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INTERROGATOR: Do you understand Trisolaran civilization? YE WENJIE: No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages. INTERROGATOR: Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society? YE: If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards. INTERROGATOR: Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific? YE:… INTERROGATOR: Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father. YE: (sighing quietly) I don’t know.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
To colour all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture. Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to finance not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity. A significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
The agricultural economist Ronald Herring noted that the most common defence for doing the minimum possible to enforce land redistribution – as has been the case throughout south-east Asia – is that one must be realistic about the difficulty of doing more. The counter to this argument, Herring pointed out, is that ‘the political realists seem to assume, rather curiously, that it is politically realistic to leave the status quo in place’.103 In south-east Asia, the agricultural status quo has proven to have very high costs. In the Philippines, the state has repeatedly been confronted by peasant-based revolutionary and terrorist groups. In Indonesia in the 1960s, Suharto suppressed a rural-based communist movement with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. In Malaysia, the British fought a ruthless campaign in the countryside to suppress a communist insurgency in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And in Thailand, land policy failure is contributing to a state of near civil war even as this book is being written.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
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