You haven’t read the second book, which went precisely into this.

The book is a cautionary tale about misreading intentions. The US imperialism is not something to be taken lightly. They have far more powerful weapons than just military prowess. I cringe everytime I read here that people think the US is going to collapse soon. The US would rather bring the whole world down than to collapse by itself. Being prudent and careful is key to dealing with the US imperialists.

Also, to cover all my bases: Chinese foreign policy has shifted rather significantly under Xi Jinping to a more active role. Please remember that the Three Body Problem was published in 2008. Also, and this really goes without saying- it reflects the views and fears of the author only, and all that entails. Whether the allegory is as relevant now as it was when it was published is a separate matter of discussion.

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I’m sorry, this turned in to a diatribe. I’m really, really, really frightened and it mostly stays buried under a layer of cynicism and irony and distraction, but it broke through here. I’m terrified of this awful country.

Original post follows;

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

• Sun Tzu

It is essential to victory to understand what your enemy is doing, why they are doing it, and why they think they are doing it.

America’s aggression is not based in what most people would consider rational thought. Americans are so utterly, blindly, deludedly convinced of their natural and divine superiority that most of them are not able to conceive of “military parity”. MAD was only barely able to contain US aggression and avert a general nuclear exchange. If even a few dozen government and military positions had been occupied by different men America would have committed to a full launch and considered the destruction of most of America’s population and much of the world an acceptable price for destroying the Soviets and Chinese.

America cannot accurately perceive China’s defensive capabilities. It cannot accurately perceive it’s own vulnerabilities. It will launch in to a war it can’t win out of sheer arrogance and bloodlust. Normally an enemy like that would be easily defeated, but America’s second strike capability and outright insanity makes defeating America in open combat suicidal. China might reach a point where they could destroy the us carrier fleet, there’s a good chance they already can. But if they can’t kill the entire nuclear triad in an overwhelming first strike they’re flipping coins on annihilation.

America is something new in history - the blind mad bloodlust of fascism armed with a nuclear second strike capability that could destroy every major population center in china.

So that’s what i don’t understand. How any of the attitudes and actions in tbp could constitute a defense against America. I get that this is an old book, and with Obama coming on to the stage at that time it was easy to be misled about the beast and maybe think that change was possible, but it seems hopelessly naive. America doesn’t kill for self defense, or for resources. Killing is what America is. It’s a self sharpening weapon with no master that destroys because that is it’s nature. You can’t hide from that, or turtle up behind walls. If defense is even possible you must infect it with something that will cause it to rot from inside and collapse, and hope that in collapsing it doesn’t crush the whole world, or else kill it completely in a single moment of overwhelming violence that leaves nothing left alive to retaliate. I don’t see any wisdom or strategy in what Liu Cixin is discussing. It’s all premised on game theory, rational self interest, and that does not apply to America. This is a strategy for dealing with a wolf, but they’re facing a rabid dog.

I don’t know if you live here, or deal with Americans, but the thrill and the joy in their voices when they, unprompted, begin talking about how many hundreds of millions or billions they could kill if only they could destroy the Three Gorges Dam or interdict the Malacca Strait is horrifying. I don’t have words for it and I’m terrified that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what we are.

Japan underwent modernization in the late 19th century, narrowly avoided the fate of being colonized by Western powers and instead found themselves among the ranks of imperialist powers, driven by the need of resource expansion to colonize China.

Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?

If the only way to survive in the world of harsh capitalism is to join the imperialist ranks (that includes the Soviet Union from the Chinese perspective, mind you, though I don’t agree with that labeling), then what is better: to survive at the cost of Humanity that defines us in the first place, or to preserve Humanity at all cost, even if it means this will lead to our own demise?

Is it accurate to say that the books can be read as an interrogation of recent Chinese history (from a modern, maybe somewhat liberal perspective), and it’s trajectory? I haven’t read books 2 & 3 to comment on them further.

Okay, true, frequently encountered issue with trying to portray America realistically in fiction.

This is really more of a meta-discussion about the things people say about the book.

Ok? But the things people are saying about the book are wrong tho, either because we’re going on hearsay or because of misreading of the text (deliberate or otherwise) and what it is trying to say. Dark Forest Theory as it’s used in The Three Body Problem is a sci-fi narrative framing device to discuss US-China relations, and imo I don’t think the book is particularly interested in exploring the idea beyond that allegorical framing.

Dark Forest is total horseshit

Oh yeah totally I agree with you on that. I don’t think any sufficiently advanced civilization can advance beyond their solar system without communism, and once a civilization is capable of interstellar travel they probably are capable of defending themselves from extinction anyway.

(Also I think the scenario you outline happens in the books but I haven’t read that far yet.)

