The chapter explains how the Earth-Trisolaris Organization grew into a powerful movement. Many members were educated elites who had lost faith in humanity, hated human civilization, or felt detached enough from their own species to betray it. Because these members held influence in politics and finance, the ETO’s strength far exceeded its numbers. Ye Wenjie served mainly as the movement’s spiritual leader and did not control its day-to-day expansion.

The ETO operated semi-openly and expanded quickly because governments dismissed it as just another extremist group. Officials underestimated both its seriousness and its reach, and the social standing of its members made authorities cautious. Only when the ETO began building armed forces did national security agencies recognize it as a real threat and begin effective attacks in the last two years.

The chapter then describes the ETO’s two main factions. The Adventists, strongly shaped by Mike Evans’s ideas, had completely despaired of human nature and wanted humanity overthrown or destroyed, regardless of what Trisolaran civilization might actually be like. Their defining belief was that even if the aliens were unknown, humanity’s corruption was already certain.

The Redemptionists emerged later and treated Trisolaran civilization with religious reverence. The Three Body game became their main recruitment and indoctrination tool, teaching players about Trisolaran history and culture and allowing the ETO to identify sympathetic recruits. Many Redemptionists hoped to save both Earth and Trisolaris by solving the three-body problem, and although their scientific efforts failed, Wei Cheng’s accidental breakthrough gave them new hope.

The Adventists and Redemptionists came into constant conflict because their goals differed sharply, and some conscientious Redemptionists helped governments uncover the ETO’s true background. Ye Wenjie tried to preserve unity, but she could not fully reconcile the factions, and both sides had armed enough to approach civil war. A third group, the Survivors, also began to appear: people who accepted the coming invasion and wanted their descendants to survive by cooperating with the Trisolarans.

In the end, the chapter presents the ETO as a movement driven by three forces: hatred of human civilization, worship of a more advanced alien civilization, and the desire to endure a future defeat. Even though the Trisolarans were still more than four light-years away and had sent only radio messages, that distant contact had already transformed human society, confirming Bill Mathers’s theory of “contact as symbol.”