"The mountains were one of the most impoverished areas in the country. But worse than the poverty was the apathy of the people toward their own condition."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible... The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible"

"War is economics"

"We're beyond the time that knowledge can explain everything"

"The truth of the situation had still not been disclosed, leading to this kind of coordination issue"

"Once the secrets are out, the province's entire economy and political structure will be dead in the water! And we don't know, and have no way of predicting, what even worse consequ might arise from so large scale and severe a disturbance...we progressed along the road if history to today because of balance, arising from the happy medium between various elements. To abandon balance and seek an extreme is a sign of immaturity in politics". 

"Imagine if DNA never made mistakes, always replicating and inherting with perfect fidelity. What would life on Earth become?... life would no longger exist on Earth. The basis for the evolution of life is mutation, caused by mistakes in DNA...Society is the same way. It's evolution and vitality is rooted in the myriad urges and desires departing from the morality laid out by the majority. A fish can't live in perfectly clear water. A society where no one ever makes mistakes in ethics is, in reality, dead."

"We both take advantage of ordinary objects in our world to enlarge and extend our abilities."

"You've got it backward, Papa. If everyone were like us and spent all their life on exploring the universe, they'd understand its beauty, the beauty that lies behind its vastness and depth. And someone who truly understood that beauty of space and nature would never go to war."

"Art is the only reason for a civilisation to exist...fuck that I have plenty of reasons to go on".

"For the forseeable future, humanity's existence would be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, at least existence was possible. Most people felt content with that. Indeed, the Ring of Ice Era made humanity learn contentment."

"Li Bai saw nature like you see the girls down by the riverside. But in technolgoy's eyes, nature is its components, perfectly arrayed and dripping blood on a white cloth. Therefore technology is antithetical to poetry."

"That Li Bai's race had preserved their individual existences also somewhat explained their extraordinary ability to grasp art."

"The hierachy of meat protein reinforces and hierachy of race, class, and sex."

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he had always thought the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." - Isaac Bashevus Singer, Enemies: A love story

"The men...were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat." - Alice Walker, The Temple of my familiar.

"The absent referent, because of its absence, prevents us from experiencing connections between oppressed groups. Cultural images of butchering and sexual violence are so interpenetrated that animals act as the absent referent in radiacal feminist discourse. In this sense radical feminist theory participates in the same set of representational structures it seeks to expose. We uphold the patriachial structure of absent referents, appropriating the experience of animals to interpret our own violations."

"Despite this dependence on the imagery of butchering, radical feminist discourse has failed to integrate the literal oppression of animals into our analysis of patriachal culture or to acknowledge the strong historical alliance between feminism and vegetarianism. Whereas women may feel like pieces of meat, and be treated like pieces of meat - emotionally butchered and physically battered - animals actually are made into pieces of meat."

"The institution of butchering is unique to human beings. All carnivore animals kill and consume their prey themselves. They see and hear their victims before they eat them. The is no absent referent, only a dead one... We have no bodily agency for killing and dismembering the animals we eat; we require implements... Without implemental violence human beings could not eat meat. Violence is central to the act of slaughtering."

"Those who are againist facism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of the barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf" - Bertolt Brecht, Writing the truth: Five difficulties

"Metaphoric borrowing that depends upon violation yet fails to protest the originating violence does not acknowledge interlocking oppressions. Our goal is to resist the violence that separate matter from spirit, to eliminate the structure that reates absent referents."

"Vegetarians face the problem of making their meanings understood within a dominant culture that accepts the legitimacy of meat eating...The theory of dominance-mutedness explains why vegetarians are not heard by the dominant culture...muted groups must mediate their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structures".

"Vegetarianism does more than rebuke a meat-eating society; it rebukes a patriarchal society, since as we have seen meat eating is associated with male power. Colonialist British (male) Beefeaters are not viewed positively if you do not approve of eating beef, male control, or colonialism."

"Humanity is thus a a symbiotically evolving , globally interconnected, technologically enhanced microbial system." - Margulis

"Ecologists should not waste their time telling the rich to share".

"The real abstraction is the social basis of capitalist implicatory denial: the seemingly evidence-proof conviction of capitalist states that capitalogenic climate change can be remedied by means, and according to systems, that guarantee it's perpetuation."

"All realistic solutions, define by capitalist realism, are inadequate. All adequate solutions, defined by the exigency of the crisis, are unrealistic."

Ideas that are deemed... "Unrealistic, is an indication of how much would have to be achieved,and how quickly consent gained for radical new ideas, coalitions assembled, tactics innovated, the unthinkable realised."

