Tuesday 8 October 2024

How Covid “Herd Immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever


First published at
Anna Chen's website

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How Covid herd immunity won and changed humanity's health forever

Public Health vs Big Business Interests in Classic Class Conflict

They don’t call it “herd immunity” any more. It’s invisible. The new normal. No name but effectively the same. 

If you want to know what the ruling classes have in store for us, here’s a clue.  Why did the US and UK do so badly in the Covid pandemic? 

And why did Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer elevate GSK’s Sir Patrick Vallance to the House of Lords and to government as the Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation for the United Kingdom as soon as he entered Downing Street in July this year? 

Sir Patrick Vallance diary testimony exposes government chaos at the UK Covid Inquiry, November 2023:” However, attempts to rehabilitate Big Pharma’s man in the government during the crucial pandemic period are undermined by his March 2020 promotion of “herd immunity” against serious scientific evidence, his deferred bonus of 43,111 shares in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) worth £600,000 from his time as president (GSK is making MRNA vaccines with CureVac), and his attempts to redact certain pages. Despite this, Keir Starmer installs him as his science minister on 6 July 2024. 
SEE SIR PATRICK VALLANCE “HERD IMMUNITY” INTERVIEW FROM 2020

The right undermines the science

Public Health and Big Business battled it out from the start of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 in an unadorned class struggle. The poorest and ethnic workers had the highest rates of infection and died. Transport workersnurses and NHS workers can’t work from home. 

As soon as China’s model of lockdown quarantine was raised, political figures such as Lord Sumption railed against lockdown as “bad for business”: “A refusal to examine the collateral consquences. … No society in history has made itself healthier by making itself poorer”. They were rapidly sidelined by growing public awareness of the dangers, informed by respected scientists in publications such as The Lancet

However, business interests soon marshalled their forces. 

The mainstream media soon picked a side and it wasn’t public health. Information that China had eradicated Covid by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown was suppressed. Instead, China’s winning strategy was trashed, and the country was vilified, as were health figures who failed to support the Business narrative, such as the WHO’s Tedros Ghebreyesus and Anthony Fauci.

Trump sets the Covid bar low

President Trump set out his stall in the early months, calling the coronavirus a hoax, stigmatising masks and holding superspreader events, despite being briefed by the Pentagon on the dangers of the pandemic on 28 January 2020. We now see the spread strategy revived in the majority of aggressive social media responses, anti-vax, anti-mask which took Trump’s initial position and blew it up into the dominant narrative. 

On 12 March 2020, the day before Patrick Vallance’s “herd immunity” interviews, Trump was forced by the weight of national sickness and death into abandoning his Cnut denial of the pandemic and changed tack, issuing the first social distancing mandates and deflecting by calling it “Wuhan flu,” “kung flu” and “Chinese virus”

His U-turn was closely followed by a White House cable to State Departments launching communications instructions “in relation to China”, and on 17 April with the publication of the Republican 57-page “blame China” memo; a training manual for China hawks to attack the rising superpower and Covid patsy. 

And in October 2020, the billionaire Koch-backed Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the discredited “herd immunity,” was released against all serious scientific knowledge

This has been a major gaslighting exercise, aided by decades-long US expertise in advertising and mass manipulation using armies of psychologists. 

Herd immunity in all but name

In Britain, we are currently seeing a Covid surge but figures are no longer kept. The media plays it down. The debilitating effects of Long Covid on the immune system – essentially HIV in slomo – are ignored. In the NHS, few wear masks even around immunity-compromised patients. Childhood ailments are on the rise, everyone is getting sicker. but there’s barely a murmur in the MSM. Perversely, when these issued are raised, vaccines are blamed. 

The UK nearly got Covid to zero in first lockdown before the saboteur lobby clamoured to get Prime Minister Boris Johnson to open up early, leaving a reservoir of the virus in the population. Zero Covid is now a dirty phrase. Johnson’s chief science officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, has thrived.

Johnson had previously mirrored Trump, closing down the UK pandemic team shortly after winning the June 2019 general election, around the same time that Trump closed the Beijing branch of the US CDC which was supposed to monitor disease outbreaks. 

Trump had already closed the White House pandemic team in May 2018, with some original team members absorbed into National Security Council chief John Bolton’s new counterproliferation and biodefense directorate which included a weapons of mass destruction unit along with arms control and nonproliferation, and global health and biodefense. 

Population – that’s us.

Like Trump, Johnson’s own superspreader actions were masked by a clownish ineptitude schtick. Amusing, appalling and effective.

Adding to the eugenecist mindset, Johnson declared the need to get the population down in 2007: “…  a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.” His own father, Stanley Johnson, has written extensively on population issues, prioritising per capita GDP growth over the population. He says, “In sheer economic terms, how can you sustain an increase in per capita income when you have rising population without rising economic growth? A declining population, which is what I would aim for.” 

Labour’s history in power indicates it is there to manage the decline of capitalism, not to defend the public that elects them. The appointment of the former chief science officer during one of our darkest hours to the House of Lords and government only reinforces that view.

A word on vaccines – Edit 3 September 2024

“Herd immunity” was always about profits before people. 

After initial fumbles, China identified, sequenced and released the SARS-Cov-2 genome to the world by 11 January, within days of finding the “strange pneumonia.” They then used their huge scales of production to make PPE and vaccinations urgently in bulk for a Global South largely ignored by the West. 

However, instead of working to contain and eradicate the virus with the time bought by China, efforts to quarantine the population from SARS-CoV-2 were constantly resisted in the US and UK by the government. 

In America, President Trump’s MAGA allies including The Washington TimesFox News and Steve Bannon began to “flood the zone with shit,” starting the Wuhan lab-creation rumour just two days before, we are told, the president learnt from the 28 January NSA Covid pandemic briefing how deadly it was. 

Disinformation grew ever more shrill with each of China’s successes. Meanwhile, Trump sent the CIA to gazump all available PPE

The race between traditional and mRNA vaccines

The anti-science, anti-vaccination messaging started out trashing China’s vaccinations such as Sinovac (CoronaVac) and Sinopharm which used the traditional inactivated (dead) whole-virus method of inoculation. The Pentagon even set up a secret operation to denigrate Sinovac that was doing most of the world’s heavy lifting. Russia’s Sputnik vaccine was similarly monstered but also proved safe and effective.

Because Chinese vaccinations used the traditional method, and not the relatively new messenger RNA (mRNA) favoured by the western pharma industry, they were produced reliably, earlier, and cheaper. More tolerance and fewer side effects are seen. They were also much easier to store than the West’s mRNA which required subzero temperatures of -80C, a big ask for hotter Asia, Africa and the central and southern Americas. 

One Singapore study of the elderly indicated that 4 doses of mRNA might be more effective than inactivated whole-virus vaccines. Although mRNA has a slightly higher risk of side effects in young males — heart: myocarditis and pericarditis — these are small compared with the risks of catching the disease itself. 

