The Trisolarians are Japanese in the sense that they are most relatable to a Chinese audience given its historical context, but the first book was written in the early 2000s, in the wake of the worst US-China relations that followed the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Yugoslavia and the 2001 Hainan Island incident, which nearly sparked a war between both countries (people old enough will remember how close we were at war back then, not to mention that China was far weaker than it is today) only to be averted by 9/11 attack later that year, as the US shifted its attention away from China to the Middle East for the next decade, followed by the 2009 financial crisis and spared China from immediate threat for almost 20 years.

So, yes, Trisolarians can be seen as a metaphor that combines former (Japan) and current oppressors (America), although many references about the Trisolarians in the books hinted strongly at Imperial Japan. It’s fiction at the end of the day and I don’t know why people are trying so hard to see a 1:1 reference to the real world, rather than extracting the meanings and exploring the questions the story itself provokes in relation to the real world.

Books 2 and 3 went further into the Earth-Trisolaris conflict but the point I want to make is that even though the author has his own predilection (and it shows in the novel, and ones that I don’t necessarily agree with), the reason why the books are so great is that it prompts questions that provokes further, deeper thoughts, rather than just the author unloading on you his own beliefs and ideology.

I won’t spoil Book 3 here, but there is a huge plotline in that book that goes into decoding and extracting meanings from what appears to be just a typical story. The author literally hinted that there are deeper layers of meaning to be decoded in all 3 of his books.

I guess there are people who read the novels and just want to be handed the messages at face value, and people who read the novels but also try to contemplate and explore the deeper meanings especially in contemporary context.