s first contact with aliens, is set to become a major Netflix series co-written by the creators of “Game of Thrones.”
In a letter to content boss Ted Sarandos, the senators accused Liu of “parroting dangerous [Communist Party] propaganda” and suggested Netflix was “providing a platform to Mr Liu in producing this project.”
They highlighted a New Yorker article from last year in which Liu is quoted defending mass internment in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, where activists say more than one million Uighurs and other Muslim Turkic-speaking people have been incarcerated in camps.
“Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks?” Liu told the magazine. “If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”
According to the senators’ letter, adapting Liu’s work would represent “the normalization of, or apologism for, these crimes.”
“We ask Netflix to seriously reconsider the implications of providing a platform to Mr Liu in producing this project,” it concluded.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/09/26/us-republican-senators-confront-netflix-over-chinese-sci-fi-show/