The coronavirus is incomplete RNA, not complete DNA like bacteria, which means it requires a host to survive and reproduce itself. Lockdown quarantine deprives the virus of a host, not only containing it, but starving it to extinction. 

China’s aim was to eradicate the virus. Vaccinations were never a magic bullet. They wouldn’t stop you catching Covid but they would empower the immune system to minimise the damage and stop health services collapsing while the virus died out. That chance was lost. China was eventually overwhelmed by variants cooked up outside its borders and abandoned its Zero Covid strategy, reopening after two years. 

The geopolitical disinformation backfired into a perpetual need for juicy profitable Covid vaccines which many neither trust nor want. As you’d expect, there’s plenty of fighting over the spoils: watch Moderna try to sue Pfizer and BioNTech for patent infringement. This is the industry, after all, that tried to copyright the human genome

Then there is Covid medicine. Pfizer is to charge $1,400 per five-day course of Paxlovid. Do the maths and weep.

The pandemic is not over. Wear a mask.

* * * * *

The Covid Pandemic, Page 1: How coronavirus was weaponised
The Covid Pandemic, Page 2: Sir Patrick Vallance’s Sky News “herd immunity” interview, 13 March 2020. Full transcipt.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 3: THIS PAGE How “herd immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever. Public Health vs Big Business conflict.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 4: Medical journals and videos on damage to the brain and immunity system by SARS-CoV-2
The Covid Pandemic, Page 5: I caught Covid again and it’s not getting any better. Covid Inquiry: denial of Airborne vs Droplets mode of transmission prolonged the pandemic

Sir Patrick Vallance promotes Covid herd immunity on Sky News, March 2020
Chief science officer Sir Patrick Vallance promotes Covid “herd immunity” on Sky News, March 2020

Saturday 24 August 2024

Sir Patrick Vallance Covid “herd immunity” interview, March 2020


Covid Pandemic: Government and “Herd Immunity”

Sir Patrick Vallance diary testimony exposes government chaos at the UK Covid Inquiry, November 2023: However, attempts to rehabilitate Big Pharma’s man in the government during the crucial pandemic period are undermined by his March 2020 promotion of “herd immunity” against serious scientific evidence, his deferred bonus of 43,111 shares in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) worth £600,000 from his time as president (GSK is making MRNA vaccines with CureVac), and his attempts to redact certain pages. Despite this, Keir Starmer installs him as his science minister on 6 July 2024.

TRANSCRIPT: The government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance tells Sky News that about 60% of people will need to become infected with coronavirus in order for the UK to achieve “herd immunity”.

Sky News 13 March 2020

Sky News: the uk’s chief scientific adviser who joins us from Westminster good morning to you. The big question here is why the advice that is being given to our government does seem to be different to the advice being given to many other governments who are taking much more stringent action

0:14
Sir Patrick Vallance: well we’ve got a panel of a very world leading scientists across epidemiology mathematical modelling viral OG clinicians and we’re taking input from leading academics to come try and come up with a plan that actually does what we want it to do and it doesn’t mean that the others are doing something wrong and in fact much of the advice and much of the actions if you look at them they’re trying to achieve the same thing and that is to try to reduce the peak of the epidemic flatten it and broaden it so that you don’t end up with so much intense pressure on healthcare systems at one time so that’s one aim is to reduce transmission try to make sure that we end up with a broader epidemic not a very sharp one that overloads the system and the second of course is to protect the elderly and vulnerable and to make sure that during that peak they are protected as well as you can because that’s the group that stand the biggest chance of having a serious outcome from this

Delaying the spread


1:18
Sky News: many people are asking the question and it has to be legitimate as to why if you’re trying to delay the spread of the virus and people can understand why you would want to do that while we basically seem to be allowing society to continue as normal you know that there’s no lockdowns there’s no shutdowns of schools or education facilities there’s still people going to restaurants and the theater isn’t that actually being gonna be problematic in terms of trying to delay the spread of the virus

1:51

PV: So the UK has actually done a good job of contact tracing and isolating so the first phase of this means that we’ve a little bit behind we in terms of where the outbreak is compared to others and the measures that were announced which is about self isolation even if you’ve got very mild symptoms will mean a large number of people actually at home being isolated because of this infection that’s a very big measure actually it’s going to have quite a big impact across a number of households a number of people so I don’t think that’s a trivial measure it’s all and all the modelling suggests that these sorts of measures and the other two that we discussed yesterday the ones that have the biggest impact there are other things which you’re quite right of things that do have some effect and and come in at the right time and mass gatherings is the one that keeps coming up and mass gatherings of course are a place where you can potentially get infection from somebody but the alternative is also important that if you’re not at the mass gathering you’re at a small gathering
2:52
and most of the transmission of these types of viruses occur in small gatherings not in big gatherings and therefore this concentration on getting people who got symptoms into their house isolated potentially the next step to last households to do it so you contain the whole thing in a household and making sure we protect the vulnerable and elderly are the first three things we need to do doesn’t cause stop the possibility that even relatively soon you need to do more than that but getting this right and making sure that we can monitor the outbreak is absolutely key.

Modelling


3:28
Sky News: you talk about the modelling Jeremy Hunt the former health secretary last night was talking about the modelling saying he would like to see if modelling particularly better behavioral science which he seemed to imply was taking some sort of precedence over the epidemiology

3:42
PV: oh I don’t think that’s correct, I mean I, I think the modelling and the behavioral science and the clinical input come together. It’s not absolutely not the case that behavioral science takes a predominance. But of course it’s an important consideration and it is the case of course that if you completely locked down absolutely everything probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus. All of the evidence from previous epidemics suggests that when you do that and then you release it it all comes back again so the other part of this is to make sure that we don’t end up with a sudden peak again in the winter which is even larger which causes even more problem.
4:25
so we want to suppress it not get rid of it completely which you can’t do anyway not suppress it so we get the second peak and also allowing us enough of us who are going to get mild illness to become immune to this to help with the sort of whole population response which would protect everybody.

[NOTE: China eradicated the coronavirus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown that began 23 January 2020, almost two months before this interview]

4:46
Sky News: Yeah I mean that that herd immunity I know you talked about yesterday when you were appearing with the prime minister and in terms of building up a herd immunity within the UK. Well I mean what sort of percentage of people need to have contracted the virus?

5:01
PV: Probably about 60% or so and we think that this virus is likely to be one that comes back year-on-year become like a seasonal virus and communities will become immune to it and that’s going to be an important part of controlling this longer term.

SN: Sixty percent?

PV: Sixty percent is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity.

Sir Patrick Vallance Telegraph GSK deferred shares

Death rate


5:25
SN: I mean even without even looking at the sort of the best-case scenario and I were talking last week and you were saying you know half of one percent to one percent fatality in something like this that’s an awful lot of people dying in this country.

