The Three Body Solution

In an almost casual mention at the end of a woolly sentence, hidden in a long and windy essay in the journal Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party namedropped a Netflix hit:

As China enters the international stage, we must stress narrative tactics… and enable Chinese stories to influence the mainstream agenda of international exchange and interaction… like the Three Body Problem … constructs a « disaster and rescue » narrative for mankind.

The sci-fi bestseller-turned Netflix-phenomenon The Three Body Problem (三体, or Santi) is celebrated as a victory in China’s great rise to power. One could almost miss it, but for the fact that no line published in Qiushi is ever casual.

Qiushi is the CCP Central Committee’s bimonthly — China’s chief publication of political theory. It claims to serve « as an important ideological and theoretical medium for guiding the work of the entire Party and the country as a whole. » Qiushi is supposed to be the vanguard’s vanguard — the intellectual forefront of the Party elite. Every phrase (including a casual-seeming reference to pop culture) performs ideological discipline, every word is an expression of power. Qiushi uses The Three Body Problem to illustrate a concept of prime strategic importance to the CCP: narrative tactics, to win narrative power.