Cixin Liu's Postscript for the American Edition for “The Three Body Problem”
reader.epubee.com
reader.epubee.com
If I remember correctly, I found The Three Body Problem super pleasant to read and engaging. By contrast, I liked the idea of Dark Forest but found it almost painful to read. The chapters were strangely broken up (some extremely long, etc.) and so on. Back to Death's End and the "writing" improved again.
So was it the swap of the translators? Is Ken Liu's translation for Books 1 and 3 just more amenable to my western sensibility, or is Book 2 really just quite different, even in the original?
I found many passages difficult to get through, and I'd constantly realise I'd read an entire page without taking anything in. Book 3 and 4 where both much easier to read, and they were both translated by Ken Liu.
(Haven't read the mandarin versions though)
The book was a bit of a slog, though. Still good without a doubt, just nowhere near as flowing and page-turning as the one before it.
I went into the third book slightly worried it might have progressed further in that direction, but you’re right, it was a step back in the right direction.
The original Dark Forest is perfectly fine. Many people suggested it has the best storytelling among the three.
1. Ken Liu is generally considered (by people who have read the trilogy in both languages) a better translator
2. the Dark Forest's structure does feel a little "literary" to me, which might make you felt "the chapters were strangely broken up".
3. I heard that they made many changes in the English version to meet "the political correctness of the western world", which might be another contributing factor of your painful read.
(Liu Cixin on Joel Martinsen, 2015-04-19, https://m.newsmth.net/article/SF/370834): --- here comes my blunt translation ---
"Very reliable, Joel Martinsen's Chinese is very good, his Mandarin is better than mine, and he works hard and is very dedicated. There are more than 1000 modifications made in the English version of Dark Forest.
The only problem is: he only goes to vegetarian restaurants.
BTW, the modifications of Dark Forest have been just completed. There are more modifications compared to the first book, deleted everything related to Ball Lightning, one of the Wallfacer's strategy has been completely changed. Besides that, the editor of TOR is a Feminist and is very strict, sexual discriminations are recognized here and there. Example 1, when words such as "purity" and "angelic" used too often it becomes sexual discrimination, so their usage needs to be limited. Example 2, the secretary-general of the United Nations is a beauty is considered as sexual discrimination. Example 3, all Wallfacers are male is considered as sexual discrimination (but this hasn't been changed, I argued that all American presidents are male, though the editor argued that they will have a female president soon). These changes are a huge workload for me and Joel, very exhausting, but finally completed."
--- translation ends ---
Some context: - "Chinese" refers to the Chinese written language, which is universal across China, "Mandarin" refers to the official spoken language of China. Many people, including Liu Cixin, have accent when speaking Mandarin. That's why he said "Joel Martinsen's Chinese is very good, his Mandarin is better than mine".
- the vegetarian part is just kidding
- Ball Lightning is another popular science fiction from Liu Cixin
Depending on the fiction the target audience grew up reading they may be sensitive to different tropes. e.g. it might be quite exhausting to read a novel with an overuse of "pure" and "angelic" in a most Anglophone societies where these words aren't that frequently used to describe friends and family.
Makes the changes more disappointing.
I don't think the political correctness or other changes would have really bothered me, it was much more about structure. IIRC, there were some "chapters" in Dark Forest that were... over an hour?
In Chinese, does the third book also go back to a more ... narrative style? That is, did you consider the first and third books to be "similar in style" but Dark Forest to stand out?
Thanks again!
P.S. I struggled to decide between saying "Chinese" or Mandarin. I had thought there were also "word/regional differences" between Mandarin and Cantonese, not just pronunciation. Good to know that Chinese would have been correct!
I’ll often read a bit before going to bed, so super long chapters (e.g., greater than an hour?) mean I’m just choosing somewhere “less intentional” to stop.
I would also say that I recall (it’s been a while!) a lot of extraneous detail in some passages, that made me think “ugh, I kind of wish I could skip this, but if there’s a hidden plot element in here I shouldn’t”.
The extraneous detail was probably more frustrating than “long chapters”, but I find that the two go together and usually suggest a missed opportunity for editing.