5:39
PV: Well I mean of course we do face the prospect of as the Prime Minister said yesterday of an increasing number of people dying that is a real prospect this is a nasty disease
5:50
for most people it’s a mild disease. It’s important to know we don’t know yet nobody knows what proportion of people have this who are completely asymptomatic so the only cases that we’ve really got at the moment are people who’ve had symptoms or largely people who’ve had symptoms …

[NOTE: Vallance ignores China figures nearly two months after the Wuhan lockdown 23 January 2020. China bought us time, western interests frittered it away. Long Covid, damaging our immunity system, is now a sort of HIV in slomo.]

6:07
… that means that even estimating exactly what the death rate is from this is quite difficult because there may be many more people that haven’t been detected yet and that’s why some of the new tests that are being developed now going to be so important so we can really understand how this disease is spreading and we don’t have a handle on that yet.

Response


6:26
SN: In terms of our response so there’s a couple of points I want to put to you one the former Prime Minister of Italy was talking to Sky News yesterday you said yesterday we’re about four weeks behind Italy don’t you want to avoid being like Italy and their former prime-minister saying don’t repeat our mistakes don’t waste time

6:46
PV: yes it

SN: should we not heed some of that advice?

6:49
PV: I think I think my comments about being behind Italy about where we were on the the unmitigated curve of the epidemic we’ve been working on this since the beginning of January so this isn’t something that suddenly groups have come together to think about yesterday this is a group of people that have been working very hard on this giving advice over the whole time what we don’t want to do is to get into knee-jerk reactions where you have to start doing measures at the wrong pace because something’s happened so we’re trying to keep ahead of it we’re trying to lay out the path so people can see what the actions are that are being advised and then of course it’s up to ministers to decide which of those actions are the most appropriate to take so I completely agree with the Prime Minister of Italy you do not want to be caught on the back foot on this.

Prof John Ashton


7:37
SN: Professor John Ashton, who I’m sure you know, former director of public health England for the Northwest region, he said the response so far has been wooden and academic

7:50
PV: Well I think John will have his views on this and they’re perfectly legitimate lots of people have got views on this I think that what we’re trying to do is feed in the most up-to-date and relevant advice we can to enable sensible decisions to be made at the right time and of course during this sort of thing there are lots of people lots of different voices coming from all sorts of angles and if you listen to all of them they are largely mutually incompatible so it’s impossible to keep everybody happy with any response you do and that’s why we’re trying to base it on the best possible advice [!?] and actually the whole point is that this is very practical advice based on the science not something that actually is meant to be an academic exercise at all.

8:32
SN: Oh Sir Patrick you have the advantage of not being a politician although I know you don’t get to have the final say in all of this but are you prepared if this changes if you look back at this in a week and say you know what this hasn’t been the right action how flexible are you prepared to be in changing your position in your advice to the government?

8:52
PV: absolutely I will base it on the evidence and my job as chief scientific advisor is to is to speak scientific truth to power and say it as it is and that’s exactly what I will do

Sky News transcript ends

It gets even worse …


POSTSCRIPT 22 August 2024:

In October 2020, “herd immunity” is formalised by the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, opposed by most of the science community. Because the coronavirus mutates faster than, say, chickenpox or measles, on top of the mortality rate, it is impossible to achieve mass immunity when the virus keeps changing. You wouldn’t deliberately expose yourself to cholera or typhoid.

At the start of the pandemic there were two competing strategies, Public Health versus Big Business interests. Various figures such as Lord Sumption have railed against lockdowns as being bad for business, reinforced by the establishment media’s attacks on China’s efforts which were twisted from “China bought us time” to “China lied, people died”.

However, in contrast to the UK and US, China had a clear aim: 1) Containment – Stop the virus transmission and spread; 2) Suppression – Decrease or stop community transmission; 3) Mitigation – Lower and delay the epidemic surge to reduce health-care demand.

China eradicated the virus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. They held up for two years but were finally overwhelmed by variants stewed up in the superspreader West and had to reopen.

The coronavirus is incomplete RNA, not complete DNA like bacteria, which means it requires a host to survive and reproduce itself. Quarantine deprives the virus of a host, not only containing it, but starving it to extinction.

China’s strategy eradicated the virus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. They held up for two years but were finally overwhelmed by variants stewed up in the superspreader West and had to reopen.

China had proved eradication was possible but Big Pharma had other aims. The UK and the US had the worst death rate in the world. The powerful, deeply entrenched anti-vaccination, mask and lockdown lobby illustrate the success of the Business strategy — class conflict at its sharpest.

THE NUMBERS – OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS (ONS): The BBC reports that more than 44 million people in the UK were estimated to have had the virus between April 2020 and February 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Based on the survey, the estimated peak of the pandemic, in cases if not in deaths, was in late March 2022, where at one point about 4.9 million people were thought to have the virus. Just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate. Since 9 December 2020, nearly 176 million Covid vaccines have been administered in various stages up to May 2023.

A HISTORY OF HERD IMMUNITY – THE LANCET: September 2020, “… any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable”. Sceptics raised other concerns, observing that other coronaviruses induce only transient antibody defences. … COVID-19 mortality in the UK and the USA has already taken a disproportionate toll on poor and minority groups, a reflection of systemic racism and poverty.

Herd Immunity to Fight Against COVID-19: January 2023, “… due to repeated mutations of the virus, it is evolving into new strains with more severity. Its consequences on the immune system and response to a vaccine are still a big challenge to overcome … The main barrier to acquiring herd immunity is that SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing frequent mutations in its spike protein, causing changes in its genome sequence and resulting in various modifications in the virus”

Herd immunity and COVID-19: What you need to know: “Herd immunity may not be possible when viruses change a lot in a short time, as with the virus that causes COVID-19. Reaching herd immunity is harder if a disease can be spread by people who catch the virus but don’t have symptoms”

The Government’s official advisory body of scientists including Patrick Vallance, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), is challenged shortly after its “herd immunity” advice by the formation of Independent SAGE, by scientists unaffiliated to government, in May 2020.


Reuters: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic. Well this was obvious. Why only release this information in the run-up to the November election? 14 June 2024

Guardian: Hancock and Hunt failed to prepare UK for pandemic, Covid inquiry finds 18 July 2024 "Health secretaries failed to fix flaws in contingency planning before Covid killed more than 230,000 in UK." No-deal Brexit took priority.  Well, I did warn that geopolitical strategy to maintain western hegemony went: Brexit > Covid pandemic and now a nice war to divert attention and pillage the wealth of our global lifeboat and growth-engine. 18 July 2024

The Covid Pandemic: how coronavirus was weaponised. Covid pandemic timeline, commentary and research by Anna Chen as it happened

Originally posted at Anna Chen's website Covid Pandemic pages

Sunday 11 August 2024

Suzy Wrong at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - 30th anniversary

Suzy Wrong, Stereotype Slayer, hits the Edinburgh Fringe Festval

Thirty years ago today, I took my show, Suzy Wrong Human Cannon, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a historic first by a Chinese Brit.

