Hi, I’m Johanna Costigan. I’ve written on history, science, tech, and politics in China for outlets including Nikkei Asia, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, L’Atelier, The Diplomat, The Asia Society Policy Institute, ChinaFile, Rest of World, The Mekong Review of Books, and others. I am also a regular contributor of news analysis on China’s sci-tech policy and US-China tech competition for Forbes.
I first went to China in high school to study Mandarin in 2012. Beijing was semi-paradoxically smoky and full of bicycles. I stayed with a host mother and figured out how to say “I support Obama” through real-time trial and error. Two years later, I was back as a college freshman, studying more Mandarin in Qingdao (of the beer). Two years after that, I went back, to backpack with a friend through Yunnan.
I moved to Shanghai after college. I lived there for two years, and then went to Oxford where my research focused on people’s absorption (or lack thereof) of state narratives on Japan’s invasion and World War II in China through museum exhibits. My field work was canceled due to COVID, which led me to study social media discourse – specifically, the nerdy platform 豆瓣 (Douban). After graduating, I’ve been working as a researcher and writer covering tech policy and development in China and US-China tech competition. I’ve also spent significant time in Taiwan and went back to China for my first post-pandemic trip in early 2024.
In this newsletter, I’ll write about the things “they” (powers, editors) aren’t particularly interested in publishing. There may not always be a connection to how China is “big, scary, or weird.” Sometimes, I’ll even opt out of making any connection to US politics. I might even forget to remind you of China’s massive population or the leadership’s “tightening grip” over the people.
Since the point (to me) of having a newsletter is to let my curiosity loose, I’ll write about both official and unofficial depictions of China’s past and future – and how they might reflect the country’s innovation policy. Some dispatches, like the first one below, will be rooted in sci-tech and culture. Others will feature research and analysis on subjects I’ve written about before, like:
Major developments in US-China tech-related diplomacy, rivalry, and everything in between, (think TikTok’s potential forced divestiture);
How the party-state’s conception of Chinese history and civilization shapes its vision for cyberspace; and,
The way AI regulation interacts with the competitive dynamics of the United States’ and China’s AI development, including the divergent role of intellectual property protections in each country
Here’s the first one:
Photo credit: Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
The Three Body (History) Problem
“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains” writes author Liu Cixin in the postscript of The Three Body Problem, the first book in his science fiction trilogy 地球往事 (Remembrance of Earth’s Past).
His characters also have to dance in their chains. In Three Body, the young scientist Dr. Ye Wenjie watches as her physicist father is murdered during a struggle session at Tsinghua University. It’s the Cultural Revolution. Academics have targets on their backs. His sin: promoting “reactionary” ideas, like the laws of physics. Ye’s mother gets on stage and echoes the Red Guards’ condemnations of her husband. Three young students beat him to death.
Years later, after she is sent to a labor camp, the Chinese Communist Party decides Ye’s scientific skills are useful. They recruit her to work at Red Coast, a military base charged with, we later learn, attempting to make contact with aliens. The Cultural Revolution wages on in the background; as the party rages against intellectuals, it privately channels their skills for strategic national projects.
Then, like today, China’s party-state exhibits a formidable capacity to tighten political and social expression while mandating and funding scientific exploration. (Last century, the United States bet this combination would not be viable. It won that bet in the Soviet Union and lost it in China. Or perhaps, as Zhou Enlai might say, it is too early to tell.)
Decentralizing China
In the newly-released Netflix series, many of the originally-Chinese characters are turned foreign. The action emigrates from Beijing to Oxford. The lineage of Chinese scientists from the Mao era to modernity is dropped. The book’s middle-aged characters are replaced by the sexual-tension-infused dynamics of an unrealistically attractive, globalized friend group of thirty-somethings. The Cultural Revolution is kept, but the modern China that rose despite it is omitted. Nothing satisfactorily fills the narrative gaps.
For example, the older Dr. Ye’s connection to the next generation of scientists – including the protagonists of the first and second books – takes on a diminished and forced form. A conversation between Dr. Ye and one of her deceased daughter’s former classmates, for example, morphs in tone from the book’s respectful exchange between a senior and junior scholar to a confrontation: “You failed [your daughter],” the Americanized version of main character Luo Ji (Saul) informs his elder. He did not speak to her that way in the book.
Unsurprisingly, Netflix’s de-Sinification decisions have not gone unnoticed in China. Some Chinese netizens have been loudly critical of the adaptation. New York Times columnist Li Yuan offered a relatively cynical analysis of their gripes: “The reactions show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public perspectives of China’s relations with the outside world.”
