What a timely article on HN for me as I am reading through the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy right now... certainly not the best sci-fi works I've ever read but some of the ideas are intriguing.
I actually just finished the trilogy on the weekend and couldn't agree with you more. Enjoyed reading all three but found the first a little slow and the third a bit all over the place. The second book in my opinion was an exceptional masterpiece. The author is truly a creative genius - only wish I could have read the original Chinese versions to see what was lost in translation.
Not bad. The series reminded me of 1940's-50's sci-fi from the US, for a couple of reasons: A large confidence in the industrial and scientific capacity of their country. Relatively uncritical acceptance that their country is the good guys. No consequential female characters.
Cheng Xin, compared to Luo Ji, has next to zero initiative and is a paper thin character which seems to only be there to metaphorically scream "woman are weak and bad for civilization".
The whole section of the book/civilization where everyone is feminized and most of the toxic male behaviors have been repressed is depicted as a "bad thing" leading to weak people and a weak civilization.
The first book was decent, certainly good, science fiction, with an endearing new scooby mystery at every chapter leading into another mystery. But the other two were bad. Going on in bad tolkien-ism (I've beared reading the Silmarillion three times) with overlong descriptions of unimportant details and derailing into ideology every two paragraphs.
She lets it end. No one apart from the mysterious (urg) race of aliens is trying to destroy the universe by collapsing it, they might as well be nothing, and story telling wise they're just a natural disaster without agency.
She just stays in her dimensional safe box and doesn't take action. Her only actions are choosing to let things happen, but she's never the one putting them in action.
Also, the goal isn't/shouldn't be growth at all cost in a story. The axiom of Liu Cixin is his theory of "The Dark Forest", which is what it is, a literary axiom, not an universal truth.
to clarify, "advance" in "forward", not to develop or grow
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Chen Xin is selected to represent the will of the mankind (or she would've been purged quickly after showing the inabilities) so the character should be thin in this sense, which reflects the very opposite character, `Thomas Wade`.
So I understand the story as, that humanity chose to destroy itself in honor of what they value.
>Cheng Xin, compared to Luo Ji, has next to zero initiative and is a paper thin character which seems to only be there to metaphorically scream "woman are weak and bad for civilization".
I interpreted it differently, the fact that some male characters can be less empathetic and could potentially solve some crisis does not mean that all men or all women are X, I am bad with names so I don't remember them, but in the end why did the man let her take the final decision about the secret project/attack ? (it seemed out of character or a way to place the hard decision on other IMO)
Thomas Wade, her ex-boss, the man of cold hard decisions, a stereotype in its own right.
One of the most out of character decisions event in the books. As with any "out of character action" a character can take, the blame lies in the author. Like in the question "who would win between Superman and Goku ?" the answer is in the author, not the characters. The author forced a narrative to prove the point that Cheng Xin wasn't able to do the hard choices.
Just my impression from my reading. Now I think of it I can recall three female characters from the first book. The only one who I would consider consequential was a scientist who survived the cultural revolution and lead a campaign to destroy humanity because of her horrible experiences then (didn't think she had a believable motivation). Her mother who basically sold out her father and her family to stay on the good side of the cultural revolution. The last one was a love interest of the main character who was defined by her physical characteristics (they actually found a woman who matched his perfect dream partner). I can't recall any new female characters from the 2nd book, and I am only reading the third book now. All the other scientists, politicians, police officers, conspirators etc... that I can recall were male. I didn't have a problem with this. It just reminded me of something like the lensmen series. It probably reflects a society where it is common for women to be home makers and the men to pursue careers.
Edit: In reply to Aeolun (couldn't see a reply button below your post):
> Relatively uncritical acceptance that their country is the good guys
Were we reading the same books? With all the Cultural Revolution trauma in Three Body Problem?
That is the only one of the three I've read, but to me a huge theme was information control. The cultural revolution as the historical event, and the single-particle invasion fleet interfering with humanity's science as the futuristic event. Both analogies for each other. And the ambivalent question underlying it of "what if this is necessary for survival"?
Just to set an alternative point of view, I thought the first had some very interesting ideas but was roughly written with weak characterisation. OK, it's a first novel and a translation, so let's see how the series and author progresses...
The second on the other hand, had no idea where it was going, no characterisation at all - or terribly cliched attempts, and one of the worst books I've read. I honestly couldn't see the appeal that so many seem to see. I didn't bother with the third!
The second book introduce the "The Dark Forest Theory". By that alone it is worth reading. This take on the Fermi Paradox and how it is weaved into the plot is very well done. The second book is also interesting from a SF perspective, describing the treat against earth and the phases and solutions earth goes through. The parallel development of the protagonist Luo Ji is also interesting with a satisfactory and clever conclusion.
I know what it tries to do. I know he's popular - I expect this comment won't be! :D
Like I said for the first, I thought the writing quite rough, but overall the book and plot carried it along to the end easily enough - I enjoyed it despite its obvious flaws and weak characters. I was looking forward to a second book of an author getting into his stride... I was very disappointed.
The whole of the first half of the book is a clumsy to the point it feels like an entirely different author. Nothing happens and it goes quite literally nowhere. How much is the different translator? I have no idea.
The protagonist has no idea why he's selected, isn't interested, can't be bothered and sort of blunders through the book. For some unknown reason the aliens really need to kill this clueless annoying asshole. Whatever happens, somehow he's still the most important dude on the planet, so he gets to keep blundering on, and keep being an asshole. That is entirely how I felt about the writing too: no idea why he's selected, isn't interested, can't be bothered and sort of blunders through the book where nothing happens.
Somewhere on the entire planet is his perfect woman - so he gives his assistant some cliche teen shopping list - did the author just watch the film Weird Science that day? Except it's Weird Science without the humour. What the hell is all this bullshit for? All so the UN can kidnap her to persuade him to work? ROFL. OK, at this point I want the aliens to win - if this is the best guy humans have, we deserve to be alien lunch, and soon! It's all so ridiculously stupid that it's easily the most memorable part of the book. The writing has descended to school essay standard now. Then the whole of the wallfacing idea mostly doesn't work - it's clumsy and shows the gaping holes constantly, sometimes with a few bits of hand waving to try and carry it.