It was a ground-breaking challenge thrown down to the degrading stereotypes embedded deeply in western culture, and it succeeded in making visible the pernicious way in which these representations thrive. And it was done by a Chinese woman, not a distanced academic with no skin in the game.

Yellow Peril tropes of vacuous Lotus Blossoms and evil Dragon Ladies had been around ever since the 19th century Opium Wars demanded subjugation of Chinese through dehumanisation as well as military conquest. When the target group is no longer recognised as human, Empire can perform all sorts of dog-whistle tricks to manipulate its own population into morally reprehensible behaviour from exploitation to outright war. This is particularly effective and serves a dual purpose if the domestic population is also directly suffering from its ruling classes' predations, but doesn't know who's doing it. Now you see it, now you don't. Hey, blame this group, instead.

In 1994, I'd half suspected my show might not be necessary. After all, surely we were all sophisticated enough to recognise the stereotypes of evil, dishonest, cheating, Fu Manchu creatures and reject them. The screening of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, at the same festival I was playing, disabused me of that optimism.

Sadly, the wave of character assassination in the Western media regarding the Chinese Olympians at Paris 2024 confirms what I've been warning for several years. They are back with a vengeance and being served up to a beleaguered home population in search of scapegoats for the social and economic wreckage wrought by successively savage rounds of government.

Crude scapegoating started in earnest after Obama's Pivot to Asia with Trump's Trade War. It was closely followed by US NED colour revolution attempts and the klaxon-horn accusations of the Covid pandemic as public health was weaponised.

So what's changed for Suzy Wrong?

So what's changed in 30 years? What would Suzy Wrong see that's different in our brave new world order since trailblazing her view at the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh in 1994?

First, there's over 800 million raised out of absolute poverty, a growing middle-class of 550 million, nearly twice the size of the US, a 97% satisfaction with the governing Communist Party of China, according to Harvard/Pew research. Pollution is on the wane as China gets to grips with renewables and blue skies are now the norm.

Their economy was motoring ahead until the US decided to put the boot in and then pretend that slow-downs have somehow happened organically, rather than resulting from wave after wave of hate-fuelled sabotage. China's phenomenal success engenders jealousy and they now have to contend with an Opium Wars 2 shaping up as the declining western nations seek the bludgeoning success of old Empires, now that they have little creative left to offer.

Cultural scar tissue

Although China is finding ways around these obstacles, this still leaves scar tissue. Culturally, there's a new colonialism rising as this stuff mutates and adapts. It's disappointing to see that China still hasn't thrown off its adoration of the white man from nearly two centuries of being beaten down. Andrew Tate only has to say something nice about China for uncritical Chinese media to lose their minds and fawn. Mediocre latecomers shove facts around a narrow bandwidth and middle-level bureaucrats throw their weight behind them as they're dragged into bad habits; mostly reactive, unable to project ahead or discuss principles and anything in the abstract.

And, of course, nothing is true unless a white or non-Chinese person says it is true. This takes us full-circle back to the 1870s downturn in the American economy when it took ten "Chinamen" to equal the voice of one white man and a "Chinaman's chance" meant no chance at all.

The harder the West attacks China, the more a significant strand seems to retreat into the old feudal thinking that the OG communists worked so hard to yank them out of. The effects of the psyops are sad to see.

Stuck at Technocrat Level

China has thrived, surpassing the west as technocrats. It has reached the highest levels in the face of unremitting hostility from the declining superpower. The ironies of hostile American policies boomeranging and propelling China to new standards of technological excellence are a pleasure to watch, proving necessity is the Mother of Invention.

However, the same pressures show signs of forcing a contraction of the recent explosion of China's renewed consciousness into old patterns of racial self-doubt and sexism. The West's efforts to contain China are not simply about economics and warfare — they've set their sights on China's cultural and psychological development into its new modern era, of which only 50 years have passed, a mere blip in history.

Have women peaked with former ambassador to the UK Fu Ying (2007-9) and the wonderfully womanly Liu Xin in the Chinese media? Both of whom I wish I'd had as role-models when I was growing up. Tiny girl-women put through elfin filters set to max with high tinkling voices now seems to be what pleases men.

Watching developments, I'm hoping this is just two steps forward and one step back, not a full stop. I'm reminded of the virtual reality game in Three Body Problem where civilisation gets so far and then is lost on the surprise turn of a star.

Raise your game, China. Don't lose the fight at the Technocrat level.

More about Anna Chen

Friday 19 July 2024

New poetry videos and a cultural feast from Anna Chen

Anna Chen's poetry and politics at TikTok

Culture and politics converge in Anna Chen’s video surge


I’m delighted to announce I’m adding more videos to my long form writing as found extensively on this website. I’ll be spreading the love to TikTok and YouTube.

My TikTok page got off to a promising start with POE, my funny poem about Edgar Allan Poe, garnering 218K likes in a week. Oh, now 219.3K. Yup, who knew the dark story-lord had so many fans? I’m going to keep this up. It’s not like I’m short of material, heh! Please bookmark the pages and follow.

Political and cultural commentary feature as it’s my contention that they are not separate but inextricably linked in service to power. It’s just that the West is so much better at it. That’s not a surprise considering that the US poured so much money into its cultural domination wars.

Culture wars always and everywhere


For example, spearheading the international art world with its wave of modern art. Francis Stonor Saunders explains this brilliantly in her book, Who Pays the Piper? I bought this when it was published around 2000, having been told about this corner of the culture war as a yoot by British artist and critic Patrick Heron in my home-from-home in St Ives, Cornwall.

Hollywood is well known as operating as the main arm of the US propaganda machine with many books and articles now available about the role of the CIA and the Office of Strategic Affairs in its movies. Whoah! Did you know that Hollywood suppressed the Weinstein revelations under the influence of Certain Parties?

One reason America is so good at concealing its mass manipulation is that it’s had decades of practise in its advertising industry. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders is the classic text on this subject.

America has an army of psychologists with nothing better to do than researching new and more effective ways to twist your melon completely out of shape. This has added to the the already existing Yellow Peril tropes embedded deeply in Western culture ever since the 19th century Opium Wars and the eight-nation alliance of murderous bandit powers that maimed and pillaged China for a hundred years.

I’ve been investigating this geopolitical friction from Empire for 30 years, ever since I took Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1994 — a first for a Chinese Brit. See my various writings on this such as Yellowface: the erasure of a race, Sinophobia and the political roots of racism, and A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats and many more.

