Sci-fi dreamer’s poisoning death shocks
>> He was sometimes called the “billionaire millennial,” and his ambitions were no less grand than his nickname.
Lin Qi, a 39-year-old video game tycoon, had spent a small fortune buying up the rights to a Chinese science fiction novel called The Three-Body Problem. A tale of alien invasion that intertwined cosmic machinations with the horrors of China’s Cultural Revolution, the book had become an unlikely international bestseller that counted Barack Obama among its admirers.
Lin saw even bigger possibilities. He envisioned a global film and television franchise based on the book and its two sequels that would approach Star Wars levels of cultural recognition. He was working with Netflix and the creators of the Game of Thrones television series to make it come to pass.
He would never see it happen. Lin was poisoned in December, according to police in Shanghai, and he died on Christmas Day. His death has rattled China’s technology and gaming worlds and set off furious speculation about who killed him and why. It has also turned attention to the unlikely story of Lin, a would-be global media tycoon undaunted by rising tensions between China and the West, who dreamed of bringing a product of Chinese popular culture to the global mainstream.
China’s government and its creative class alike have long worked to bring the country’s ideas and characters to a world audience, opening up new markets and giving Beijing a soft-power boost to counter the share of mind the United States has won through Hollywood, popular music and other cultural ephemera. Those efforts have had mixed results, which many blame on the tight controls that Beijing maintains on games, books, television shows and movies.
The Shanghai police said they received a report on Dec 17 that Lin had likely been poisoned. They detained a man whose surname is Xu and who they said was a colleague of Lin’s. The police said they were holding Xu under suspicion of committing a major crime. Chinese media have identified the suspect as Xu Yao, an executive at Lin’s gaming company, Youzu Interactive, which goes by Yoozoo in English.
It was not clear how or whether Lin’s death would affect Netflix’s plans for The Three-Body Problem. In September, the US streaming service said it would turn the trilogy into an original series developed by David Benioff and D B Weiss, executive producers of Game of Thrones, with a creative team that included Liu Cixin, author of the books. Lin was listed as an executive producer.
The Three-Body Problem is the first book in what Liu called the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The book, set in present-day China, tells the story of an engineer called upon by Beijing authorities to look into a spate of suicides by scientists. He discovers an extraterrestrial plot with roots in the Cultural Revolution, the decade of paranoia that led to the persecution and torture of perceived enemies of the Communist Party, which lasted until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. The English version of The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, became a sensation when it was released in 2014. It won the Hugo Award, a major science fiction accolade, for best novel. Mark Zuckerberg added it to his reading list. Mr Obama called it “fun to read, partly because my day-today problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade.”
Lin made it his life’s work to make the novel known to an even broader audience, according to an online memorial written by Chen Long, a professor who taught Lin at Hupan University, a business school. Beginning in 2014, Chen said, Lin started buying copyrights and licences connected to the books. By 2019, Mr Chen estimated, Lin had spent about $150 million (4.4 billion baht). His mission was to make the trilogy’s world into an internationally recognised franchise, with movies, television shows, video games, animé and more, Mr Chen wrote. A native of Wenzhou, a coastal city famed for its entrepreneurial spirit, Lin has said that his family ran a coal mining business. Even after he moved to Shanghai to try his luck in the video gaming industry, he kept up his Wenzhou ties, holding a position as executive chair of a Wenzhou business association in Shanghai.
Lin was among a new, younger group of entrepreneurs who were more aggressive than their elders about growing business outside of China. His successes show how companies continue to work on projects extending beyond China’s borders, despite Beijing’s worsening relations with the US and some other countries. Outside China, Yoozoo was best known for its 2019 release of Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming, an online strategy game based on the books and television show.