Last weekend, I watched all eight episodes of 3 Body Problem, a Netflix adaptation of the bestselling Chinese science-fiction novel San Ti (2008), by Liu Cixin.
Ken Liu’s English translation, The Three-Body Problem (2014), was the first novel by an Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, in 2015, which celebrates the best science fiction and fantasy works.
The main conceit of 3 Body Problem – spoilers ahead! – is the impending arrival of a race of aliens that was contacted by Dr Ye Wenjie, a Chinese scientist who was so utterly disillusioned by the horrors she witnessed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China that she believed only the aliens could save humanity from itself.
Ye, together with a fanatic cultlike group that she founded, would help the aliens prepare the earth for colonisation.
When the rest of the world finds out, in the present day, what Ye has done, and when it transpires that the aliens, who will reach earth in 400 years’ time, are not so benign (they refer to human as “bugs”), Ye is condemned as a traitor to the human race.
Among the many traitors in China’s past, military leader Wu Sangui (1612-1678) is best known for allowing the Manchu army to pass through Shanhaiguan, a narrow, strategic pass about 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the Ming dynasty capital Beijing, which guarded the Chinese heartland against the Manchu invaders.
Only 1 ancient Chinese singer could match Taylor Swift’s effect in Singapore
Only 1 ancient Chinese singer could match Taylor Swift’s effect in Singapore
Once they breached Shanhaiguan, the Manchu troops quickly overran the whole of China and established themselves as the rulers under the new Qing dynasty (1644-1912).
While they are now regarded as a part of the Chinese nation, the Manchu people were considered foreigners, or even barbarians, by the Han Chinese 400 years ago.
By facilitating their invasion, Wu Sangui has since been despised as a Hanjian, or “traitor to the Han people”.
As a reward for his service to the new rulers of China, Wu was made a prince and conferred a vast region in China’s southwest, where he ruled as an autonomous potentate. As a subject of the new regime, Wu persecuted loyalists of the fallen Ming dynasty, and even executed Yongli, the last pretender to the Ming throne.
In time, the central government reduced the powers of these regional princes, who responded by rebelling against the Qing dynasty. As a final hurrah, Wu declared himself emperor of the Wu-Zhou dynasty in 1678, but died seven months later of natural causes. Soon afterwards, the Qing government repossessed his princedom.
What motivated Wu to allow the Manchu army free passage into the Chinese heartland?
It could have been to save his family, who were being held by rebels in Beijing. He could have been trying to use the Manchu troops to defeat the rebels, with a plan to drive them back afterwards, but misjudged the strength of the troops.
Another question: after the Manchu invaders became China’s rulers, what made Wu hunt down the Ming loyalists and murder the remnants of the Ming imperial family?
Whatever his motivations were, Wu Sangui is still vilified as a traitor today. His very name is a byword for a turncoat in Chinese.
But why only him? What about the many other Han Chinese officials, soldiers and functionaries who served the Manchu before and after their occupation of China?
If these individuals were all Hanjian, what about the countless Chinese people who served in the British colonial government in Hong Kong? Surely, they couldn’t all be “traitors to the Chinese race”? Or were they?