Then finally, when I'm about to put the book in the compost, there's an all too brief section of decent and compelling story telling. Except I'd mostly lost interest at this point. That quarter or third of the book could have been a decent basis for all of it. Lose well over half a book and the plot wouldn't change!
Then the clumsy utterly unbelievable ending. Yeah right.
Overall? 2/10
Don't care what happens in 3. Unlikely to read another by him.
I think your criticisms are all valid, but I still loved it.
A lot of sci-fi is plot driven, characters are just vectors for the ideas, and I found the big ideas in The Dark Forest really interesting. I'd never thought to critically about the Sagan/space optimist "people in bear suits" view of alien contact before reading the book (in spite of seeing plenty of space horror movies). And for all its faults, it maintained a tension and mystery that kept me interested to the end.
I also had trouble keeping names and even genders straight, the only character I had a connection to was Da Shi (the hard boiled cop).
Yeah I found the second one to be the "most boring" of the three. Maybe it could be a translator issue, where one writes in a more fluid way and the other in a more literal sense?
"When I brought up the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs—around a million are now in reëducation camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang—he trotted out the familiar arguments of government-controlled media: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.” The answer duplicated government propaganda so exactly that I couldn’t help asking Liu if he ever thought he might have been brainwashed. “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”"
Devil's advocate here, but to be fair, there's a pretty decent likelihood that we in the west have indeed been "brainwashed" into believing that freedom is actually more important than these other things he's listing (health care, housing, education, etc...).
If you set aside freedom as a goal in itself for a second, then it's actually worth asking: is freedom actually the most important factor leading to those other creature comforts everyone wants?
I traveled once to Singapore, where a number of people I met made the exact same argument Liu makes. They phrased it this way: sure, we don't have a free press, and we have a benevolent tyrant running the place, but:
- I drive a nice car
- I can travel anywhere in the world
- I live in a spacious appartment
- My kids go to great schools
- My country is a very safe place
- Healthcare in S'pore is great
- I have a million bucks in the bank
I know how repulsive such a line of reasoning might sound to a western-educated mind, but try to step out of the cocoon of your culture for a second (the actual "brainwashing" that every culture basically make us undergo) and see if you can actually counter the argument with logical arguments.
What does living equally even mean? People having the same life standard? Or all people can live a life how they want it?
Does anyone have the right to remain poor? I think propably he does. Does anyone have the right to think that he has no chance but to stay poor and thus do nothing and stay poor? Well, is there even such a right?
Now, social benefit is a good thing, but it's also a very un-capitalistic thing. Do people have to work to earn their food and clothes and residence,etc, or can people wait for the government to give them food, or money to buy food? Or, if the government is not rich enought to provide said food or money, what should the poor people do?
If a person, for any random reason, say, without the resources or willpower to work, should he/she be given a chance, or should he be left alone? If the chance requires education and training, or some other involuntary effort, is it right to demand such effort from the person?
Now, some specific group of people in some certain country on this Earth, didn't know how they could get out of the poverty they're born to. They may feel insecure around other people that look different or even speak different languages. And there are other people who may look less different and want to exploit those poor people, to turn them into terrorists. You may even have evidence. Is waiting for them to get turned and then punish them really the right thing to do?
Exactly. Honestly, having lived for a while in Singapore myself, I don't think there is much logical argument to be made against that.
Another thing to be considered is that freedom in the West gets more and more relative latterly. Say the wrong thing in public (or even in private, if it is made public), and you can easily be fired, even denied future jobs. Is the overall degree of freedom in most Western countries that different to that in, e.g., Singapore? I'm not sure it is (it's clearly better than China's, though... at the moment).
Freedom of speech refers to the government not being able to infringe those rights. It says nothing about freedom of consequences for one’s shitty beliefs from prospective employers.
I have never seen a definition of freedom of speech that is restricted specifically to government action. Certainly, internationally recognized definitions like that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights don't make that distinction.
If saying something can essentially wreck your life and turn you into a pariah because you can't even get a job, what does it matter if it's a government or not doing it? When the church punished heretics, did it also not count as a violation of freedom of expression because it was not the government doing it?
>If saying something can essentially wreck your life and turn you into a pariah because you can't even get a job, what does it matter if it's a government or not doing it?
Conversely, it's impossible to have a "marketplace of ideas" if all forms of criticism, regardless of their source or intent, are considered a violation of someone's freedom of speech, and this presents the paradox of only considering active speech to be defensible, but not reactive.
A marketplace of ideas implies that some ideas will be considered not worth buying.
Demanding the person to be fired is not fine, ad hominem attacks are not fine, sharing private information about the person is not fine. You get the idea.
I agree with opposition to ad hominem attacks and doxxing, but the first is just a manifestation of public protest, which is well established as a valid expression of free speech. If (to use a straw example) someone is free to vote to deny rights to a group of people I consider fundamental (or, conversely, to give them rights I don't consider valid) I should be free to vote (through collective action) to deny them employment.
To claim otherwise would seem to place business and company culture beyond the reach of the public interest and the scope of society, which is a position not even free governments enjoy.
I see. So the government should ensure that everybody has the right to say whatever vile things they want by mandating that employers must hire you even if you happen to be outspoken about your awful beliefs?
I'm not claiming I have a perfect solution or saying it's specifically the government's responsibility. But maybe yes, why not? Governments in many countries already have rules so employers cannot discriminate by gender, race, religion... not discriminating by speech made outside the job either wouldn't be that much of a stretch.
The "right to be forgotten" that is being recognized in some countries is also an example of a government measure that can help.
By the way, you seem very confident that nothing should be done because these things only affect people with "awful" or "shitty" beliefs. But what is socially considered awful can vary a lot. There are societies that would place being gay, abortion or being an atheist under that umbrella; conversely, other societies in the past placed being religious under that umbrella. Even if you don't like the people being affected by this now, allowing freedom of speech to be eroded in this way can backfire in a big way in the long term.
One can see your point, and indeed one may choose to sacrifice one's own freedom for material prosperity. But it is not analogous.
The question is whether one thinks it's fine to forcefully lock up a certain group of society for one's own, arguably, material benefit. It is easy to preach material security when the cost is born by another group.