Poetry videos and radio series


In addition to my culture and poetry videos, and having the perfect face for radio, I’m going to be uploading 16 episodes of my pioneering ResonanceFM series from 2013 and 2014, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge. I’m aiming to get these up on YouTube and at this website over the rest of the year. So do have a listen to what someone straddling two major cultures since birth has to say about them.

Boomers poem at TikTok

The Diss Persists poem at TikTok

Friday 14 June 2024

Three Body Problem review: the politics of novel, Netflix and Tencent

Three Body Problem review by Anna Chen, Netflix, Tencent

Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu: Netflix and Tencent TV series adaptations


Reviewed by Anna Chen, First published 6 May 2024

8-part Netflix 3 Body Problem

30-part Tencent Three-Body

SPOILERS AHEAD

Book One of Remembrance of Earth’s Past


How did the Three Body Problem work as a book, a Netflix series and a Chinese Tencent series? That’s a Three Body Problem in itself.

There once was a time when any American or British playwright or scriptwriter would have taken the concept of Cixin Liu’s stupendously successful Chinese science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, and run with it. Adapting other people’s histories to your own world experience with insights and dramatic skill has been our strong point ever since Chaucer read Virgil and Shakespeare refracted Holinshed.

Genius always stands on the shoulders of giants. Netflix’s eight-part series 3 Body Problem had the opportunity to dramatise Book One of the Hugo Award-winning blockbuster series and illuminate it through a western lens. But, instead, they turned it into a banal addition to the multiple-body of China-hate currently pervading every nook and cranny of the culture like a cancer.

Yes, we geddit. China bad, West good. Hulk smash.

It’s as if Western intelligentsia drove their egghead brains into the buffers of late-capitalism when its contradictions bit them on the bum. The resulting cultural entropy and breakdown misses chances for enlightenment and insight: as illustrated in the new Netflix series.

As I’m fond of reminding everyone, the cultural superstructure collapses into the economic base. Sadly, even Netflix, with all its resources, can’t break out of this gravitational nosedive and avoid being pulled into the black hole of US-led geopolitics. This isn’t helped by the author’s own inner Ye Wenjie pressing that big red button and replying to the siren call from afar.

Overall, the eight-episode 3 Body Problem is strong on pacing but glosses over the science and philosophical ideas that drive the novel. Sacrificing content for spectacle and action loses much of what makes the book interesting. The 30-episode Tencent Three-Body series made for Chinese audiences is truer to the book and its ideas, but it suffers from longeurs and repetition. A stronger edit could lose it a few episodes and prove that sometimes less is more. Both have strong production values reflecting how much was spent on these two mega-projects.

The Cultural Revolution


Three Body Problem, Book One of the trilogy, kicks off with the traumatising events of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a reverse-mirror event of our own swinging sixties which took place in an expanding post-war economy. Lucky us.

China had no such luxury. It faced an assortment of obstacles across more than a century of hardship including the decaying Qing dynasty, opium wars, ridding itself of colonial rule (yes, I’m looking at you, Britain), the birth of the republic, civil war, war lords, sadistic Japanese occupation, revolution, a vicious Korean war, famine, embargoes used to starve the fledgling state into submission, and a war against itself in the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

The chief antagonist who gets the story rolling is astrophysicist-to-be, Ye Wenjie. She is only a teenager when, to chants of “Root out the bugs,” she sees her physicist father publicly denounced as a counter-revolutionary intellectual and beaten to death by the young Red Guards who’ve been entrusted with preserving the purity of the revolution.

Betrayal looms large as her own younger sister is one of the patricidal ideologues on the stage, who are full of passionate intensity but too immature for wisdom. Her terrified mother also piles in with accusations. Later, a journalist who Wenjie trusts saves his own skin by stitching her up as the author of a tract he has himself written about the western ecological book, The Silent Spring. You can’t trust those feckless intellectuals.

The aliens are greener on the Other side


Wenjie’s world is relentlessly hostile and it takes its toll on her. More sinned against than sinning, at least in the beginning, she will end up committing the biggest betrayal of her own kind, less as revenge, more trying to help out what she sees as her ruined planet and her own species who are responsible. It is The Silent Spring that, in a tortured logical fallacy, finally sparks her motivation for doing the awful deed that dooms humanity.

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”

Having chosen lifetime incarceration at the top secret Red Coast Base run by the People’s Liberation Army, which transmits communications via a monster nature-destroying satellite dish in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the damaged Wenjie has access to the outside force she believes can awaken humanity.

Which, given the clues including an alien message warning, “Do not reply,” is a helluva gamble.

Three Body Problem novel by Cixin Liu

Dark mirror


The first book in Liu’s trilogy uses the Cultural Revolution as the initial setting, and its harrowing events as motivation, for Ye’s action. Liu himself has some dim childhood memories of catastrophes occurring as the chaotic young communist nation struggled to stabilise and reconstruct itself. Everyone loves a winner. His critique of China’s politics and besottedness with the West is hard to miss. Giving aid and comfort to an opposing system that could destroy your kind lies at the core of his villain, so you could read Wenjie as a dark mirror version of the author.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem seizes on the Cultural Revolution opening and foregrounds it into a simplistic device colouring the whole narrative, essentially ascribing a moral paralysis to China that makes it responsible for world destruction. It’s an unpleasant seed to plant in the current climate of war fever while, of course, absolving the West from any culpability after nearly two centuries of pumping out pollution since the Industrial Revolution and numerous wars.

The Tencent version runs in the other direction and only reveals the book’s opening scene fully somewhere around Episode 24, focusing instead on the science and philosophy within in a detective mystery.

First serialised in a Chinese-language science fiction magazine in 2006 and then published as a novel in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, the events of Three Body Problem are framed by the pendulum swing from the chaos of the revolutionaries’ tragic attempt to prevent a recidivism back to the destructive system they’ve just overthrown, to the new era of wealth and stability.

Yellow Peril tropes for the 21st century


Fifty years after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese can take stock and enjoy the new normal: the eradication of absolute poverty, the growth of the biggest middle-class on the planet and the emergence of, whisper it, a new bourgeoisie. But humanity is about to learn of of the existential threat lying four light years away in the Centauri star group, set in motion by Ye Wenjie in 1979.

This is where the Netflix series gets ideologically stuck and hollows out. While the book and Tencent’s Three-Body series explore the whys and wherefores of chaos and stability in a modern setting, Netflix acknowledges no such contrast for Chinese society. We are shown Chinese only as cyphers unless they are here and thoroughly westernised; always at work, never at play. They are spotted in flashbacks to the bad old days, never in their homes with family or in bars, or restaurants as in the Tencent. In short, the Chinese are dehumanised.

The inference drawn is that the Cultural Revolution opening is a static backdrop to a failed China which is, under the glittering surface, dark-age mysterious, sinister and no good for its inhabitants. Especially when the China scenes are all shot with the same grey misery filter the BBC reserves for communism while safe old Ingerland is filmed in full colour.