> There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.
> I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.
I think his books a good reminder that even the interstellar equivalent of saying "howdy neighbor" is incredibly risky. And I agree that we should behave better towards each other even if I don't look forward to "a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole" if that means world government and suppression of "non-harmonious" opinions. On the other hand, I don't think that alien species are doomed to be adversaries. Populations don't need to grow forever exponentially, and empires don't need to always expand.
For my part, I think we should be careful about announcing our presence and should be very careful around any alien civilization, especially those that are more technologically advanced than ourselves. But we also could learn a lot from each other, and so initially being friendly and abiding by a tit-for-tat strategy if they become aggressive seems like a good approach.
Responding in a friendly manner to a direct communication is a good idea. Telling your whole tribe to run to the beach and look at and call to the large wooden boat passing by on the other hand...
(Even more likely is the scenario where we're so far behind technologically that the best we can do is hope they're friendly; if they aren't, there's nothing much we can do about it.)
However, even if alien races aren't constrained by anything we would recognize as morality, we are (sometimes) constrained by our own morality. I think that's a good thing.
The only way the dark forest scenario is not an iterated prisoner's dilemma (albeit an odd one) is if no information about the encounter can leak to subsequent first encounters.
In other words, if you're going to eliminate anyone you encounter with a preemptive first strike, you had better hope that you have the means to prevent your victims from sending distress calls and warnings so no one ever hears about your actions before they encounter you.
I'm not sure that given such a disparity, the first-strike strategy makes sense.
Once you're experiencing an exponentially acceleration of technological progress, why bother wiping out anyone just starting out? They can't catch up. And if you're worried about civilizations more advanced than yours, why give them a potential clue to your location by attacking anyone else?
Clearly, only civilizations that are quite close to your own capabilities can be a credible threat, and those are ones you don't have such an overwhelming advantage over.
* We imagine theoretical "people"/beings to be good, but are confronted with the complicated reality of our neighbors. Non-human entities remain strictly theoretical, untainted by the same reality.
* We see spacefaring beings as advanced beyond ourselves, and aspirationally believe that goodness accrues with advancement. Or at the very least, that our trivial little human problems are beneath the concerns of sufficiently-advanced societies.
* We believe that much human conflict is driven by resource scarcity, and that a spacefaring culture surely does not lack for resources.
The opposite conclusion can be drawn from one of the other major drivers of human conflict: religious/etc ideology.
We humans have no (widespread) ideology that is so nihilistic as to advocate for the elimination of all humans, but we are pretty good about constructing ideologies that would eliminate large percentages of other humans.
If we made contact with another civilization (or were made contact with), I would be shocked if some major religion didn't declare the aliens to be apostate/devilspawn/etc -- because how else could a non-Earth-based civilization fit into the mythology?
Granted, that'd be a really hard sell for most mainstream branches of any religion.
But, to your point, you said some major religion, and there are already some major religions that declare Christians to be OK to kill.
I once read an article that calculated how much warning we'd have, if we could detect an incoming projectile at the edge of the solar system, and it were approaching the Earth at .99c. Since it would be traveling just behind the light we see from it, the answer was eight seconds. Cixin Liu might have a point.
It has been established that the author's own political views, no matter how incorrect, will have an impact on the story. This is evident in 3BP.
https://www.businessinsider.com/liu-changming-china-holds-of...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-deals-with-dissent...
It is an open secret that this is the case for many students who come to American universities, and this is often how they coerce them into sending back IP and trade secrets. I would shudder to imagine what might befall the family of a prominent defector that so humiliated the party.
I would imagine that the possibility of Cixin Liu leaving would be contingent on whatever the idiosyncrasies are of his personal circumstances. I would say he's not necessarily constrained by the examples you've cited, though they raise a valid concern.
This kind of logic misusage is strangely common in affairs towards China but I'm not too surprised.
I still recommend just sit down, exchange information, and think.
And are police being an "instrument" supposed to indicate that holding domestic relatives hostage is indeed a systematic policy rather than a circumstantial tactic particular to special cases, and is failing to understand that is a misuse of logic?