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it relies on the benevolence of a dictatorship (and I don't use the term dictatorship pejoratively). It's all fine and good to have a system where people's needs are provided for and in general the populace is taken care of (for example, the housing situation in Singapore is very good and much better than places where people have to pay through the nose for shacks, like for example Hong Kong and SF).
But the real problem is that this system is by its nature fragile. On the one hand, this means that you never know when leadership will no longer be so enlightened and shit will hit the fan with nothing you can do about it.
From another perspective, because of this fragility, it's not capable letting its crazy people reach their potential. Can you imagine what the system would have done to creative hippies or even Steve Jobs if he didn't toe the line? If you don't give free enough reign to these people, your society will hit a ceiling where you don't produce the most innovative culture or people.
I disagree with your last point, just because some topics are forbidden to talk about, does not mean that creativity in general is suppressed in anyway.
An important factor that often gets left out when discussing different types of government is the level of development of a country. A centrally powerful government has some perks that makes rapid industrialization possible. Where as a democracy might be good if a country is wealthy and its citizens educated. South Korea and Singapore are the only countries that went from impoverished to developed, and both were under authoritarian government when the rapid industrialization happened. You can also look at China and India, both started at comparable levels of development in the 70s but now one economy is 5 times the other
I don't think Isaac Newton lived in a free society, and so did many truly ground breaking folks. I'd argue the odd of producing these figuers is more to do with the population. I'm a fan of Steve Jobs but he is not in that league.
> They phrased it this way: sure, we don't have a free press, and we have a benevolent tyrant running the place, but:
I think the bigger problem is people completely mischaracterizing what Singapore is.
Modern Singapore is nothing like a "benevolent tyranny". The best way to characterize it is probably to imagine a large, well-run city with strict laws, heavy bureaucracy, expansive regulation and government involvement in business, and whose politics are dominated by one political party. None of these are extremely rare traits for a city.
Yes, Singapore does have black spots in its record with respect to human rights. Most of this is in the past (primarily during the post-war period, where many other countries have similar black spots with regards to the treatment of communists), but I argue that this aspect has been incredibly exaggerated in the foreign perception of Singapore.
The reason why I raise this is that your comparison to Singapore is invalid: Singapore is already very much similar to a "Western democracy". It holds free and transparent elections (the fact that policies favor the incumbent party does not detract from the fact that the elections are fairly run, and next to no one questions this.) No one holds back criticism of the government in private or in public - they do hesitate for more official mediums (e.g. newspapers, television) because of legal repurcussions e.g. libel. I have never once encountered any instance of censorship with teeth (there have been instances where the government suspended the distribution license of a print magazine... in the age of the Internet).
Please stop using modern Singapore as an example of "benevolent tyranny".
Yes, I got that feeling as I was writing it. For example, take the list I mentioned:
- strict laws
- heavy bureaucracy
- expansive regulation
- government involvement in business
- politics are dominated by one political party
All of these give off a terrible impression. But I urge the reader to consider that none of these are unique to Singapore, and are in fact not uncommon among cities/town. Like it is not uncommon for city/state-level governments to be dominant by one party or another for generations. Nor is it uncommon for cities to have annoyingly or weirdly archaic and strict laws. (Singapore bans chewing gum? The US still bans the import of "Kinder Surprise").
I'm not the best writer for this sort of thing, but I just want to dispel this notion that Singapore is this magical, esoteric fascist paradise. It's just a city-state which leans more toward government regulation. Only once we stop treating it as exceptionally special can we actually discuss which policies and aspects of government work and don't work well.
Why are Westeners always criticizing other cou tries? I think its great that there are different competing systems. The best ones evolve. It's not a good idea to have all eggs in one basket. It would be sad if all countries were like USA.
The people who run China believe in "freedom" for themselves. They think of ideas and implement things, they have a great degree of freedom and set up the systems to watch everyone, but they themselves have ways around it, connections, access to information about what's going on in the world, etc.
They fundamentally believe they are better than the other Chinese they make decisions on (bureaucrats have a tendency to arrogance and belief in their own "best ideas"). Maybe they have some good ideas, maybe they don't. But the fact that _they_ view themselves and treat themselves differently is the point. In such a system, the violent and ruthless usually rise to the top, which eventually shows in society. Humanity has tried that lots of times, it doesn't work out.
In a truly free society, you are free to _truly_ start a competing system or a different system. You can take your strange ideas and start up a commune if you want. You can start an authoritarian commune (as long as people choose to let you and can leave), or an artistic commune, or a free-love commune. That is where you get different systems, and everyone can make a different system. Yeah, it's great to have that, but that gets us back to square one: people being treated like they individually can go do something important of their own choice and different than those around them. Instead of one bureaucrat thinking their ideas are the best ones and then imposing it violently on everyone else. That's not different competing systems, that's hell.
It's all great for the homogeneous, apathetic majority, but where are the schools, education, healthcare, spacious apartment, etc. for the Uighur?
The core problem is that you could put any country in there. USA think they have freedom to do what they please because of their economic and military power. Britain thinks they can leave and have a better time out of the EU etc. All countries are ruthless. Some do it a pleasant but deceiving way the others do it out in the open. At least with China you get to see what and how they are implementing it. US you don't. Who's more secretive?
I'm not holding any country up as a shining light. I don't think there is any country that even comes close to what I'm describing as an ideal. I wish there was. Some are more some are less, in different ways.
If Britain were putting their dissidents and muslims in concentration camps I would be very vocally criticising my own country - which I suppose means I'd be a dissident earmarked for a concentration camp. I already do criticise on lots of other topics, and some of our worse moments of empire in history, or the lives ruined by UK's austerity dogma. I criticise the US too, and don't want to be just like them either.
Why should I not do the same for China when they are destroying lives of people whose only crime is being an ethnic minority, or trying to bring repressive laws to Hong Kong?
It's good to have different systems when the basics of humanity are remembered.
"I'd be a dissident earmarked for a concentration camp"
From what I remember of Duncan Campbell's Secret Society I believe the legislation for just emergency measures as interment of 'subversives' and other emergency measures was drafted during the Cold War - this would be expected to be passed by parliament in the event of a suitable emergency. I would suspect these things have never been thrown out but will still be there in a filing cabinet somewhere in Whitehall.
