Cixin Liu's Postscript for the American Edition for “The Three Body Problem”

By which you mean "if I were sole judge of everything happening in the world" - but you aren't, and it isn't.

> and barely anybody mentions it now.

You just mentioned it. And your comrades mention it all the time, both in the US and abroad. Scarcely any discussion involving anything political - not even having anything to do with the US, as for example this one - can pass without mentioning it. I leave it for you to judge whether "barely anybody" adequately describes yourself and your comrades.

> America is not yet 250 years old. China is 5000 years old.

Yes, and? 5000 years, and it culminated in the Cultural Revolution, where educated people were hunted down, free thought was suppressed, cultural artifacts and knowledge were forcefully destroyed, all traditional values were discarded, tens of millions of people were persecuted and many of them murdered, and country's development has been set back by decades at least. I'm sure there are a lot of things over China's 5000 years of history which one can be justifiably proud about, but these years should be source of shame, not pride. And yet, the same organization that perpetrated it still rules China, and under essentially the same ideology, only slightly tweaked.

Western news media news is designed for western audience consumption. Pointing out the suffering of people in other countries is something that people with empathy want to know about. For example, when Western media points out the suffering of Palestinians, we hear that this is because of anti-Israel bias. The reality is, most people aren't opposed to Israel, they're concerned with the suffering imposed by the occupation, and the ancillary effects on their own national interest due to regional instability. The goal of the media isn't conflict and war, it's awareness and political change. If there's a genocide happening, I want to know about it. If the US backed Saudi proxy war in Yemen is destroying huge number of lives because of American made weapons or policy, I want to know about it, and if a large US trading partner is locking people in Xinjiang and even manufacturing with slave labor, I'd rather buy my products somewhere else.

>"Take your imagined trilateral water war as an example, have you looked into how minor the supply is to India?".

Of course, have you? There are 130 million people who live in the Brahmaputra basin. And 1 billion downstream of the Hindu Kush. You don't think India is concerned about the dams going up in Kashmir and the Tibetan Plateau? "damming for electricity has little effect on total volume of flow" you're talking past damns, the concern is over future mega dams.

>"Otoh, when US dammed the Colorado the water was diverted for agriculture and urban consumption. The river basically dried up before reaching Mexico."

Yeah, and that was bad for both the environment, and for Mexico, which is exactly why people are concerned about China's activity, not just for geo-political reasons and the 1+ billion people dependent on the Tibetan plateau water supply, but the environmental damage that could result as well. Your own example shows exactly why those dependent on Tibetan and Hindu Kush supplies should be concerned about dam building, in which they have little say over.

By all means, use past US transgressions as a road map for why we should be concerned. Take Belt and Road Initiative. Sucker someone into taking a large loan, make them use the loaned money to buy from your own country's companies, and then when the debtor can't pay, seize concessions. The US played this out extremely well all over the world (see _Confessions of an Economic Hitman_ https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...), and it's being repeated: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lank...

It's because of how awful the US's policy was in doing the same thing in South America and Africa that I'm concerned now about what I see happening now, essentially neo-colonialism.

However, the real issue I sense, is that a lot of 五毛 and 玻璃心 don't want to hear any criticism, even if it's legitimate, because of elevated nationalism dialed up by Xi over the years. And it is this rising nationalism, in the US with Trump, in Europe (e.g. in Hungary), and in China that we should be worried about. We've managed to temporarily put down Trumpism here, but Xi made himself President for life, and authoritarianism combined with rising nationalism and economic power is not a good recipe, if the 20th century taught us anything.

I had a similar problem, but don't think it was a lack of character details, but rather that the dialog seems rather undifferentiated. What distinguished one character from another was only what they say, and almost never how they say it.