Caution: SPOILERS
I was surprised to see a fair amount of criticism of the cultural revolution in Cixin Liu’s scifi novel The Three Body Problem. The novel opens with a teenage girl being gunned down from a roof and then skewered on a fence spike. Red Guard militiaman (teenagers themselves, essentially) use the girl as target practice as she slowly bleeds out on the spike. The book describes this period (60’s China) as a time of “madness.” While the book primarily takes place in an unnamed present, Three Body occasionally dips back into the past to explain the wild goings-on of the book’s conspiratorial world. Honestly, I figured you weren’t allowed to portray the cultural revolution negatively in China. That said, Cixin Liu’s book is probably one of the first Chinese novels I have ever read. Perhaps enough time has passed in China that individuals are allowed to criticize the Cultural Revolution so long as that criticism doesn’t extend upward into the modern CCP.
In one of these past interludes during the novel, classified documents relating to a Chinese attempts to communicate with aliens are revealed. The book is very technical, so these documents are presented to the reader as-is. Despite the formality, the human content of the documents is hilarious:
IV. Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations
First Draft [Complete Text]
Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. That superpower is struggling against another superpower for world domination so that it can drag human history backwards. We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution!
[Instructions from Central Leadership] 'This is utter crap! It's enough to put big character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space. The Cultural Revolution leadership should no longer have any involvement with Red Coast. Such an important message must be composed carefully.'
In the book, Red Coast is a fictional organization within China’s military whose sole task is to communicate with space using radio waves shot out of a giant antenna on top of a mountain. The chapters dealing with Red Coast Base are really interesting because they tackle basic questions about interstellar communication that I have never really considered before. If you were to try to talk to aliens via general radio broadcast… what would you send?
The message they ultimately decide on is almost ironically saccharine, but I couldn’t help but puff up with pride a bit at it:
Fourth Draft: [Complete Text]
We extend our best wishes to you, inhabitants of another world. After reading the following message, you should have a basic understanding of civilization on Earth. By dint of long toil and creativity, the human race has built a splendid civilization, blossoming with a multitude of diverse cultures. We have also begun to understand the laws governing the natural world and development of human societies. We cherish all that we have accomplished.
But our world is still flawed. Hate exists, as does prejudice and war. Because of conflicts between the forces of production and the relations of production, wealth distribution is extremely uneven, and large portions of humanity live in poverty and misery.
Human societies are working hard to resolve the difficulties and problems they face, striving to create a better future for Earth civilization. The country that sent this message is engaged in this effort. We are dedicated to building an ideal society, where the labor and value of every member of the human race are fully respected, where everyone's material and spiritual needs are fully met, so that civilization on Earth may become more perfect.
With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.
It reads kind of like a galactic declaration of independence. In hindsight, this passage is emblematic of the hope and striving inherent to the human condition, because the aliens that this message does eventually reach are the opposite of us. The alien world in Alpha Centauri is a blasted landscape orbiting within a three-sun system. The unpredictable gravity of the three body system leads to dark periods lasting centuries. The life that emerged on the alien world had to be hard beyond all measure, slowly developing technology after hundreds of cycles of civilization and apocalypse. By the time of the novel, the aliens have developed an autocratic world where individuals are allowed to live only so long as they can provide value to the civilization. There is no literature or art. Few ever get to mate. When Earth’s message reaches the alien world, the individual to receive it is overcome. Worship of Earth’s culture begins immediately. To them, Earth is a paradise with a calm 24 hour day-night cycle and beautiful weather. It really puts our struggles into perspective!
The Three Body Problem is a wonderful piece of sci-fi. It left me with a lot of questions, but I am going to finish the trilogy before I go probing for answers.