Let's hope we don't meet in a camp one day and laugh about the naivety of our postings on HN....
I laughed, but you're right, I'm sure the state of emergency measures are still there in some form, since you never know when they might be needed. I always thought such a thing would be fairly clear cut, but possibly state of emergency is the only way Brexit is going through...
Still that veneer of civility and rule of law is important, however artificial it sometimes seems. Democracy is all too fragile. I remember the nuclear war programme Threads, and the documentary at the same time - possibly Panorama - where some petty bureaucrat or councillor was positively itching for Armageddon to happen just so he could start shooting people. I think he only had a very minor place in the emergency hierarchy. It was his answer for every disagreement - shoot them - he must have mentioned it a dozen times!
Internment was used in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the last prosecution for "sedition" in the UK was 1972 before it was reformed in 1975. http://www.bailii.org/ew/other/EWLC/1977/c72.pdf
> If Britain were putting their dissidents and muslims in concentration camps I would be very vocally criticising my own country
The UK did lock up dissidents in a mass internment during the 1970s - in the six counties of north Ireland. The Irish marched through the streets of Derry to protest and 14 (unarmed) men were shot. The queen then proceeded to pin medals on the parachute regiment who fired on the crowd.
Chinese needs no help from the Britains who launched a war to keep selling their opium and heroin to Chinese drug addicts - drug pushers using violence to keep addicts addicted, to "remember their humanity".
After intense fighting between the catholics and loyalists in the 1969 riots, and the IRA petrol bombing and shooting at police - unprovoked. Nearly 2,000 casualties of the IRA campaign - nearly all unarmed.
Yet I don't condone the use of internment - even if I do understand how and why it happened. All it did was intensify the already high tensions.
The problem is that the PRC is going for an authoritarian ethnostate, and I think this a reasonable system to have in the global "marketplace of ideas", but at the same time they refuse to give up non-Han territories like Xinjiang that don't fit into this equation at all.
Also, the CCP won't leave people alone who leave China for more attractive systems. They're hardly interested in a competition of systems.
That's kind of my point. They wouldn't need to cleanse the Muslim regions (or Tibet for that matter) if they weren't part of the PRC to begin with. But of course China will never give up these territories -- in fact they're busy trying to annex other places where the CCP system is not welcome.
(Not trying to imply that everything that happens within the "core" of China is awesome.)
The problem is that he's not wrong, and I really do see this as a massive problem, he wouldn't even be wrong if the word "Chinese" would be replaced by most Western demonyms. It's a straight-forward, honest, and well-reasoned position. It's also despotic and dystopian.
The issue I see for the future of the entire industrialized world is that this particular brand of consumerized dictatorship is based on the lessons of hundreds of years of failed regimes, and in an evolutionary effect it seems "we" have now come up with a system that is both stable and totalitarian. It's an emerging system for the whole world, and the fact that no human on the entire planet can escape it without losing access to everything they care about, only enhances its stability.
This system is precisely tuned to offer us just enough so we do not mind what's being taken away. I'm personally no exception to this: I want a high standard of life and security as well. I want the luxuries afforded by consumer electronics and high technology. Through technology and international connectivity, I have more options for meaningful social interactions than ever before. The prospect of losing access to any of that if I ever act up against the system is a powerful mechanism that keeps me in line. Not that I ever brush up against the boundaries, mind you, because the system is well designed to appeal to my need for perceived autonomy: as long as I keep my head down, I'll be left alone.
Right now, in the West, the price of reasonable dissent is not very high. Yet. But you can already feel the thousands of little mechanisms working to discourage it. When I became active in protesting against the EU copyright reform, my first attempt at being political in decades, the game was so thoroughly rigged that I'll probably refrain from attempting to change the official narrative in the foreseeable future. Had protesting been actively discouraged by the government, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, I would probably not have shown up at all.
I'm struck by our collective inability to come up with a good alternative to this system. It seems to me this system is evolving on its own, and that development is synchronous world-wide. Sure, it's appealing to the powerful, who actively push it. But that's not what's driving it. I suspect it's the collective human spirit.
There is another option here. The fact that it is pitch perfect to the official line is probably the message. There are two main reasons for someone parroting an official line. Either they are dumb and obedient, or they are being very sarcastic and indicating the opposite. Three Body Problem goes over the problems for Chinese citizens in trying to second guess the current official line when the state is looking and features a protagonist whose main skill is his ability to not give away what he is thinking. I would not be so quick to take his statements at face value for things he can get into serious trouble over.
It's a truly fascinating piece, but wow, I didn't expect going in that I'd come out not liking him. On the other hand, I didn't really know anything about Liu Cixin or his work before now, so maybe this is all well-trodden ground for everyone else.
You sure it wasn't Liu Cixin's own statements that were working to achieve that effect? The journalist just asked questions and wrote down his response.
If the author simply transcribed every conversation and printed it, we would still come out with the same impression that this is a guy with some pretty shitty beliefs. Everything else in the article is just window dressing around those facts.
Turns out totalitarian states are not very popular amongst a wider global audience. Not much positive gets written about Venezuela or North Korea either.
The only culture that ever begot science was the tradition of greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything, and that everyone was on the same playing ground.
Materially, China could have come up with scientific progress for a thousand years, but they didn't, because they lacked the culture for open debate and expression of ideas.
No freedom of press, no cars.
That's the historical perspective.
Now, let's look into the future.
Do we want to stop the progress of science? If then, sure, there is no strong technocratic argument for freedom.
> The only culture that ever begot science was the tradition of greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything, and that everyone was on the same playing ground.
I'm sorry but this statement is extremely Eurocentric. Are you seriously suggesting that ancient India and China didn't have a tradition of science?
I'm saying that China did not have a culture that promoted science.
Not all of europe did either. Science rose mostly in the protestant north that had learned that differing arguments are not a threat to the status quo.
I'm not saying Chinese were more stupid, or that North-Europeans are smarter than South-Europeans.
I'm saying the culture of open discussion, critical thinking and being challenged for ones claims (i.e. testability) are the cornerstones that are necessary to be in place, and that curtailing freedom of speech curtails the progress of science, as much as focusing on eminence instead of evidence does.
