Oh FFS I spent much of the past two months engrossed in Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem trilogy and emerge only to find an eminent Harvard historian mangling one of its main ideas into pop-psych punditry about "how Xi's China thinks". Short thread (warning: some plot spoilers)...

Niall Ferguson's contention is that Dark Forest, the second part of Liu's trilogy, has given him more insight than any other book into how China views America & the world today.

Never mind that it's sci-fi written more than a decade ago by a writer who says he does not like drawing connections between his books and the real world. Let's humour Ferguson and have a closer look.

Taken entirely out of context, the "cosmic sociology" in Dark Forest is indeed scary. The basic conclusion is that civilizations must destroy any others that they discover, however distant, before they are destroyed themselves.

But Earth civilisation (ie, humanity, which, in Liu's writing, is largely represented by Chinese people) is horrified by this grim theory, and continuously tries to find a way around it, as chronicled extensively in the third and final book.

Deterrence is a basic, if flawed, approach (like cosmic mutually assured destruction). Much effort is also devoted to the question of whether it's possible to send out a message of peace to others. Ultimately, the best but fraught solution is to hide from other civilizations.

If you really want to say this is how China thinks, it looks like a metaphor for its long-professed, oft-violated, principle of non-interference, not Ferguson's "intergalactic Darwinism". But I wouldn't want to stretch escapist sci-fi into a parable about Chinese grand strategy.

Also, one more bone to pick: to build up his argument that Liu's writing offers insight into high-level Chinese thinking, Ferguson says that Wang Huning, a key figure in shaping Xi's thinking, has endorsed Liu Cixin as a face of "21st-century Chinese creativity".

But the only linkage I can find is that Wang delivered an opening greeting at a three-day conference in 2018, at which Liu sat on one of the panels.

As for a political leader who has actually endorsed Three-Body Problem as a great -- and escapist -- read? Try Barack Obama. ///