"It is, unfortunately, not impossible for distinctly fascist solutions to climate change to be imposed, along despotic and ultimately genocidal lines. The mise-anthropo-scene presents ample opportunities for various lines of racist, patriachal and militarist policy to be represented as mitigatory, or adaptive - and, from within the predicates of fascism, such policies would in fact be mitigatious and adaptations. The very aspects of ecological disaster which throw capitalism into crisis, and which indicate the need for social mobilisation tantamount to war, are just those which could give rise to a far-right climate leviathan, whith the military organising what the bourgeoisie cannot."

"Pity would be no more. If we did not make somebody poor" - William Blake

"Like most geoengineering proposals, their possible and possible irreversible effects of regional life and remote weather systems are poorly understood, and yet they are vaunted with astonishingly little cognisance of what that means."

"The onrush of catastophe does have a temporality of its own... It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight." - Andreas Malm

"The language of 'sustainable development' Gareth Dale points out, has become the language of sustained capitalist growth. It has become the language of implicatory denial. Capitalist states proclaiming the objective of 'zero net emissions' while their means entail the massive expansion of emissions. 'Green economies expanding airports and extending motorways. The unsinkable rubber duck of 'green capitalism'."

"The majority of carbon emissions in the entire history of humanity, as David Wallace-Wells starkly reports, have been produced since the Earth Summit in 1992."

"The pivot of imperialism today is not direct political control of territory. It is rather a global, liberal, properly rights regime, policed by everyone from the US Trade Representative to the European Commission, backed by the power of the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, supported by capitalist classes from Paris to Beijing and secured by violence 'in the last instance'.

"Of course it is always and only profit that will be prioritised."

"According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) 30 percent of cereals grown for human and animal consumption are wasted, along with almost half of all root crops, fruits and vegetables. To conclude from this grotesque squander that a 'more efficient' capitalism would 'solve the problem' of 'the environment' would be to fail to understand wate, capitalism and ecology: that the first is intrinsic to the second; that the second whatever the degree to which it is inflected by the first, in imicable to the third." (Jeven's paradox is also relevant here).

"In May of 2020, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere het 417 parts per million, the highest ever recorded - and the first breach of 400ppm since the Pliocene."

"To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness" - Ursula K. le Guin

• The setting is back in Beijing
• Interesting commentary on the effects of capitalism and globalisation on the local residents e.g., displacement in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, and widening wealth inequality. 
• Li and Margaret are finally trying to commit to each other, there are much less petty, unecessary conflicts. 
• Clear call out on racist behaviours and the difficulties in inter-racial/cultural partnerships being accepted

• The murder conspiracy plot was much less prominent than in other books in this series. It wasn't until the 80% mark that we made any real progress with this subplot and started to tie different threads together. There was significantly less autopsy/medical content than previously, despite it still being relevant to the storyline.
• The murder conspiracy plot also wasn't as interesting in my opinion as previous storylines. It also loses some of twist/'oomph' by recycling
  another genetics story. This brings the count up to 3 (1 with the rice, 2 with the flu virus, now 3 with the endogenous hormone production for athletes)
• XinXin was just sort of dropped out of the picture. Like many characters before her, if not directly relevant to Li and Margaret right now, then we don't really hear anything about what happened to them and how they're doing.

• “It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born in it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it” 
• Classism - The elites, the generational and class differences i.e. who becomes a 'defender', the others, the help (forced labour) etc.
• Acknowledgement that so much about survival as a refugee is about luck.
• Changing allegiances/solidarity to different groups you are part of and feeling of betrayal - from your family, your coutnrymen, your colleagues. All explored in a nuanced way.
• Military mindset (my sister is currently in the British Army, the culture described in the book is spot on, and frankly, depressing.)

"It's a character driven story, so there isn't a huge amount of world building beyond life on the wall, but that is described in bone-chilling detail. A rare visit home highlights the gulf between Joseph's generation and that of his parents - they had it all and their children are paying the price.

It lacked the bite and viscerality of human suffering that would make a compelling story. The deaths are quick, almost bloodless, and the main characters face none of the privitation of a world wracked by drought and famine (apart from at the very end). They live in a controlled world surrounded by giant sea walls that they must serve two years of duty defending. Despite the suggestion of an elite upper class living in luxury as something the main character aspired to, he essentially was living a well provided for life with plentiful food, shelter and friends. The wall amounted to a period of military service.