Technological progress and scientific progress are two different things!
China was technologically the most advanced country hands down for a very long time before natural sciences rose. Yet they did not produce a Newton or a Galileo, or, at least the cultural environment was such that their work was forgotten.
I wouldn't necessarily relate scientific progress with democracy. Philosophers like Pluto and Aristotle were famously against the idea of democracy. Honestly I can't imagine scientific laws get passed by virtue of having most votes.
I also you confuse openness in political debate with openness in STEM, yes China prohibits the former, but definitely not the latter
Fascinating. One can imagine that applying this seemingly curiously and typically Greek principle of hypothesize-experiment-falsify to the thesis of free conversation and science combined with the existence of sharashki would yield interesting results.
But some ardent disciple somewhere may preach otherwise, fearing the use of his favourite tool lest he tarnish it through use. Present company naturally excluded.
China had technologies that were unavailable to the West for centuries; gunpowder, printing, silk etc.
What China did lack was liberalism, especially the economic freedom to develop technologies into products, and especially the freedom to be "disruptive". Imperial China absolutely hated disruption; for about a thousand years they successfully murdered anyone challenging the status quo.
Meanwhile a surprising amount of culture was preserved from the classical era in the Middle East while Europe was experiencing the "dark ages"; have you not noticed the Arabic numerals we use or the "al" in algebra?
> greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or nationalistic flamewar. This comment was a noticeable step in the wrong direction, I think because of the combination of grand generic claims with the glib, inflammatory internet style ("No freedom of press, no cars"). This makes for much lower-quality discussion (cf "This didn't turn out so well for Socrates" below), so can you please not post like that here?
"When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”"
Does anybody have a link or know more about this ?
My mother is a semi-professional artist, and I've overheard a similar thing at one of her exhibitions once. Some journalists (or some such) were standing in front of one of her pieces, discussing the deeper meaning behind the work and what the artist must have been trying to express at the time. My Mum just laughed and said "the only thing behind this piece was three bottles of wine"
Phew, I didnt have much money when I was reading the three body problem. The first I picked up second hand, the second and third I pirated, with the hope of buying the set one day, looks like I wont be buying it now
If you're implying that most science fiction hasn't almost always been "war movies or westerns just set in space," I have bad news for you. Science fiction is about the science in the same way westerns are about the horses, which is to say, it isn't.
Also, I don't see signs that people in the US no longer believe in technical progress. There may be forms of technical progress which are not given the priority in American culture that you might prefer, but it seems obvious that progress is advancing in a vast number of fields, and both science fiction and science are more mainstream (albeit, perhaps, in a watered down pop-culture sense) than they ever have been.
To me this journalist is disgusting and plainly unprofessional. Yes, Jiayang Fan, I am looking at you.
It's ok to argue with an interviewee, but, gosh, who does it like that?
While "brainwashed" Liu Cixin is "deaf to the argument", the journalist ignores opponent's arguments because of her (commendable, of course) "inflexible sense of morality" and "principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes".
In case the reader is not susceptible to the journalist's line of thought, let's plug a couple of bits like "as if I were minding a small child" and "he sounds almost like a child" in seemingly innocent contexts. Of course, it has nothing to do with how Liu Cixin's words should be perceived in the other contexts.
But what if the reader is still not sure who's won the argument?
The journalist tells what she had read in Liu Cixin's mind: "he sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head."
Of course, he sighs because he doubts what he says, what else that could possibly be?
"I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked" - oh, Jiayang Fan, you are magnificent.
Hey, cool down a bit. I don't think posting here on HN has any effect on the piece or journalist's style.
Westerners think any opinions Chinese people have, if not conforming to Western values, are due to either "brainwashed" or "fear repercussions".
I have resigned from expressing my opinions long ago in real life because I don't think people around me care much about what I think other than claiming superior or vindicating their own position. So my normal response has been "fly there and ask people what they want, see for yourself".
It has been fascinating to see so many Chinese people who go oversea but end up supporting the current government even more (mind you, not everything the government does, before someone brings this up).
But I feel so much better now :)
Yes, what irked me is not so much her arguments as her smug attitude and the underhanded way of retelling the conversation with a person who trusted her enough to talk with her at length.
If you ask me, lifting almost a billion of people out of poverty is amazing. Still, some developments in China make me feel unease.
What do people in China think about the social credit system?
Also while rounding up a million of Muslims in a reeducation camps is better than fucking up two countries in the wake of 9/11, it still doesn't sit well with me.
My impression for the social credit system is that people seem to like it (mind you, I'm not in China), because it is a powerful tool against bad behaviors and law breakers. I'm not sure if people are aware of or care the invasion of privacy in the implementation of the system. I'm not a big fan of this system in its current form, but someone will need to propose better alternative.
As for the reeducation camps, I haven't been following that closely, haven't had first hand account or direct experience. To form my opinion I will need to travel to Xinjiang to see for myself -- yep, I live up to my own suggestion.
Along with Barack Obama and probably another half billion people, I am a huge fan of sci-fi author Liu Cixin. As a fan of Liu's, it is interesting to get to know him a bit better.
A fun read!
His old sci-fi story The Wondering Earth is available on Netflix, which is pretty good but I prefer reading his books.
104 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadDo you mean something different?
The whole section of the book/civilization where everyone is feminized and most of the toxic male behaviors have been repressed is depicted as a "bad thing" leading to weak people and a weak civilization.
The first book was decent, certainly good, science fiction, with an endearing new scooby mystery at every chapter leading into another mystery. But the other two were bad. Going on in bad tolkien-ism (I've beared reading the Silmarillion three times) with overlong descriptions of unimportant details and derailing into ideology every two paragraphs.
Try to put the PC for our time aside, and think about this again. In the cold and cruel universe, what would survive?
Advance, advance at all costs.
Edit:
You don’t have to save the universe in bold to become a character.
Being paper thin and then destroy the 3 dimensional universe, on behalf of the will of mankind?
Also, the goal isn't/shouldn't be growth at all cost in a story. The axiom of Liu Cixin is his theory of "The Dark Forest", which is what it is, a literary axiom, not an universal truth.