Take an example -- if we could agree on that -- it is well known that police will kill bad people when the bad people are doing really bad things -- with the precondition that the bad people must be alive to do really bad things, and to be killed. With the same faulty deduction rules, one could say that it is well known that police kill people whenever people are alive.
Sorry if that caused confusion.
> sit down and exchange information
For one.
I am a Chinese citizen. I know many people, including close friends, relatives, studying abroad. I am not aware of any cases that their relatives are held hostage by the government. I am aware that police go after bad people (of course, the definition of "bad people" may vary nation-wise, but please take a little break on that and assume it normal), even if the bad people are relative to one entity studying abroad.
For two, about Cixin Liu's case.
This is the part I genuinely don't understand -- why would he seek asylum outside China? Did he do anything illegal? This whole thread is about an English version of the postscript in his work. I have read both native and translated version, and can confirm that the same postscript is attached in both versions, and the translation is quite precise. And then people start to discuss about "seeking for help abroad", "HK protest" etc. -- do these people think the postscript is so offensive that the government will go after him?
I don't think the text is offensive by any means. I don't think the government will go after him.
If that's not the case, what are they talking about? Am I missing something?
As for the second part, there's a lot there. It's good that your personal anecdotes you don't know of anyone held captive, but I don't think that was the question, and again I feel like that's coming from a place of wanting to generally dispute that people should be concerned about the practice of holding relatives captive to punish dissent.
For the rest of it, this is exploring the possibility, illustrated through Cixin Liu in a hypothetical example, of what might happen if he ever hypothetically wanted to extricate himself from China. His international success brings with it questions relating to free expression in China, so I treat these conversations as not terribly surprising, and frankly quite necessary.
And again, I don't think there's a literal case that he wants to do this, but that wasn't the point, and your confusion there again seems like it's coming from a place of generally wanting to deny that there should be any concern with how China could conceivably take family members hostage to pressure expat dissidents. And again, I could not disagree with that more.
It's like a high priority, non-maskable interrupt -- when such conditions are met (China signal pulled up to 3.3v), it is immediately no longer about the matter at hand, but the thought experiments, hypothetical stuff.
This is not good in a few ways, but I don't think you care about most of them.
But at least, I think, this will matter: If this is necessary and inevitable, then you, as a whole community, will have more difficulty, less efficiency in thinking about, or discussing anything about China.
Maybe it was because of my non familiarity with Chinese names or lack of detail to a lot of characters, that I had to constantly look back to see names if they appeared again after a while. I am not sure why this happened as I have read Manga or Manhwa in the past and have been able to hold a lot more characters in memory.
I had a similar problem, but don't think it was a lack of character details, but rather that the dialog seems rather undifferentiated. What distinguished one character from another was only what they say, and almost never how they say it.
But I wonder sometimes if it’s more a cultural difference than simply some kind of “failure” on the authors part.
Have you seen those videos where old communist leaders gave speeches, they declare some good news, some achievement, and the crowd claps and cheers, and so does the leader. Watch Stalin, watch Mao.
To a westerner it looks like they are clapping for themself - taking credit for the victory.
But in communism, the results are not that of a “brilliant leader”, but rather the results of history unfolding. They aren’t clapping for themselves, but for society’s progression.
I think, similarly in this way, 3bp doesn’t have the “hero narrative” that western authors favor, because the protagonist of 3bp is society as a whole, while the characters themselves are just minor witnesses.
I had the luxury of finding out about the problematic CCP leanings after finishing them all. But can’t bring myself to pick up anything other by him.
Liu is Chinese just like most of HN are American so there will be different default stances on international politics, but the books did not read as jingoistic to me.
Look at what's happening in India. An elected government on a clear majority, passed new laws and some section of people which are not happy with it, have held the government to ransom through protests. There seems to be international civil society support for the protests as it seems like the powerless going against an all powerful government.
Without going into the merits of the protests in this particular example, just the fact that even a small section is able to express themselves is a good thing. One can always argue that this can become counter productive, but I guess that's better than people suffering silently.
Having said this, I don't doubt that the majority of people in PRC, at least Han Chinese are massively better off in the last 40 years.