I just saw something that happens in the book called out for this. A dude sends a radio signal from a star to test the “dark forest”. The star blows up, so they decide yes, the dark forest is in effect. But the obvious problem is that the attackers don’t do any follow up. They don’t scout the star to see if anyone is actually there, they don’t treat it as a potential trap by the dark forest predator they’re supposed to be hiding from. If you shoot a giant relativistic or ftl or magic weapon at someone and you don’t kill all of them at the same time they’ll just follow the line of your weapon back to you and either counter-attack and wipe you out, or broad-band your position to everyone else so you get wiped out anyway.

The solution to the Dark Forest is War Games: the only winning move is not to play. The book seems like it’s trying to engage with nuclear deterrence and MAD is some way, but then forgets about second-strike weapons - nuclear missile armed submarines - that are the foundation on which MAD rests. If second-strike weapons exist you can’t do silly shit like this. Maybe it’s supposed to make some kind of sense in the silly space-magic of the book, but irl the us can’t destroy China without destroying itself and the whole world.

Like, what happens when the Trisolarans successfully invade?

Id recommend reading the books for this part, its a harrowing space battle.

I mean, the problem is that you can kinda trip and fall into US state department talking points if you’re not careful, so I get why people don’t do it in leftist spaces online.

Personally, I feel that since I can’t influence Chinese policy one way or the other and that only the passage of time will reveal whether Socialism with Chinese Characteristics pans out or not, I should focus on what I can do locally rather than worry if China is actually communist or not.

That said, Xi please

I feel like I’m the only person who thinks and says this,

Fyi about 3 years ago, our minister for cracker control, Black Red Guard, also mentioned China’s lack of material support to Nepal’s recent Maoist revolution.

what does that even mean in the context of geopolitics circa 2008?

It means Dengism. To quote Deng Xiaoping on Chinese foreign policy circa the 1980s: “observe calmly, secure our position, cope with affairs calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile, and never claim leadership.”

The metaphor’s 40 years out of date, rather than 300.

if you take the implications of the theory seriously

I mean, in the context of Chinese national defense it means that technological parity is the only means of avoiding disaster, and the books are kinda about the disaster that happens if you attract the notice of a technologically superior opponent without achieving technological parity first

China is based but hiding there power level, duh.

I feel like it’s worth mentioning that Obama was a big fan of this book series & I first heard about it on NPR of all places.

i mean yeah if you’ve never read the books it’s pretty cringe to say stuff like that. you don’t know how slavery is portrayed in the books, you havent read them.

I can criticize the books for that because I’ve read them and know how the main character is literally a slave owner, but for all you know I made that up.

Don’t worry, Dark Forest Theory is probably total bullshit since it just assumes alien civilizations will be monolithic in nature or coordinated enough to have a singular response to the presence of any rival civilization

But if it is true we’re literally already dead since we’ve been blasting radio waves into the aether for over a century

The laws don’t, it’s all silly techbro bullshit.the kind of weapons, communications, and sensors “Dark Forest” requires are silly nonsense. It has an enormous number of holes. It’s pretty easy to detect whether planets out to quite long distances have organic life on them, so why hasn’t someone used their magic hyperspace lasers to blast every life baring planet, including us? If you want to destroy a solar system you’ve got to be at a level where you could shoot, idk, Jupiter, at another solar system. How are you going to do that? You’d pretty well have to turn an entire solar system in to a gun and people are going to notice if you re-configure a solar system to do that. If you build a dyson swarm and use it as a giant laser folks will notice the dimming of the star and everyone near the path of the beam will notice it and be aware of it’s point of origin.

Dark Forest mostly drastically misunderstands how big space is, how stealth in space can and cannot work, how probability works, how rare life is, and makes a whole bunch of silly assumptions not least of which is that it’s worth anyone’s time to pretend that there are magic people in the sky who will punish us for being naughty.

I compare it to Pascal’s Wager for illiterate tech bros. It’s exactly as worthy of consideration as Roko’s Basilisk.

Interesting. I’ll have to give it a try!

It probably helps that almost the entire generation that committed or suffered under these atrocities has been dead for a while

Living memory is so much more potent than history

Because nations aren’t people, they’re not monolithic, they’re barely even real. Afaik the idea of ancient, durable enmity between nations rarely if ever happens unless they’re constantly at war, and even then it breaks down as soon as people start talking to each other.

Warfare and international violence are games played by capitalists and kings. Normal people mostly don’t identify the world that way, and the second they start to actually interact with each other the walls start breaking down. An excellent example would be the US invasion of Grenada. Afaik the very explicit danger Grenada represented to the US was an English speaking communism that could talk to Americans directly.

Defection and fraternization, basically learning, tolerance, and acceptance, have always been critical threats to imperial and colonial projects. The kind of blind hatred and ignorance required to keep up colonial and imperial relations usually has to be enforced by the state.

Or maybe the author contrived a scenario to explore what would happen if MAD thinking failed? As a cautionary tale on an over-reliance of that strategy in the face of a technologically superior opponent?

I dunno just spitballing here haven’t finished book 2.

In the books the deterrence (broadcasting our location so some powerful alien civilization will blow us both up) does have second strike capability though.