-------------
Chen Xin is selected to represent the will of the mankind (or she would've been purged quickly after showing the inabilities) so the character should be thin in this sense, which reflects the very opposite character, `Thomas Wade`.
So I understand the story as, that humanity chose to destroy itself in honor of what they value.
I interpreted it differently, the fact that some male characters can be less empathetic and could potentially solve some crisis does not mean that all men or all women are X, I am bad with names so I don't remember them, but in the end why did the man let her take the final decision about the secret project/attack ? (it seemed out of character or a way to place the hard decision on other IMO)
One of the most out of character decisions event in the books. As with any "out of character action" a character can take, the blame lies in the author. Like in the question "who would win between Superman and Goku ?" the answer is in the author, not the characters. The author forced a narrative to prove the point that Cheng Xin wasn't able to do the hard choices.
Edit: In reply to Aeolun (couldn't see a reply button below your post):
ehhh, Ye Wenjie is fairly central in the first book (I'm halfway past the second one)
Were we reading the same books? With all the Cultural Revolution trauma in Three Body Problem?
That is the only one of the three I've read, but to me a huge theme was information control. The cultural revolution as the historical event, and the single-particle invasion fleet interfering with humanity's science as the futuristic event. Both analogies for each other. And the ambivalent question underlying it of "what if this is necessary for survival"?
The second on the other hand, had no idea where it was going, no characterisation at all - or terribly cliched attempts, and one of the worst books I've read. I honestly couldn't see the appeal that so many seem to see. I didn't bother with the third!
Like I said for the first, I thought the writing quite rough, but overall the book and plot carried it along to the end easily enough - I enjoyed it despite its obvious flaws and weak characters. I was looking forward to a second book of an author getting into his stride... I was very disappointed.
The whole of the first half of the book is a clumsy to the point it feels like an entirely different author. Nothing happens and it goes quite literally nowhere. How much is the different translator? I have no idea.
The protagonist has no idea why he's selected, isn't interested, can't be bothered and sort of blunders through the book. For some unknown reason the aliens really need to kill this clueless annoying asshole. Whatever happens, somehow he's still the most important dude on the planet, so he gets to keep blundering on, and keep being an asshole. That is entirely how I felt about the writing too: no idea why he's selected, isn't interested, can't be bothered and sort of blunders through the book where nothing happens.
Somewhere on the entire planet is his perfect woman - so he gives his assistant some cliche teen shopping list - did the author just watch the film Weird Science that day? Except it's Weird Science without the humour. What the hell is all this bullshit for? All so the UN can kidnap her to persuade him to work? ROFL. OK, at this point I want the aliens to win - if this is the best guy humans have, we deserve to be alien lunch, and soon! It's all so ridiculously stupid that it's easily the most memorable part of the book. The writing has descended to school essay standard now. Then the whole of the wallfacing idea mostly doesn't work - it's clumsy and shows the gaping holes constantly, sometimes with a few bits of hand waving to try and carry it.
Then finally, when I'm about to put the book in the compost, there's an all too brief section of decent and compelling story telling. Except I'd mostly lost interest at this point. That quarter or third of the book could have been a decent basis for all of it. Lose well over half a book and the plot wouldn't change!
Then the clumsy utterly unbelievable ending. Yeah right.
Overall? 2/10
Don't care what happens in 3. Unlikely to read another by him.
A lot of sci-fi is plot driven, characters are just vectors for the ideas, and I found the big ideas in The Dark Forest really interesting. I'd never thought to critically about the Sagan/space optimist "people in bear suits" view of alien contact before reading the book (in spite of seeing plenty of space horror movies). And for all its faults, it maintained a tension and mystery that kept me interested to the end.
I also had trouble keeping names and even genders straight, the only character I had a connection to was Da Shi (the hard boiled cop).
If you set aside freedom as a goal in itself for a second, then it's actually worth asking: is freedom actually the most important factor leading to those other creature comforts everyone wants?
I traveled once to Singapore, where a number of people I met made the exact same argument Liu makes. They phrased it this way: sure, we don't have a free press, and we have a benevolent tyrant running the place, but:
I know how repulsive such a line of reasoning might sound to a western-educated mind, but try to step out of the cocoon of your culture for a second (the actual "brainwashing" that every culture basically make us undergo) and see if you can actually counter the argument with logical arguments.I like to think that the cocoon of my culture values all human lives equally.
Obviously it doesn't really (I'm Australian), but it feels nice to pretend anyway.
Does anyone have the right to remain poor? I think propably he does. Does anyone have the right to think that he has no chance but to stay poor and thus do nothing and stay poor? Well, is there even such a right?
Now, social benefit is a good thing, but it's also a very un-capitalistic thing. Do people have to work to earn their food and clothes and residence,etc, or can people wait for the government to give them food, or money to buy food? Or, if the government is not rich enought to provide said food or money, what should the poor people do?
If a person, for any random reason, say, without the resources or willpower to work, should he/she be given a chance, or should he be left alone? If the chance requires education and training, or some other involuntary effort, is it right to demand such effort from the person?
Now, some specific group of people in some certain country on this Earth, didn't know how they could get out of the poverty they're born to. They may feel insecure around other people that look different or even speak different languages. And there are other people who may look less different and want to exploit those poor people, to turn them into terrorists. You may even have evidence. Is waiting for them to get turned and then punish them really the right thing to do?
Mind you that country may not be China.
Another thing to be considered is that freedom in the West gets more and more relative latterly. Say the wrong thing in public (or even in private, if it is made public), and you can easily be fired, even denied future jobs. Is the overall degree of freedom in most Western countries that different to that in, e.g., Singapore? I'm not sure it is (it's clearly better than China's, though... at the moment).
If saying something can essentially wreck your life and turn you into a pariah because you can't even get a job, what does it matter if it's a government or not doing it? When the church punished heretics, did it also not count as a violation of freedom of expression because it was not the government doing it?
Conversely, it's impossible to have a "marketplace of ideas" if all forms of criticism, regardless of their source or intent, are considered a violation of someone's freedom of speech, and this presents the paradox of only considering active speech to be defensible, but not reactive.
A marketplace of ideas implies that some ideas will be considered not worth buying.