What has happened in China is that a billion farmers are massively, undescribably better off. You literally cannot describe it to the average American, their scale for lifestyle doesn't go that low.
After Great Leap forward? Cultural Revolution? What about the farmers of the marginalized communities in Tibet and Xinjiang. I am not saying all that gets printed in Western press is true but it is not all fabricated up as well. There was an actual cost to getting here, which might not have happened in a democratic setup.
> What's happening in India is that farmers were/are going to be screwed, and they're really mad about it.
From news reports it seems only a section of farmers, as the protests are concentrated in few areas. But as I said in the comment above I don't want to go into the merits/demerits of it, as looking from outside we both will not have the complete info. You can call them capitalist interests but most of the expert opinion from a farming/economics standpoint within the country and outside seems to support the laws.
I'm not trying to assert authority here but you could look at the last 500 years, the last 200, 100, years, the last 50 years.. cherrypicking a 25 year period that happened between 70-45 years ago is kinda weird if you're after understanding rather than scoring points.
Changing systems without a massive, disruptive loss of life is actually a huge accomplishment. No other nation has transitioned out of communism smoothly. It had the side effect of not changing names of various things.
> No other nation has transitioned out of communism smoothly.
China didn't either. Unless by "communism" you mean whatever Marx meant as the ultimate point of history - classless moneyless post-scarcity society with no property and no suffering and basically paradise. Obviously nobody transitioned out of it at all because it never existed. If you mean actual society built in China, it didn't transition out of anything - it allowed some modest economic freedoms, under the tight control of the CCP of course, but the idea of state-controlled centralized economy which is subject to single-party rule and complete absence of the idea of any individual rights is firmly in place.
Can you think about what would be persuasive to such a person?
They're not American, didn't grow up on your information diet, and really don't give a shit about what's "communist" or not. Their economy is state-controlled to the tune of Norway, or a little less so. Who cares. They are all doing way better than a generation or 2 ago, and here in America, we are comparatively struggling. They see this. Why should they want our system instead?
> didn't grow up on your information diet
You don't know the first thing about my information diet.
> and really don't give a shit about what's "communist" or not
Hong-Kong protests showed pretty clearly they do, if they are not forcefully and violently suppressed. Of course, it's kinda hard to know if they give a shit if one gets shot for publicly admitting you give a shit.
> Their economy is state-controlled to the tune of Norway, or a little less so.
That's a lie.
> They are all doing way better than a generation or 2 ago
Generation or 2 ago Communists were literally destroying the country with Cultural Revolution, trying to purge it from any shred of old tradition and make all educated people forget all they know and go dig dirt in the fields. Pretending like stopping this and the resulting relative improvement of conditions is some great achievement of the Communists is the peak arrogance - what's the Chinese word for hutzpah? It's like if I beat you up for years and then stopped for a while and your health improved a bit and I would go around and brag that I am a great doctor - because I "cured" you from the sickness I was causing to you by beating you up!
You've given some pretty strong hints about it in fact, and tripled down in this comment.
I'll go out on a very specific limb, tell me I'm wrong: Moved to the US from an eastern european country at a young age, perhaps exactly 1989, parents talk a lot about how bad it was?
And "state-controlled to the tune of Norway" is approximately accurate, thank you. You know they have gigantic private corporations there? Alongside the state-owned oil behemoths, Norway makes for a particularly nice comparison.
You are not wrong about me being born in an Eastern European country (no shit, Sherlock, I told about it in this very topic pretty transparently, and mentioned it many times otherwise on HN), but very wrong about all the rest. Ok, except for the fact I am presently in the US (which also doesn't require genius-level detective insight as I also referred to this fact many times). As internet telepathy goes, I give you C- - at least you could read what I write, lesser minds would conclude if I said I lived in a totalitarian state I must have been born in North Korea.
That said, I am not sure what it has to do with my information diet anyway - I assume you are not going to tell me my place of birth somehow prescribes my information sources? That makes no sense whatsoever. Even if you guessed my whole biography right - which you mostly failed at with an exception of a couple of details which I pretty much explicitly told you - you still wouldn't have any idea what my information diet is. And you do not, of course.