But protests over an American entertainment company gaining access to one of China’s most important pieces of intellectual property – one that has earned both cult appeal and global respect – have many justifications. Some might be more valid than others. Making the characters not Chinese dissolves their cultural affinity, an element that adds plausibility to their evolving mutual trust. It also undermines the multigenerational understanding that comes from operating under the incentives and restraints of Chinese research institutions and the party-state system overseeing them.
Defensive commentators can find legitimate rationale in the books’ expertly foregrounded Chinese-ness: the story occurs within and because of the interaction between China’s modern history and state-led science and technology research. Fears surrounding what Christoper T. Fan described in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “how the trilogy’s deeply Chinese outlook – its settings, characters, and cultural references – might be deformed, deleted or, worse, Disneyfied” in the Netflix series were, to a degree, proven right.
Liu’s depiction of how Chinese society handles history is an underlying driver of Dr. Ye’s Cultural Evolution-era decision to invite the aliens to invade earth. Yet the Netflix show omits Ye’s interactions with state-led, societally-endorsed historical erasure. In so doing, the show provides far less clarity on the source of her entrenched malaise concerning the human condition.
For example, the show cut an entire storyline on Ye’s permanently damaged relationship with her mother, who never apologized for taking the Red Guards’ side in the dispute that killed her father. After the two are reunited for the first time in years, Ye’s mother’s new husband scolds Ye, telling her she should “not try to pursue old historical debts.” Her lack of hope in humanity isn’t simply the result of bad people or bad things. She is equally disturbed by people’s tendency to gloss over hard historical truths – and refuse to apologize for them.
Light Years and Longtermism
Mike Evans, who is American in both the book and the show, travels to China as a young man to find meaning in Pan-species communism and save a species of swallow. In their oddly candid first conversation, Evans tells Ye he has realized in China that people everywhere are the same: “Civilization continues to follow its path of destruction of all life on Earth except humans.”
She agrees – and then reveals she knows there is other life, which sets Evans on a journey to fact check her. Within a few years, he ends up not only convinced she has communicated with aliens, but also that they (the aliens) should destroy humanity. They have earned that right through their technological superiority and humans have sealed their fate by continuing to make selfish, destructive decisions.
Evans is no exception from his own analysis. His forfeiture of hope betrays an urge to shut down in the face of problems, not solve them. (Problem-solving is harder than problem-burying.) Mike Evans embodies a version of Bernie-or-bust-type popular nihilism. He is hyper-aware of how the world has wronged him and everyone else in it – and yet he’s stubbornly unfocused on his contributions to that condition. He does not consider the alternative choices he could make – with his billions of dollars – to help the currently alive. His plans are grander than that.
His impulses have real-life corollaries in the global tech sector – specifically, among the proponents of longtermism who simultaneously warn of and work toward an AI apocalypse. “What’s the point in deworming a few hundred kids in Tanzania when you could pour that money into astronautical research instead and help millions of unborn souls to escape Earth and live joyfully among the stars?” Leif Wenar writes in a scathing reckoning with the effective altruism movement and its connection to longtermism.
The philosophy, which Wenar admits having prior affection for, advocates for a mathematically-oriented (if not entirely rationalized) approach to doing good that conveniently allows for tech companies to keep doing what they’re doing, with more money and at scale. It’s for the good of the planet – maybe even the universe. “When you truly believe that your job is to save hundreds of billions of future lives,” Wenar writes, “you’re rationally required to sacrifice countless current lives to do it.” Evans is perfectly prepared to sacrifice all human lives in service of what becomes his religious devotion to the Trisolarans – and the blow-it-all-up easy, if not necessarily quick, fix their invasion offers. (The aliens are scheduled to arrive in hundreds of years, giving humanity plenty of time to scheme for their survival.)
In fact, ethically and (or) effectively planning for a war that will take place in the faraway future is the driving force of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Liu writes in the first book’s postscript that part of what fascinates him about the great potential disruption of alien life is its non-linearity: “Other great shifts, such as climate change and ecological disasters, have a certain progression and built-in adjustment periods.” He contrasts these phenomena with the temporal randomness of contact between aliens and humankind. It could happen in 10,000 years – or tomorrow.
The countdown that is started once the Trisolarans decide to invade Earth, which occurs after their conversations with Mike Evans convince them humanity is a threat, interrupts the mysticism that has so far been inherent to human-alien contact. In its place comes a planetary wartime mentality.
The global wargaming that follows tests one of the axioms of “cosmic sociology” Dr. Ye describes to Luo Ji (in the book) – namely, that “survival is the primary need of civilization.” Is there anything more important to humanity than survival?
Multiple main characters driving the sci-tech advancements in Liu’s book, onscreen in the series, and, to a degree, in our real lives suggest that the pursuit of epicness – high-risk discovery, newness for newness’ sake – is more important than, at least, most humans’ survival. Let’s hope that insight falls more into the category of fiction than science.