Criticism is fine, trying to shut opponent's mouth is not, punishment is not.
Now define "criticism" in a way that can't be arbitrarily equated to "punishment" or "trying to shut your opponent's mouth."
Demanding the person to be fired is not fine, ad hominem attacks are not fine, sharing private information about the person is not fine. You get the idea.
To claim otherwise would seem to place business and company culture beyond the reach of the public interest and the scope of society, which is a position not even free governments enjoy.
Perhaps, you are confusing your own interest with the public's one?
The "right to be forgotten" that is being recognized in some countries is also an example of a government measure that can help.
By the way, you seem very confident that nothing should be done because these things only affect people with "awful" or "shitty" beliefs. But what is socially considered awful can vary a lot. There are societies that would place being gay, abortion or being an atheist under that umbrella; conversely, other societies in the past placed being religious under that umbrella. Even if you don't like the people being affected by this now, allowing freedom of speech to be eroded in this way can backfire in a big way in the long term.
The question is whether one thinks it's fine to forcefully lock up a certain group of society for one's own, arguably, material benefit. It is easy to preach material security when the cost is born by another group.
But the real problem is that this system is by its nature fragile. On the one hand, this means that you never know when leadership will no longer be so enlightened and shit will hit the fan with nothing you can do about it.
From another perspective, because of this fragility, it's not capable letting its crazy people reach their potential. Can you imagine what the system would have done to creative hippies or even Steve Jobs if he didn't toe the line? If you don't give free enough reign to these people, your society will hit a ceiling where you don't produce the most innovative culture or people.
The entire West went through this process at one time or another, along with some of the post-Communist countries.
I think the bigger problem is people completely mischaracterizing what Singapore is.
Modern Singapore is nothing like a "benevolent tyranny". The best way to characterize it is probably to imagine a large, well-run city with strict laws, heavy bureaucracy, expansive regulation and government involvement in business, and whose politics are dominated by one political party. None of these are extremely rare traits for a city.
Yes, Singapore does have black spots in its record with respect to human rights. Most of this is in the past (primarily during the post-war period, where many other countries have similar black spots with regards to the treatment of communists), but I argue that this aspect has been incredibly exaggerated in the foreign perception of Singapore.
The reason why I raise this is that your comparison to Singapore is invalid: Singapore is already very much similar to a "Western democracy". It holds free and transparent elections (the fact that policies favor the incumbent party does not detract from the fact that the elections are fairly run, and next to no one questions this.) No one holds back criticism of the government in private or in public - they do hesitate for more official mediums (e.g. newspapers, television) because of legal repurcussions e.g. libel. I have never once encountered any instance of censorship with teeth (there have been instances where the government suspended the distribution license of a print magazine... in the age of the Internet).
Please stop using modern Singapore as an example of "benevolent tyranny".
- strict laws - heavy bureaucracy - expansive regulation - government involvement in business - politics are dominated by one political party
All of these give off a terrible impression. But I urge the reader to consider that none of these are unique to Singapore, and are in fact not uncommon among cities/town. Like it is not uncommon for city/state-level governments to be dominant by one party or another for generations. Nor is it uncommon for cities to have annoyingly or weirdly archaic and strict laws. (Singapore bans chewing gum? The US still bans the import of "Kinder Surprise").
I'm not the best writer for this sort of thing, but I just want to dispel this notion that Singapore is this magical, esoteric fascist paradise. It's just a city-state which leans more toward government regulation. Only once we stop treating it as exceptionally special can we actually discuss which policies and aspects of government work and don't work well.
(although it's a valid point that this was a colonial introduction)
The people who run China believe in "freedom" for themselves. They think of ideas and implement things, they have a great degree of freedom and set up the systems to watch everyone, but they themselves have ways around it, connections, access to information about what's going on in the world, etc.
They fundamentally believe they are better than the other Chinese they make decisions on (bureaucrats have a tendency to arrogance and belief in their own "best ideas"). Maybe they have some good ideas, maybe they don't. But the fact that _they_ view themselves and treat themselves differently is the point. In such a system, the violent and ruthless usually rise to the top, which eventually shows in society. Humanity has tried that lots of times, it doesn't work out.
In a truly free society, you are free to _truly_ start a competing system or a different system. You can take your strange ideas and start up a commune if you want. You can start an authoritarian commune (as long as people choose to let you and can leave), or an artistic commune, or a free-love commune. That is where you get different systems, and everyone can make a different system. Yeah, it's great to have that, but that gets us back to square one: people being treated like they individually can go do something important of their own choice and different than those around them. Instead of one bureaucrat thinking their ideas are the best ones and then imposing it violently on everyone else. That's not different competing systems, that's hell.
It's all great for the homogeneous, apathetic majority, but where are the schools, education, healthcare, spacious apartment, etc. for the Uighur?
Why should I not do the same for China when they are destroying lives of people whose only crime is being an ethnic minority, or trying to bring repressive laws to Hong Kong?
It's good to have different systems when the basics of humanity are remembered.
From what I remember of Duncan Campbell's Secret Society I believe the legislation for just emergency measures as interment of 'subversives' and other emergency measures was drafted during the Cold War - this would be expected to be passed by parliament in the event of a suitable emergency. I would suspect these things have never been thrown out but will still be there in a filing cabinet somewhere in Whitehall.
Let's hope we don't meet in a camp one day and laugh about the naivety of our postings on HN....
Still that veneer of civility and rule of law is important, however artificial it sometimes seems. Democracy is all too fragile. I remember the nuclear war programme Threads, and the documentary at the same time - possibly Panorama - where some petty bureaucrat or councillor was positively itching for Armageddon to happen just so he could start shooting people. I think he only had a very minor place in the emergency hierarchy. It was his answer for every disagreement - shoot them - he must have mentioned it a dozen times!
See you in camp... :)
The UK did lock up dissidents in a mass internment during the 1970s - in the six counties of north Ireland. The Irish marched through the streets of Derry to protest and 14 (unarmed) men were shot. The queen then proceeded to pin medals on the parachute regiment who fired on the crowd.
Chinese needs no help from the Britains who launched a war to keep selling their opium and heroin to Chinese drug addicts - drug pushers using violence to keep addicts addicted, to "remember their humanity".