> And "state-controlled to the tune of Norway" is approximately accurate, thank you.
Repeating a falsity does not make it less false. Norway has plenty of socialist stuff going on, but nowhere on the level that CCP totalitarian control goes. Not even same order of magnitude.
Anyways, you've made clear that your reference point for understanding China is Soviet Eastern Europe. If you check a map and a calendar, you can see some places where that reference point might be inexact.
There's more small business than america, by a lot, the biggest internet companies outside of America... I think you've redefined 'communist' into some sort of tautological catch-all.
Here, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China. Unless the Wikipedia editors are communist conspiracists as well.
> I think you've redefined 'communist' into some sort of tautological catch-all.
I define "communist", broadly, as a totalitarian state with single-party rule, where the ruling party is the communist party, i.e. a leftist party based on the Marxist social theory, and with state-controlled planned economy, with all economic and political decisions being made and subject to the control of the state and the communist party (which are one and the same in this case). This describes China very well. What would be your definition of a communist country?
Of course, if we instead use strict Marxist definition of "communism", no communist country ever existed and none can exist ever, because marxian communism is anti-scientific fever dream. But if you follow the common use and include socialist countries which are ruled by Marxist parties calling themselves "communists" (e.g. USSR, North Korea, Warsaw Pact countries, China) - even though their countries do not implement marxian communism (because it can not exist) - China fits. Here is Wikipedia:
The economy of the People's Republic of China is a mixed socialist market economy which is composed of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and domestic and foreign private businesses and uses economic planning. Since the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1982, the economy has been described as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Following the common, colloquial definition of communist country instead of the strict marxian one - and noticing SOEs in fact dominate the economy and even the nominally independent businesses are subject to strict control by the CCP - one can be sure my definition is correct. But if you insist on saying "totalitarian socialist country ruled by Communist party" - ok, you can use that one, it's just saying the same with different words.
How "communist" was Pinochet? He had total 1-party control, after all.
Is North Korea a Democratic Republic? That's what they call themselves, after all.
You information sources are sick though, bro. Nobody has better information sources than you.
By which you mean "if I were sole judge of everything happening in the world" - but you aren't, and it isn't.
> and barely anybody mentions it now.
You just mentioned it. And your comrades mention it all the time, both in the US and abroad. Scarcely any discussion involving anything political - not even having anything to do with the US, as for example this one - can pass without mentioning it. I leave it for you to judge whether "barely anybody" adequately describes yourself and your comrades.
> America is not yet 250 years old. China is 5000 years old.
Yes, and? 5000 years, and it culminated in the Cultural Revolution, where educated people were hunted down, free thought was suppressed, cultural artifacts and knowledge were forcefully destroyed, all traditional values were discarded, tens of millions of people were persecuted and many of them murdered, and country's development has been set back by decades at least. I'm sure there are a lot of things over China's 5000 years of history which one can be justifiably proud about, but these years should be source of shame, not pride. And yet, the same organization that perpetrated it still rules China, and under essentially the same ideology, only slightly tweaked.
Any decent person with an ounce of humanity knows it was a barbaric crime. Then you have your Bush, Trump and I suppose you for your enthusiastic support.
> describes yourself and your comrades.
It is the big bad commies, I tell ya, but we will make america great again.
> And yet, the same organization that perpetrated it still rules China, and under essentially the same ideology, only slightly tweaked.
The same you dont see the irony on criticizing China (btw the Cultural Revolution and the BLF were criminal things) and yet get your panties in a twist because a COMMIE dares to criticize the best country in the world(TM) says everything about your mental state.
Bye kiddo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8EMx7Y16Vo
Who am I a kidding I'm 99% sure that you are white, male, over 40, socially inept and "libertatian". A walking,talking stereotype.
