Throw rocks and then watch them bounce back.

I take keyboard in hand today to recommend a NY Times column by an ethnic China watcher, Li Yuan, about China and a current media explosion that has traveled out of China and into the world: “3 Body Problem”.  (In English. The evolution of the original Chinese title is interesting too.) It’s a television adaptation of a Chinese Sci-Fi novel – an invasion of Earth by aliens from space – by the media giant Netflix. That bare description makes it sound like just another Sci-Fi rehash of a theme that has been pulverized since H. G. Wells wrote “War of the Worlds”.

Li Yuan’s column is much more than that. It’s a view of Chinese culture written by someone with the credentials to know. Li Yuan uses the novel, and the Netflix film, as a platform to explain her penetrating ideas. The film starts with a scene of unrelenting brutality taken directly from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

From the column …

…  the Netflix series has been met with anger, sneer and suspicion in China. The reactions show how years of censorship and indoctrination have shaped the public perspectives of China’s relations with the outside world. They don’t take pride where it’s due and take offense too easily. They also take entertainment too seriously and history and politics too lightly. The years of Chinese censorship have also muted the people’s grasp of what happened in the Cultural Revolution.

All too true! Deliberate lies and distortion of history is a weapon used by dictators from the earliest recorded history.

Are you listening, MAGA people?

The blowback in the comments is even more interesting than the column. (In the NY Times moderated comments, they often are. The granola horde – nuts, fruits, and flakes — is not welcome there.) The major theme in the comments is, “Yeah! But what about you, America? Tunnel vision? You got it supersized. Brutality? From the slave pens of the South to the native American massacres of the North, there’s plenty to point to.”

Of course, Li Yuan couldn’t cover even a fraction of all that in just one column. But I’m reassured to see that NY Times readers noticed.

Maybe there is hope ……………………………….. Nahhh!