As one viewer succinctly put it on Twitter/X, “The Netflix series makes the Cultural Revolution into an eternal symbol of Chinese Evil which is contrasted with Western Good.”

BOOK ONE and TENCENT – Three-Body


In the book, you can read a serious attempt to make sense of what goes wrong, what goes right and why. All within a largo-paced SF story about Trisolaran aliens, human beings grown mad with grief and the big logical fallacy that sets the story in motion.

Tencent’s Three-Body series, which follows the book closely, provides a glimpse of the Chinese people looking at themselves as the protagonist of the story, the driver of their own destiny, while pursuing philosophical enquiry as well as a detective-thriller investigation.

After the opening Red Coast Base scene, we cut to the present, 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. Back then, China was riding high, about to debut on the world stage as the benign rising superpower that could put on a stunning show demonstrating how far they’d progressed from just making our cheap tat in suicide factories.

This was the start of a Golden Age when the Chinese were looking forward to spending their hour in the sun and sitting at the Top Table, previously the domain of the western developed nations. China was about to save the global economy from America’s Great Financial Crash and prove itself to be the good guy in the new era of stability. What could possibly go wrong?

The detective quest


Equilibrium is upset by the suicides of top scientists who were connected to the mysterious Frontiers of Science cult. Our hero and protagonist, nanotech engineer Professor Wang Miao, is enlisted by the authorities to help the investigation. He learns that the dead scientists include Dr Ye Wenjie’s daughter, the lovely string theorist Yang Dong, on whom he has a crush, making his involvement personal and applied, not just theoretical.

Wang is goaded by a gruff, earthy police detective and former soldier, Da Shi Qiang, who, after initial antagonism meeting cute, will become his sidekick.

“I’m not a good cop,” he tells Wang, annoying his colleagues and establishing himself as a disobedient, wilful anti-hero — quite risque in Chinese society which is emerging from a tradition of disdaining individualism. The series’ honourable attempt at Hollywood-style character construction harks back to a grinning Errol Flynn swashing his buckles, and is done with mixed results: sometimes sweetly buddy-buddy, at other times clunky and toe-curling.

Major-General Chang Weisi of the PLA asks Wang to take up Japanese physicist Shen Yufei’s invitation to join the Frontiers of Science group in order to infiltrate the organisation, which he’d previously rejected as far too theoretical in their exploration of the limits of science. Wang’s applied research is aimed at getting things made, specifically, nano-fibres that can cut through anything.

Wang agrees to join, telling Da Shi: “A person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.”

This, of course, idealistically assumes one’s objective is to find the truth, the raison d’etre supposedly lying at the heart of 400 years of fact and science-based Age of Enlightenment which may well be coming to an end in the West (See Netflix’s wasted story opportunities).

Peace origin of Three Body Problem


Televised in 2023, with the benefit of hindsight and the foresight dread of Things To Come, Tencent’s Wang probes Chang about his war anxiety and points out that there are no hot-spots in the world as this is “probably the most peaceful period in history.” And, indeed, it was peaceful when the book was published in 2008. And even when Ken Liu’s English translation was published in 2014, there’s a feeling of, phew! Thank goodness we’re living in this part of history. However, by the time of TV production, the fictional fear is bleeding into reality.

In both The Three Body Problem book and Three-Body, Chang tells Wang he’s lucky if he’s never known a complete change, a crisis. A comment that becomes loaded with irony as the series was made over the period of deteriorating relations with the USA superpower.

“The entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age until now, no real crisis has occurred. But if it’s all luck, it has to end one day. Let me tell you: it’s ended. Prepare for the worst.” This sounds like the Tencent series preparing Chinese viewers for a major calamity and reversal of fortune.

And so life imitates art. Or perhaps the art sensed what was in the wind and provided a cathartic outlet in a science fiction metaphor for an underlying collective dread of an enraged imperialism.

It’s painful to hear the same words from the 2008 book uttered with a new meaning in 2023 that’s like a death plunge into an abyss. At this point metaphor and real life collide. Something even worse than the Opium Wars, World War 2 and Japanese fascism slouches its way here.

Story dynamics — what works and what doesn’t


You can see why audiences prefer the Chinese Tencent version. The first two episodes are gripping, serving up a rich, complex stew, explaining physics and particle accelerators with the aid of a drunken pool table demonstration. Street hallucinations and a rich, imaginative palette of visuals from the smallest quantum sub-atomic particles to the biggest cosmic vista are vividly delivered.

Viewers aren’t talked down to but are assumed to have enough of a grasp of basic scientific principles to find credible the science in the world of the story. The Shooter hypothesis is simply explained and illustrated, as are the turkey scientists of the Farmer hypothesis, a most entertaining series high point. They’re fed regularly and looked after … until the day they aren’t. But they’re not to know that until it’s too late, poor delicious turkeys.

But the visual medium of film and TV has different demands to the speed of a book if you’re sticking to it literally and literarily. By episodes four or five, narrative drive threatens to grind to a halt, suffering from stasis and repetition. One influence seems to be the mesmerising German hit series, Dark, sharing with it a hypnotically atmospheric sound design, but with many of the narrative-pacing flaws that sometimes made watching it feel like wading through wet cement.

Long pauses have to earn their screen time and deliver meaning through skilful set-up and story momentum, not left as vacuums hoping to be filled by profundity: it is a Zen emptiness we crave.

The animated turkey scientist story is a delight but one which loses its power with each telling — and it was retold frequently with little variation. Adding drag, a whole ten minutes is spent explaining why the sun is a super-antenna.

Three-Body Tencent series - turkey scientist

San-Ti’s little helper


Nostalgic and grateful for the leg-up out of its century-of-humiliation doldrums, the book leans into adoration of the West and its science figures such as Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and one Chinese philosopher Mozi, as if China did little up to modern times. But if Chinese astronomers hadn’t been active, we’d never have known about the RCW 86 “Guest Star” supernova in 185AD, or the supernova that created the Crab Nebula in 1054, also seen by a monk in Flanders as a “bright disc”.

Not having a time machine, Liu couldn’t foresee China’s vast clean-up and the effect its green tech would have on the world, as he was writing at a time when Beijing was bathed in smog all year around from manufacturing affordable goods for western consumers. The Silent Spring book to which Liu defers through his chief antagonist, Wenjie, has long been eclipsed by events as genius takes a giant step for mankind onto the shoulders of giants.

It’s not until Episode 18 of the Tencent that the core Trisolar story gets going, reaching the book’s beginning. In Episode 24 we finally see in flashback the full inciting incident as shown incompletely in the first episode.

It’s worth hanging in there as the story deepens and picks up when it is revealed that the misanthropic oil billionaire and Adventist Mike Evans is helping the Trisolaran San-Ti invade Earth because he is a species egalitarian who sees humanity as sinful. And of what importance is the human species in the vastness of the universe? A fossil-fuel oligarch’s son who transfers his hatred for his eco-destructive father onto the human race, he devotes his love and obedience to the off-planet daddy figure, the distant voice of the San-Ti he calls “Lord”.