Bullshit claims that whoever disagrees with you is "barbaric" and "inhuman" is just that - bullshit empty words, devoid of any substance. However, this is exactly the language that the people we're talking about used - Germans fought "barbarians" for the future of "humanity" and "civilization" - as they saw it, Japanese fought "barbarians" for the future of "civilization" - as they saw it. Read their propaganda, it's literally the same words. Both considered their enemies subhuman and devoid of any value or decency. That was what gave them the moral sanction for their atrocities. I am very happy they lost. I sincerely hope your side, whatever it is, considering people disagreeing with you sub-human, will lose also.
> It is the big bad commies
For you, it may be fun and jokes, for people who actually lived under communist regimes, it's the history of death, torture and oppression. You are welcome to make fun of it, because these people are not fully human anyway, since they might disagree with you. While furiously patting yourself on the back convinced in your moral superiority.
> yet get your panties in a twist because a COMMIE dares to criticize the best country in the world
The communists are morally aligned with one of the most oppressive and deadly ideology that we have seen so far, judging by the history of 20th century. And they should learn those lessons. It does not exclude US - or any other country - from criticism about problems they have - but communists have less right than anyone to mount the high horse and call out anybody, if they refuse to reckon with their own blood-stained past. There is a place for honest criticism - but people who deny anybody who disagrees with them human decency is not the people who you expect the honest criticism from. Especially when they openly align with the ideology that literally murdered hundreds of millions of people for the mere fact they were born to wrong parents or dared to disagree with the Party.
> A walking,talking stereotype.
Also probably not fully human. As usual from the moral high horse types, they only think about themselves and their comrades as human. All the rest are walking, talking whatever but not humans. Of course, then there's not much problem with suppressing them, and having a good hearty laugh about it.
Others' progress is our progress too.
I perfectly understand a Chinese being proud of their country, their government and their CCP- as much as Americans are proud of their country despite their 2 million imprisoned people, dual-party system that allows no competition, police violence, decades of wars waged around the world and support for dictatorships and coups to overthrow democratically elected leaders. Things could certainly be even better and hopefully with time they will be- but this attitude of fixating on one aspect to justify a black-and-white view of the world- in which your side is the good one- is damn stupid.
Be it the civilians in Yemen being starved by a Saudi-led American backed proxy war, or the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Yes, China has raised a huge number of people out of poverty, mostly thanks to Deng inviting in foreign investment, but Xi is turning China into a surveillance state, using a few terrorist events to justify large scale oppression in Xinjiang, and the CCP is on balance, a corrupt inner circle of grifters getting rich off the economic rise. How does China’s parliament delegates have 100 billionaires in it?
Xi’s family net worth has widely been reported to be hundreds of millions. How did they earn it?
I’m not willing to give my own government a pass for the good things they’ve done (eg Obama on healthcare) and excuse the bad things they’ve done (extrajudicial drone killings)
And I don’t think giving a free pass on massive Corruption, an oppressive police state in Xinjiang, etc is justified because the economy is good.
So invariably someone’s going to claim I’m just getting my info from bias western media, but I’ll just tell you I have traveled all over Xinjiang and speak passable Mandarin, in addition to having lived in China for a while. You can quite clearly see the overwhelming security apparatus in Xinjiang on every street corner and road, and I don’t need CNN to tell what my eyes see.
Like White people dismissing the conditions of Black people in the US, it’s really easy for Han Chinese to think the Uyghur minority concerns are blown out of proportion. I had many Han friends tell me not to go to Xinjiang, that it was far too dangerous. The reality is, I never once felt threatened by Uyghurs, they were incredibly friendly and hospitable. I was more nervous from soldiers with rifles everywhere, and constant road checkpoints demanding my photo and passport every few kilometers.
If you live in a Tier-1/Tier-2/Tier-3 city, it's really easy to dismiss the complaints of minority provinces or rural poor, especially when the one view of what's happening you get comes from state media.
I love China, am hopeful by its steady rise, and the world will be a better place with another advanced wealthy civilization of a billion people, and hopefully the whole 7 billion people on the planet can be uplifted. But it is not going to be served by a corrupt authoritarian government of grifters getting more and more control and power over of a large fraction of the world's economy and people.
Are the foreign press wrong to worry about China building massive dams and threatening India's water supply for example? Pakistan, China, and India are involved in a 3 way war over fresh water that affects 2+ billion people, and all of them have nuclear weapons.
