SenseTime does not just make games. It is also one of several firms involved in developing surveillance technology to help the Chinese government track and control the Uyghur population around Xinjiang, and elsewhere in China

According to the New York Times, SenseTime, along with four other companies, is the first to use to explicitly use this technology for racial profiling. As many as two million Uyghurs are currently detained in forced labour camps and re-education centres in Xinjiang.

Cixin lives in China and is a supporter of the Communist Party. He was asked about the Uyghurs in a 2019 New Yorker profile. Cixin’s defence of Chinese government policy followed the party line:

André Gide once said that every good writer ought to navigate against the current. Cixin is a great writer, but he is clearly willing — or feels obligated —  to swim with the tide. In the context of his comments to The New Yorker, his work with SenseTime comes as little surprise.

Cixin’s importance operates at two levels. There is the sheer imaginative brilliance of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy, which takes place over the course of 18 million years, and details a brutal, Hobbesian struggle between humanity and a technologically advanced alien race.

Then there is Cixin as a representative of China at this moment in its history. Just as H.G. Wells’ science fiction probed deep anxieties in Britain at at time of unprecedented scientific change, Cixin writes speculative fiction as China expands and advances as a 21st century superpower.

Wells, like many progressives in Britain at the turn of the last century, looked forward to the inevitable arrival of a  rational World State ruled by an elite caste of scientists and engineers. Cixin has no such vision. In his novels, kindness gets characters killed, idealism is a luxury, and realpolitik is the only sane approach to geopolitical conflict. Unlike Wells, who also wrote fine social comedies, Cixin’s views human beings as they interact in systems and institutions. It is a cold view.

It would be easy to draw a line from the bleak outlook of Cixin’s fiction to his decision to work for a company that is involved in what is being described as a genocide. “In a time of war”, says one of his characters, “we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Cixin doesn’t appear to have many scruples about Xinjiang.

Then again, the pressures Cixin may be under as the most celebrated writer in a totalitarian society are not known. They can be guessed at though. Consider what he wrote in the afterword to the English edition of The Three Body Problem:

H.G. Wells was not bound by ‘invisible shackles’ like Liu Cixin.