3 ideas
A Chinese pilot crash-lands on Mars and watches the cat-people's nation collapse when the invading Dwarf soldiers arrive. Rival cat factions keep fighting each other instead of resisting, and the invaders exterminate them. The last two survivors, caged by the Dwarfs, bite each other to death, completing their own extinction.
Cat Country's young cycle through fashionable foreign ideologies such as 'Everybody Shareskyism'. They take up the names and rhetoric but not the underlying disciplines or institutions, so each ism only supplies new justifications for looting and killing. The lens asks whether a reform movement has changed behaviour and institutions, or has only changed vocabulary.
In Cat Country, students graduate on their first day and everyone ranks first. Teachers go unpaid, and students humiliate and even kill their teachers and principals. Once credentials are detached from learning and authority is detached from knowledge, schools become sites of status-seeking and violence, and the nation loses its capacity for renewal.