The press should be looking at things that are harmful, not just saying "Good job government". FDR did a lot of good things for the US, but he also locked up 100,000+ Japanese in camps. The founding fathers did a lot of good in writing the US Constitution, but they also owned slaves. Criticism of government is a good thing.
Take your imagined trilateral water war as an example, have you looked into how minor the supply is to India? Have you considered the fact that damming for electricity has little effect on total volume of flow? Otoh, when US dammed the Colorado the water was diverted for agriculture and urban consumption. The river basically dried up before reaching Mexico.
Western news media news is designed for western audience consumption. Pointing out the suffering of people in other countries is something that people with empathy want to know about. For example, when Western media points out the suffering of Palestinians, we hear that this is because of anti-Israel bias. The reality is, most people aren't opposed to Israel, they're concerned with the suffering imposed by the occupation, and the ancillary effects on their own national interest due to regional instability. The goal of the media isn't conflict and war, it's awareness and political change. If there's a genocide happening, I want to know about it. If the US backed Saudi proxy war in Yemen is destroying huge number of lives because of American made weapons or policy, I want to know about it, and if a large US trading partner is locking people in Xinjiang and even manufacturing with slave labor, I'd rather buy my products somewhere else.
>"Take your imagined trilateral water war as an example, have you looked into how minor the supply is to India?".
Of course, have you? There are 130 million people who live in the Brahmaputra basin. And 1 billion downstream of the Hindu Kush. You don't think India is concerned about the dams going up in Kashmir and the Tibetan Plateau? "damming for electricity has little effect on total volume of flow" you're talking past damns, the concern is over future mega dams.
>"Otoh, when US dammed the Colorado the water was diverted for agriculture and urban consumption. The river basically dried up before reaching Mexico."
Yeah, and that was bad for both the environment, and for Mexico, which is exactly why people are concerned about China's activity, not just for geo-political reasons and the 1+ billion people dependent on the Tibetan plateau water supply, but the environmental damage that could result as well. Your own example shows exactly why those dependent on Tibetan and Hindu Kush supplies should be concerned about dam building, in which they have little say over.
By all means, use past US transgressions as a road map for why we should be concerned. Take Belt and Road Initiative. Sucker someone into taking a large loan, make them use the loaned money to buy from your own country's companies, and then when the debtor can't pay, seize concessions. The US played this out extremely well all over the world (see _Confessions of an Economic Hitman_ https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...), and it's being repeated: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lank...
It's because of how awful the US's policy was in doing the same thing in South America and Africa that I'm concerned now about what I see happening now, essentially neo-colonialism.
However, the real issue I sense, is that a lot of 五毛 and 玻璃心 don't want to hear any criticism, even if it's legitimate, because of elevated nationalism dialed up by Xi over the years. And it is this rising nationalism, in the US with Trump, in Europe (e.g. in Hungary), and in China that we should be worried about. We've managed to temporarily put down Trumpism here, but Xi made himself President for life, and authoritarianism combined with rising nationalism and economic power is not a good recipe, if the 20th century taught us anything.
P.S. As for the Brahmaputra river, according to Indian officials: "Out of five major tributaries of Brahmaputra, only three come from China, rest are from Arunachal Pradesh. Of the total water entering (Brahmaputra), only 7% is contributed by precipitation in China." https://www.livemint.com/Politics/jksr4ft6Jn5wjvJAEGwD5L/Ind...
I've lived in China, much of what the CCP is doing infrastructure wise is admirable. They've built 10s of thousands of miles of highways, high speed rail, waterways, electric grid, into historically underserved areas. And they have understandable paranoia having observed the breakup of the USSR, as well as bloody historical Chinese rebellions, like the Taiping rebellion, about what could happen if there is a revolution against the ruling party. This paranoia has perhaps fueled an overreaction, that is driving historical levels of brainwashing nationalism, down to the elementary school level, and insane levels of surveillance, etc. After 9/11, the US government utilized fear from terrorism to launch the Patriot Act, the Global War On Terror, invasion of Iraq, and NSA surveillance programs. Xi similarly latched on a few Uyghur terrorist incidents as an excuse to do, IMHO, massive violations of human rights.
