The Three-Body Problem tells the story of an engineer, called upon by Chinese authorities to look into a spate of suicides by scientists, who discovers an extraterrestrial plot.
Lin had wanted to build a franchise of global television shows and films akin to Star Wars and centred on the novels.
Lin Qi, CEO of Yoozoo, was killed by a disgruntled employee.
He eventually linked up with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, creators of the television series Game of Thrones, to work on the Netflix project.
Lin’s gaming company, Youzu Interactive, Yoozoo in English, is no stranger to the HBO hit; its best-known release is an online strategy game based on the show called Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming.
Lin’s fate changed when he hired lawyer Xu, in 2017, to head a Yoozoo subsidiary called The Three-Body Universe, which held the rights to Liu’s novels.
But not long afterward, Xu was demoted and his pay cut, apparently because of poor performance. He became furious, according to Chinese business magazine Caixin.
As Xu plotted his revenge, Caixin reported, he built a lab in an outlying district of Shanghai where he experimented with hundreds of poisons he bought off the dark web by testing them on dogs, cats and other pets.
Caixin said Xu was fascinated and inspired by the American hit TV series Breaking Bad, about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who teaches himself to make and sell methamphetamine, eventually becoming a drug lord.
Between September and December 2020, Xu began spiking beverages such as coffee, whiskey and drinking water with methylmercury chloride and bringing them into the office, Caixin reported, citing court documents. The report’s details could not be independently confirmed.
Calls to Yoozoo and the Shanghai court went unanswered. Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The plot is as bizarre as a Hollywood blockbuster, and the technique is professional enough to be called the Chinese version of Breaking Bad,” Phoenix News, a Chinese news outlet, said last month.
According to a story by The Hollywood Reporter in January, Benioff said the killing was certainly disconcerting.
“When you work in this business, you’re expecting all sorts of issues to arise. Somebody poisoning the boss is not generally one of them,” he was quoted as saying.
Police arrested Xu on December 18, 2020, the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court said on its official WeChat account as it announced the verdict and sentencing.
Xu reportedly declined to confess to the crime and did not disclose what poison he had used, complicating doctors’ efforts to save Lin’s life.
The court said Xu had plotted to poison Lin and four other people over an office dispute. Its post included a picture of a bespectacled Xu in the courtroom wearing an oversize beige cardigan surrounded by three police officers.
The statement said more than 50 people, including members of Xu’s family and Lin’s family, attended the sentencing.
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The Three-Body Universe, the Yoozoo subsidiary, did not respond to a request for comment, but its CEO, Zhao Jilong, posted on his WeChat account, “Justice has been served,” according to Chinese state media.
Before his untimely death, Lin was something of a celebrity in the world of young Chinese entrepreneurs.
He had built his fortune in the early 2010s, riding a wave of popularity for mobile games. His bid to popularise Liu’s novels was a rare attempt to export Chinese popular culture – something that has eluded China as its government yearns to wield the same soft power the United States commands with its movies, music and sports stars.
Six years after The Three-Body Problem was published in 2008, an English version translated by Ken Liu was released to widespread acclaim.
The book won the Hugo Award, a major science-fiction prize, for best novel. It counted Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg among its fans.
Although Netflix is not available in China, 3 Body Problem has still set off a backlash among Chinese viewers who have been able to access the platform by using virtual private networks, or who have seen pirated versions of the show.
Users on Chinese social media expressed anger that the Netflix adaptation Westernised aspects of the story, and said the show sought to demonise some of the Chinese characters.
Even the People’s Liberation Army’s propaganda wing has weighed in on the series. In an editorial published last Saturday on its website, China Military Online, it called the Netflix series an example of American “cultural hegemony”.
“It can be clearly seen that after the United States seized this popular intellectual property with its superpower strength, it wanted to transform and remake it,” the editorial said. “The purpose was to eliminate as much as possible the reputation of modern China.”