Jiayang Fan was born in China and moved to the US at age seven. I do recommend reading her interview (also linked in the original post above). It’s quite well written and nuanced.
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I wonder if you would feel differently if you were the target of her billion dollar platform? She’s using her very loud megaphone to get people to hate me, and that’s plenty of reason for boycott. She’s not just some artist. She’s a fucking billionaire with billions of people that listen to her. She will get many trans people killed.
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I have no problem criticizing genocide whether it’s sincere or hypocritical. Whatever bad stuff the US or France or Japan or anyone else does not excuse Beijing.
That said, asking to ban this because a minor celebrity who lives in a dictatorship doesn’t have the ability to freely criticize his government is ridiculous. Not all people have the freedom to operate and decent people will make allowances for that. Not all Nazi resisters were brave all the time. Albert Goering was fairly brave, but he had political cover, and could be a thorn in public (For example, Albert is reported to have joined a group of Jewish women who had been forced to scrub the street. The SS officer in charge inspected his identification, and ordered the group’s scrubbing activity to stop after realizing he could be held responsible for allowing Hermann Göring’s brother to be publicly humiliated). Others did what they could do, some braver than others, but always one needs to handicap those efforts from their position.
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FWIW, it’s also entirely plausible that he believes precisely what he says he believes. I tend to think this is the case, but one one can judge from the tenor of the article @GulliverFoyle linked to above. I think it’s also a form of colonizing to believe that if only the person had REAL freedom as we know it, he’d probably tell us how he thinks about things just like we do.
Sorry for the wall of text, but the actual interview might be instructive:
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.”
I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:
The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.
Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me . In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.
And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”
It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
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To be fair, even being mum on the issue might have consequences, given his relatively high profile outside of China? I suspect he’s closely watched and knows he’s close watched.
True. I’d hope he makes those statements not because he really agrees with concentration camps, but because he has to be seen backing China’s government. That’s not something we’re going to know unless he leaves China for good and can confirm or deny that.
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I’m waiting for his next strongly worded condemnation of Duck Dynasty / Phill Robertson and calls to cancel all re-runs of the show based on the star’s consistently racist and islamophobic public comments. AAAAny day now…
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Everything the Republicans attack they are already doing. Communist China is not the enemy of the Republicans, it is the role model.
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He (Liu) seems to be saying the China is boiling under the surface and ready to erupt into massive violence and civil war, and as bad as the current government may be (to our eyes), it’s just barely keeping a lid on things, and if it lets up, the Chinese people will explode and go on a rampage of mass violence and genocide. Is that actually a likely scenerio? Sounds far-fetched to me. Is the whole “well ordered society” thing in China really just an illusion? Or is it just the government itself that expects to be on the receiving end if they cannot suppress the people? (a la like the french revolution)
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I was watching a documentary just yesterday about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. One of the leaders of the movement said that the community that demonstrators created in the square proved that Chinese people could build a peaceful, stable democratic society, and that the idea that Chinese people need a strong hand to maintain order is a myth used to justify one party rule.
On top of that, the Tiananmen protests were a mass movement involving workers, police officers and even soldiers as well as students,. It was just like a Communist revolution, except against the Communist Party The Party leaders were determined to make sure that nothing like it could ever happen again, so they violently suppressed the protest to quell all opposition, they accelerated economic growth and made the promise of prosperity the source of their legitimacy, and when the Web came to China they set about building a mass online surveillance system so that discontent could be detected early and organised opposition could be stopped before it became a threat.
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Let me get this straight. Republicans are so concerned about saving Muslims in China. They also don’t want Muslims in the US and criticize European allies for accepting Muslim refugees. They claim to be moral Christians with strong family values, but choose as their leader … well, Trump. They also remain silent as their leader cages immigrants from overwhelmingly Christian countries with family-oriented cultures and forcibly sterilizes them. And they want us to believe that they’re the ones who will bring morality, law, and order?
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Communist China doesn’t exist, even as an aspiration.
Authoritarian Capitalist China does though, which might explain the similarities.