I don't think it's a stable situation. Sooner or later something will give, either nationalism will spill over into a conflict because eventually the nationalists need to start an invasion against someone (probably Taiwan) to regain lost honor or satisfy a past humiliation, or if there is ever a financial implosion, they'll be great internal unrest, and without the "relief valve" of even pseudo-democracy, you'll great more and more tightening by the government, until a fed up population who is facing a declining economy for the first time, destabilizes the government.
This is not really about what Wolf Blitzer is saying on CNN, it's more or less about personal observations I see around rising fascism and nationalism around the world that has be deeply worried about this century, and that's without considering the Thucydides’s Trap, and that 12 of the last 16 confrontations between a superpower and a rising superpower have resulted in war.
I can't solve the problems of the Uyghurs anymore than I can solve climate change. But do you think people should have sat quietly by in 1930s while Germany murdered Jews just because they couldn't do anything directly about it? I could choose not to buy Chinese goods the same as I could choose to recycle, but we all know it doesn't do anything. So the real change must occur at higher levels, that is, Western governments and corporations need to stop appeasing China for market access, compromising their art, their IP, just to please the CCP, only to be betrayed later, while at the same time, supporting violations of human rights. Condition your contracts, your trade deals, on transparency, protection for the environment, humane treatment, etc.
Right now Xi Jinping is thinking China can eventually survive on their domestic market only. Welp, that'll be a good experiment to try that Western governments can help with, and if the result is a severe economic recession in China, it may eventually lead to a new Chinese President as other CCP factions takeover, who takes the country in a different direction.
That always seemed like a trite argument of those who want to justify their own behavior, and is a cop out in a story.
The point of survival is that values change, and can return, but survival is absolute. You fight until there is no other option, then you surrender with the hope that hat you can work towards that goal again in the future.
Similarly, the correct choice between slavery and death is slavery, as slavery contains the chance of freedom but death does not. That's not to say the correct choice between slavery and a chance of death is the same thing. But people like to speak in absolutes without this nuance in a way that leads to interesting thought patterns in others that hear it and parrot it.
I think the most jarring bits are plot points where some ideology crops up that's contrary to whatever goals the countries of the world have decided to pursue, so they just make that opinion illegal and that's the end of it. And then I'm like: "that's not how that works in most of the world". In North Korea that might work, and maybe in China, but not anywhere with reasonably well-established human rights.
It was also interesting how China was always saving the day. That's sort of expected of any author to make their own country the heroes, but I couldn't help but wonder if that's really what he wanted to write, or if writing a story that could be construed as a criticism of modern China would get him in trouble in some ways.
On the other hand, a big early part of the first book was about how awful the cultural revolution was. Is it considered politically acceptable these days in China to acknowledge the past failings of communist government, even if criticizing the current policies often is not?
No...
At maximum, "cultural revolutionaries" were just silenced for one generation.
The bit where his sister committed suicide during the cultural revolution jumps out as sort of character forming, but in more general terms, do you have any chinese party sources praising the cultural revolution? The closest I can think of is the now vanished Bo Xilai.
Evidence: "The Two 'Cannot Negates'" - In English: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00094609.2016.12... - In Chinese: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%A9%E5%80%8B%E4%B8%8D%E8...
I haven't even read 3bp but it surprises me that even a significant amount of praise/charity for the CCP is an issue.
There is so much glorification of the US Government in so many Hollywood movies it has simply become a thing to filter out. When I do read it, I expect this will hit the same filter.
There is almost as much vilification of the USG as there is glorification.
For example, a stereotypical USG Agent Gone Rogue character can just as easily be the hero as the villain in a Hollywood blockbuster (with the rest of the agency, or at least it's leadership, serving as the opposing villain or hero as needed). I don't know enough about Chinese cinema to say for certain whether the equivalent is true in that context, but the superficial impression I have is that it is not.
The book covers the Cultural Revolution like US films cover Vietnam: not favorably.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/25/netflix-liu-ci...