Yet I don't condone the use of internment - even if I do understand how and why it happened. All it did was intensify the already high tensions.
Also, the CCP won't leave people alone who leave China for more attractive systems. They're hardly interested in a competition of systems.
It really isn't, as it's not achievable without mass murder or at the very least "ethnic cleansing".
(Not trying to imply that everything that happens within the "core" of China is awesome.)
The issue I see for the future of the entire industrialized world is that this particular brand of consumerized dictatorship is based on the lessons of hundreds of years of failed regimes, and in an evolutionary effect it seems "we" have now come up with a system that is both stable and totalitarian. It's an emerging system for the whole world, and the fact that no human on the entire planet can escape it without losing access to everything they care about, only enhances its stability.
This system is precisely tuned to offer us just enough so we do not mind what's being taken away. I'm personally no exception to this: I want a high standard of life and security as well. I want the luxuries afforded by consumer electronics and high technology. Through technology and international connectivity, I have more options for meaningful social interactions than ever before. The prospect of losing access to any of that if I ever act up against the system is a powerful mechanism that keeps me in line. Not that I ever brush up against the boundaries, mind you, because the system is well designed to appeal to my need for perceived autonomy: as long as I keep my head down, I'll be left alone.
Right now, in the West, the price of reasonable dissent is not very high. Yet. But you can already feel the thousands of little mechanisms working to discourage it. When I became active in protesting against the EU copyright reform, my first attempt at being political in decades, the game was so thoroughly rigged that I'll probably refrain from attempting to change the official narrative in the foreseeable future. Had protesting been actively discouraged by the government, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, I would probably not have shown up at all.
I'm struck by our collective inability to come up with a good alternative to this system. It seems to me this system is evolving on its own, and that development is synchronous world-wide. Sure, it's appealing to the powerful, who actively push it. But that's not what's driving it. I suspect it's the collective human spirit.
Other than being different from your own beliefs, that is.
Especially anything that gets posted on HN.
The only culture that ever begot science was the tradition of greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything, and that everyone was on the same playing ground.
Materially, China could have come up with scientific progress for a thousand years, but they didn't, because they lacked the culture for open debate and expression of ideas.
No freedom of press, no cars.
That's the historical perspective.
Now, let's look into the future.
Do we want to stop the progress of science? If then, sure, there is no strong technocratic argument for freedom.
I'm sorry but this statement is extremely Eurocentric. Are you seriously suggesting that ancient India and China didn't have a tradition of science?
Not all of europe did either. Science rose mostly in the protestant north that had learned that differing arguments are not a threat to the status quo.
I'm not saying Chinese were more stupid, or that North-Europeans are smarter than South-Europeans.
I'm saying the culture of open discussion, critical thinking and being challenged for ones claims (i.e. testability) are the cornerstones that are necessary to be in place, and that curtailing freedom of speech curtails the progress of science, as much as focusing on eminence instead of evidence does.
Technological progress and scientific progress are two different things!
China was technologically the most advanced country hands down for a very long time before natural sciences rose. Yet they did not produce a Newton or a Galileo, or, at least the cultural environment was such that their work was forgotten.
I also you confuse openness in political debate with openness in STEM, yes China prohibits the former, but definitely not the latter
But some ardent disciple somewhere may preach otherwise, fearing the use of his favourite tool lest he tarnish it through use. Present company naturally excluded.
What China did lack was liberalism, especially the economic freedom to develop technologies into products, and especially the freedom to be "disruptive". Imperial China absolutely hated disruption; for about a thousand years they successfully murdered anyone challenging the status quo.
Meanwhile a surprising amount of culture was preserved from the classical era in the Middle East while Europe was experiencing the "dark ages"; have you not noticed the Arabic numerals we use or the "al" in algebra?
> greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything
This didn't turn out so well for Socrates.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20221537.
Does anybody have a link or know more about this ?
The red chamber is a good chinese example.
I wish it were mainstream in the US. Back when people here believed in technical progress, science fiction was popular, if not always main stream.
Nowadays there is a category “science fiction” in every video app but the movies are always war movies or westerns, just set in space.
Also, I don't see signs that people in the US no longer believe in technical progress. There may be forms of technical progress which are not given the priority in American culture that you might prefer, but it seems obvious that progress is advancing in a vast number of fields, and both science fiction and science are more mainstream (albeit, perhaps, in a watered down pop-culture sense) than they ever have been.
It's ok to argue with an interviewee, but, gosh, who does it like that?
While "brainwashed" Liu Cixin is "deaf to the argument", the journalist ignores opponent's arguments because of her (commendable, of course) "inflexible sense of morality" and "principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes".
In case the reader is not susceptible to the journalist's line of thought, let's plug a couple of bits like "as if I were minding a small child" and "he sounds almost like a child" in seemingly innocent contexts. Of course, it has nothing to do with how Liu Cixin's words should be perceived in the other contexts.
But what if the reader is still not sure who's won the argument?
The journalist tells what she had read in Liu Cixin's mind: "he sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head." Of course, he sighs because he doubts what he says, what else that could possibly be?
"I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked" - oh, Jiayang Fan, you are magnificent.
Westerners think any opinions Chinese people have, if not conforming to Western values, are due to either "brainwashed" or "fear repercussions".
I have resigned from expressing my opinions long ago in real life because I don't think people around me care much about what I think other than claiming superior or vindicating their own position. So my normal response has been "fly there and ask people what they want, see for yourself".
It has been fascinating to see so many Chinese people who go oversea but end up supporting the current government even more (mind you, not everything the government does, before someone brings this up).
If you ask me, lifting almost a billion of people out of poverty is amazing. Still, some developments in China make me feel unease.
What do people in China think about the social credit system?
Also while rounding up a million of Muslims in a reeducation camps is better than fucking up two countries in the wake of 9/11, it still doesn't sit well with me.
As for the reeducation camps, I haven't been following that closely, haven't had first hand account or direct experience. To form my opinion I will need to travel to Xinjiang to see for myself -- yep, I live up to my own suggestion.
A fun read!
His old sci-fi story The Wondering Earth is available on Netflix, which is pretty good but I prefer reading his books.