Along with Redemptionist Ye Wenjie who wants to work with the San-Ti to solve their Three Body problem, these two narcissists decide the fate of the world due to an inability to come to terms with the hurt done to them. (I see parallels with war-mongers and whoever released the Covid virus.)

Their betrayal backfires when the Lord realises how treacherous and duplicitous humanity is, being capable of saying the opposite of the truth even if it’s a fictional fairy story. The San-Ti see humanity as an existential threat and resolve to destroy it when the fleet arrives in 450 years, clobbering their science first. Sounds familiar? Just as Wenjie could not foresee the San-Ti’s deadly turn, neither could the author see his idealised American system doing the same and turning on his kind.

3 Body Problem Netflix series - virtual reality Trisolaris

NETFLIX — 3 Body Problem (March 2024)


Half an hour in to Netflix’s eight-part 3 Body Problem, the godless, heathen Chinee hate old things. There’s little sense of history or science. Only the West has a sense of God. To get a snog, give a girl a book about pesticides. Foregrounding the Cultural Revolution horror up front as a five-minute pre-credit sequence without paying it off with society’s contrasting progress, establishes it as China’s underlying mindset in the present; a misery mise en scene only relieved by an English language book and western values, of course.

Unlike the book, it denies China’s emergence from the period, repairing & reconstructing itself, and catching up with the West. It reinforces China as Other with a single positive male ethnically Chinese character, detective Officer Clarence “Da” Shi, who works for the British Strategic Intelligence Agency (MI6), a reassuring presence played solidly by Benedict Wong.

After establishing Cultural Revolution horror without the nuances of the book or Tencent series, 3 Body Problem transfers to the safe familiarity of the West and a murder mystery. We know who dunnit — the victims themselves — but we don’t know why.

3 Body Problem Netflix series - Red Coast Base

The Oxford Five


The present-day story starts with its wheels rolling, with Clarence/Da Shi arriving in the present at the scene of a grisly death of a scientist where sequential numbers, possibly a countdown, are scrawled in blood on the walls.

A second scientist, Vera Ye (Yang Dong in the Tencent series, daughter of Ye Wenjie), commits suicide at the Oxford University Particle Accelerator after the project is shut down, and leaves her colleague and friend, Saul, to investigate why the physics is wrong, “science is broken” and whether God exists.

Two of Saul’s scientist buddies, Auggie Salazar and Jin Cheng, function as Three-Body‘s Professor Wang split across two characters. (Jin is the only other positive Asian apart from Clarence/Da Shi.) They are all members of Vera’s Scooby-gang group-protagonist of university friends; dubbed the “Oxford Five,” it includes Jack the snacks business mogul and Will, Jin’s cancer-ridden ex-boyfriend.

Like Professor Wang, Auggie is a nanotechnologist. They both begin to hallucinate numbers in a countdown sequence. Wang spends ages identifying his mysterious numbers appearing in the photos he takes and in his wider vision. Auggie learns what the big lightshow numbers filling her vision mean within the first thirty minutes as events are economically collapsed into one scene: sinister Adventist Tatiana demands she close her nanotech company or else, and says the sky will wink at her as proof. It does.

After demonstrating that her nano-fibres can cut through diamond, Auggie orders her company to shut down its development with seconds to go before the countdown reaches zero.

Three Body Problem in virtual reality


Both series pursue the mystery of the dead scientists and the cults who hold the key. Both enter the Trisolaran realm via the Three Body Problem virtual reality game: Netflix via a headset, and Tencent through two full-body suits and helmets, the suits being the more believable experience. However, the gorgeous, shiny, metallic Netflix helmet does look more alien and its Trisolaran virtual world is funnier, inhabited by Earth science legends played by popular British comics. The game sequences are little filmlets in themselves.

The VR game within the detective mystery requires the players of both series — Wang and Da Shi, and Jin Cheng and Jack — to solve the problem of the three “flying star” solar bodies: the triple suns’ orbits can have no focus point, making it impossible to predict periods of chaos and stability. Accurate predictions allow the population to either dehydrate and survive the roasting sun and big freeze, or hydrate and continue to develop their civilisation to higher levels of the game until they can conquer space travel.

Wang tries to unravel the science while Jin’s role in the Netflix version is to mark out western scientific superiority over the Count of the West’s Asiatic mysticism. Again with the subliminal defining Chinese culture as primitive Other. They should have had a Galileo character trying to persuade the Church of the superiority of science.

The BBC misery filter


One thing Netflix 3 Body Problem does effectively is the fate of Mike Evans’s ship the Judgement Day, a wandering community of his Adventist followers. However, the success of this climactic scene is despite the disturbing addition of children on board — not in The Three Body Problem — whose only purpose seems to be to ratchet up emotional involvement. Dead children, even pretend ones, is not something most of us wish to be seeing right now.

Both versions had me squirming but it was Netflix that dialled up the tension to eleven and had me watching through clenched fingers.

For some unearthly reason, in episode 7, Netflix sends Wenjie untried and unpunished from England back to where it all started at the Red Coast Base for her final fate (ambiguous in the book, but certainly not by anyone else’s hand). It’s in China so it’s still relentlessly bleak and shot through that hazy grey BBC filter even in the present. This was a chance to show China’s current contrasting state of stability and development but it only follows her to the graveyard decay of the old SETI project.

One viewer said dryly on Twitter, “If Dr Ye had been shown landing at Beijing Daxing Airport then travelling via High Speed Rail through Futuristic Chinese Cities, Three Body Problem viewers may have thought the San Ti had arrived early & started fixing human problems.”

3 Body Problem Netflix series - virtual reality game

Sophon supercomputers


The Tencent series ends Book 1 bleakly but on an optimistic note. Aided by pacifist Trisolarans in the VR game, Wang and Ding discover how the invasion will happen.

The Trisolarans have been targeting Earth’s technology on the quantum level with advanced protons in order to contain and keep us primitive — shades of US objectives to contain China. With every destruction of an unfolding proton, raised from one to eleven dimensions, entire universes can be destroyed. Raised to 2 dimensions it is big enough to wrap around Trisolaris and create Wisdom One (Sophon One in the book), a supercomputer beyond mere AI.

At this juncture in the book, there’s a ton of science exposition that requires reading several times and I congratulate Three-Body for paring it down as well as they did. I can, however, picture the triumphant script-writing meeting at Netflix after bringing in their their economic explanation at under two minutes, manuscripts and champagne corks flying through the air and producers yelling, “Eff it! Science, schmience! We’ll just have terminally cancer-ridden Will’s brain shot into space to save us!”

