The murderer of Lin Qi, the Chinese billionaire who had the idea of bringing the Chinese science fiction saga “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin to the screens, was sentenced to death on March 22, just the day before the debut of the long-awaited series on Netflix. The case, CNN reports, has attracted enormous attention in China, given the notoriety of the victim – a young entrepreneur who became very rich when his video game company was listed on the stock exchange in 2014 – and the dynamics, worthy of a series TV a la Breaking Bad, of the murder.
Lin, who is listed in the credits as the series' executive producer, was poisoned at 39, months after Netflix announced plans to produce the series in 2020. He was killed by one of his company's top executives, lawyer Xu Yao who had helped Lin's Yoozoo Games obtain the rights to the trilogy.
Xu had given Lin a bottle of what he presented as a probiotic, but it contained lethal toxins purchased on the 'dark web', through a system of 160 different cellphones and a trading company in Japan, Chinese media reported. According to these reconstructions, the killer mixed and tested a hundred lethal substances in an improvised laboratory, just like that of the protagonist of the American series “Breaking Bad” of which Xu is a big fan.
After the poisoning in the winter of 2020, Lin was admitted to a hospital in Shanghai where he died 10 days later, with doctors finding the presence of five different toxins in his body. Xu was quickly identified as the main suspect and arrested.
According to the conviction, the motive was a dispute over the management of the company. The media specified that the dispute was linked precisely to the rights to the trilogy, to transform it into a sort of cultural franchise. However, the rights were purchased in 2009 by a couple of Chinese entrepreneurs, with whom Lin unsuccessfully attempted to collaborate in recent years for the film adaptation.
In 2017 he turned to Xu, a famous lawyer educated in France and the United States, with a decade of experience as a Chinese corporate lawyer, who succeeded in obtaining the rights and the following year was appointed to head a subsidiary of Yoozoo, called The Three-Body Universe, with the task of developing the Three-Body IP.
But at this point the relationship between the two deteriorates, and Lin, dissatisfied with Xu's results, begins to marginalize the lawyer by entrusting the most important projects to another manager, Zhao Jilong, who also appears to have been the victim of poisoning by of Xu, who had injected mercury into bottles of water, whiskey and coffee capsules in Zhao's office who survived but with a concentration of mercury in his body 10 times higher than safe levels.
Xu also saw his salary reduced from 20 million yuan ($2.7 million) a year to 5 million, and when Netflix announced the project for the series in September 2020, his name did not appear among the producers executives, while Lin has Zhao's placed next to his. And perhaps this is the final tear that pushed Xu to implement his murderous plan.
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