The protesters were singing The Internationale. They felt that the CCP had lost their way back then.
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Not that weird. The republicans have gone along with the Donald on a lot of domestic policy issues, because they essentially agree with those positions. The ‘law and order’ racism, the misogyny, the anti-immigrant nastiness, rollbacks of environmental protections, tax cuts for the rich, all that stuff is basically stock republican platform stuff, just turned up to 11. They can live with the corruption and the bullshit to get these things. It is what their base wants.
They’ve been less compliant on foreign policy issues. They haven’t given anything on Russian sanctions, and I’m sure Trump’s puppet master is not happy about that. For the most part, they don’t share Donald’s worship of foreign dictators. There’s obviously a few (Jim Jordan, Devon Nunes) who are willing to carry some Putin wastewater to please the Trump. But I suspect they know that the isolationist core of Trump’s base doesn’t care that much one way or the other about that stuff.
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It is a really good book. I gave away my copy, which I do not regret, but I think I’d like to read it again. Perhaps the local library has one.
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Well said! Hypocrites all.
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I quite enjoyed the first one. There were some diminishing returns with books two and three, but it was a neat Clarke-esque riff on the dark forest hypothesis. Interestingly, from The New Yorker article by Jiayang Fan, Liu seems aware that his fiction is driven by the scientific ideas rather than the characters and is fine with that, which reminds me of Clarke and much of Asimov.
I’m skeptical of how well it will translate to screen, especially remembering the mediocre results of the SyFy Channel’s 2013 miniseries adaptation of Childhood’s End.
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China has been through a couple of really bloody civil wars. Taiping Rebellion in the mddle of the 19:th century killed at least 20 million people, then there was the civil war the Communists won, more recently the Cultural Revolution that makes up a backstory to The three body problem was basically a civil war organized from the top by Mao. I don’t know if China would explode, but I can understand if people there are nervous about political change.
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Arguably Lovecraft’s racism seems like a (particularly prominent and problematic) part of a whole skull full of profound issues with otherness, boundary violation, purity and probably a bunch of other similar bits and pieces.
Your more or less self-satisfied Lovecraft-era racist would also have inferior negros and degenerate tribals and English or English-adjacent cultural values at the top of the heap; but wouldn’t so much have stories where the narrator spends the entire time investigating a town of moral, economic; and biological degenerates and then is struck down by the ghastly realization that he himself is a hideous fish-frog/human hybrid monster; or make sinister and otherworldly dreams seeping into the consciousnesses of every sensitive young man of good breeding be a thing that seems to happen whenever forces unimaginably larger than all human culture shift and stir in their sleep a little.
None of this is intended to be exculpatory, just to note that, unlike a lot of people who share his most visible racist positions, Lovecraft does not write like someone who thinks that a good Protestant work ethic, sound Anglo-Saxon Stock; and maybe some eugenics and maxim guns at the perimeter as needed for the natural order of things to be brought into effect. He writes like someone who hates and fears difference because he’s overwhelmingly consumed by the idea that the difference we can see is just the barest hint of the (literally) unimaginable extent of what is lurking beyond normalcy.
It is not a coincidence that both his father and mother were institutionalized and died in a mental hospital, the former from what was almost certainly tertiary syphilis. No wonder Lovecraft’s stories are full of fears of mental and bodily degeneration, of corruption lurking unseen in you until it blooms and turns you into something hideously other!
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Yes, but he also meant Black people and immigrants. 
Dude was racist, there is no doubt about that.
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Oh, certainly. Old HPL was totally racist, there can be no question about that. He started mellowing out a bit towards the end of his life, but given where he started, it wasn’t that much. 
IIRC,somewhere among his numerous letters he rages about the quasi-Asiatic Finns coming to America. (No joke, we were being lumped in with the “Mongolian races” a lot between the world wars…)
But I think Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia stem more from his intensely personal fears and traumas, than from absorbing the general racism of early-20th century Rhode Island. And I think that’s why his stories remain well known and readable today, a century later, when so many other writers who were more popular and successful at the time are forgotten.