Back to Three-Body: once Wisdom/Sophon Two, Three and Four are built, the first two are launched towards Earth at the speed of light where they will hide in the particle accelerators and deliberately give out wrong results and create false miracles like blinking stars. Wisdom Three and Four act as receivers allowing monitoring of humans in real time while the invading Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet is in transit, expected to arrive at Earth in 450 years.

And so to the end …


Wang and Ding (Yang Dong’s widower) despair drunkenly over humankind’s imminent extinction four and a half centuries hence. A terminally cancer-ridden Da Shi cheers them up with a rousing speech in a field of locusts comparing their resilience to that of bugs that survived the worst that humans have thrown at them. Individuals may die but humanity will survive. In the face of species obliteration this is about as much optimism as can be mustered under the circumstances.

Netflix Clarence takes depressed Saul and Jin to a field of cicadas where he gives a similar speech but uses cicadas for his metaphor which makes less sense as we all like cicadas, rather than locusts which no-body does and have indeed survived age-old attempts to wipe them out.

Tencent’s Ye Wenjie ends the book on a literal cliffhanger when granted a visit to the Red Coast Base camp to see her last sunset before her life sentence for crimes against humanity begins — all shot affectingly without BBC grey haze. You see, it can be done.

Like all the women in the Tencent Three-Body series, even the aging Wenjie is exquisitely beautiful, as if Chinese society is terrified of its anima being perceived as ugly or even slightly imperfect. This fear of being seen in all its variety hints at a lack of confidence, pressure to conform to rigid standards of beauty instead of letting rip with women from across their fabulous range. Women are not pioneering leaders outside pure science. They echo western stereotypes of man-pleasing lotus blossoms or mysterious dragon-lady villains. Chinese men are not similarly constrained in Three-Body as they are in the Netflix.

“You are bugs”


In the absence of Chinese males in Netflix 3 Body Problem, Clarence/Da Shi does a lot of heavy lifting but he works for the “good guys” so is allowed a rounded character. Other Chinese men, mostly seen in flashback, are rendered mysterious.

One might suspect that the only good Chinese is one working for the Western state: for the remnants of an empire currently trying to revive the worst aspects of itself and itching to wreak havoc in the spirit of Winston Churchill.

So when the San-Ti tell us Earthlings, “You are bugs” on tech screens throughout the world in different languages, I thought of Winston Churchill and what he had to say about “Red Indians,” native Australians and Palestinians.

At the Palestine Commission in 1937, Churchill said of Palestinians: ” ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’

He might as well have cut to the chase and said, “You are bugs”.

The very first words of Episode 1 are “Root out the bugs,” equating the Communist Party of China with the murderous species from Trisolaris. A crude transference of the crimes of Western imperialism onto the patsy as the Viking raiding party seeks a casus belli and gears up for war in Asia.

We are witnessing in a great crossover the anguish of the European group that has brutally dominated the world for centuries and fears that they are about to end up on the receiving end of what they dished out: as the dinner, not the diner. Of course, this is pure projection of a guilty conscience but try telling them that.

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY: Possible story directions


We now arrive at the direction the Netflix series could have taken had it been motivated by artistic excellence commenting on the world we now find ourselves in instead of plugging into the US geopolitical agenda.

It is possible for American culture to critique its own system. We’ve seen this vividly since Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, All The President’s Men, JFK and Apocalypse Now to Westworld, Fallout and many others. Netflix 3 Body goes retrograde and reinvigorates a reactionary mythologising of itself as world saviour and policeman rarely seen since the height of the Cold War.

The contrast between chaos and stability and their causes is what the Three Body Problem story is largely about. Netflix writers would have demonstrated an advanced skillset if, in transposing it to the West, they’d looked at the era of chaos we’re entering. China is emerging from a dark place and heading towards the light, while we’ve abandoned the science and fact-based Age of Enlightenment and find ourselves burrowing deeper into a dark age.

Character assassination, poison, demonisation, dehumanisation and repetition of the Big Lie until it is accepted as Truth are our stock-in-trade along with military hardware and survival of the strongest. They could have taken a long, hard look at themselves and where we are if they’d examined that instead of delusional grandstanding as a 21st century John Wayne. More like a lung-wrecked Marlboro Man.

They might have transposed the story to the west, juxtaposing the outgoing balance of the post-war liberal order (for us, that is) with the rapidly descending chaotic era characterised by wars, social meltdown, abandonment of law and principles and lashings of speaking with forked tongue. An enlightened playwright might have seized the opportunity to flag up the reverse happening in the West in late stage capitalism as we are dragged from Stability to Chaos.

We even have our own real life bodies for which the three suns of the Trisolar system are the perfect metaphor: the USA, Europe and China; the actual Three Body Problem tipping us from a long period of post-war liberal order dominance into a multipolar rebalance.

This is likely to be a long and painful birth.

Our own Three Body Problem


Kindly allow me to finish by running with my astro-political metaphor.

As the US, the great star of the geopolitical firmament, declines and recedes, it disrupts the cosmic equilibrium of the post-war liberal order in the West. (Not so much equilibrium for the colonialised regions, unfortunately.) The US enters its supernova phase.

During the final period of stability, China saves the global economy from the declining America’s Great Financial Crash of 2008, releasing the big star’s last burst of energy which it proceeds to burn up at speed in a last ditch attempt to maintain its brilliance.

Meanwhile, Europe is drawing towards China under its huge gravitational pull of 1.4b human beings, vast productive economies of scale and rapidly advancing technology.

Lighter elements in the US whose outgoing energy counters the star’s own gravity, begin to burn out and fuse to create heavier elements. These deep state elements need to either drag Europe back or nix it all together.

They resort to all sorts of dirty tricks to promote Brexit, taking a huge chunk out of Europe as the UK jumps out of the Europe frying pan and into the US fire, adding its small mass to America. The additional gravitational attraction is just enough to pull Europe from its natural flow towards China and jerk it back towards the US, where the American red sun expansion fries parts of it to a crisp.

Burning through the last of its hydrogen and helium, the oversized star rapidly fuses into heavier and heavier elements — as Brexit shock leads to Trump leads to Biden in ever deteriorating states until its outgoing energy can no longer counter its own gravity.

It falls in on itself and bounces back off the tiny metallic core in a cosmic supernova, collapsing and exploding at the same time. Nothing is left except a tiny dwarf remnant of social breakdown, civil war, debt, hate and death spinning in the black depths of space.

Now, this is the plot we actually find ourselves in. I wonder if Cixin Liu ever stands at the lip of his Red Coast Base clifftop, staring into the setting sun, and asks if the sunset for humanity isn’t already here.

Anna Chen

Kicking the tyres of the culture: arts reviews and cultural critique by Anna Chen

Three-Body on Viki: all 30 episodes with subtitles

Three-Body on Prime: to buy

3 Body Problem: all 8 episodes on Netflix

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