Summary
1. The Madness Years (China, 1967)
In Beijing, approximately one year into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Red Union (pro-Chairman Mao) is in a two-day standoff with the April Twenty-eighth Brigade. An unnamed Red Union commander watches a 15-year-old rebel emerge from the building and wave a flag on the rebels’ roof. Red Union soldiers shoot her, then use her corpse for target practice.
At Tsinghua University, a mass struggle session is underway, targeting academics. (In Beijing alone, in 40 days, over 1,700 people have been beaten to death in struggle sessions.) Many famous intellectuals have committed suicide; others either repent or become numb to the struggle sessions. Only one intellectual still gives the Red Guards any entertainment, so he’s saved for the end of the session: Ye Zhetai, a physics professor. The Red Guards—some of whom are Ye's own students—make him wear a heavy steel hat and an iron plaque around his neck with his name crossed out. The Red Guards insult him, accusing him of teaching Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is reactionary capitalist propaganda that must be overthrown.
Ye’s wife, Shao Lin, delivers a lecture against her husband and against the theory of relativity. Ye argues well, refusing to bow his head, but the young female revolutionaries whip him to death with their belts. Shao Lin, driven insane, laughs maniacally until the courtyard empties.
Only one person remains: Ye Wenjie, Ye Zhetai’s daughter. She stays with her father’s body until it’s taken away, then seeks out her friend/advisor, Professor Ruan Wen. Ruan, who studied at Cambridge and collected many European things, has suffered in struggle sessions as well—the Red Guard ransacked her home, tied high heels around her neck, and streaked lipstick across her face to show she had lived the corrupt life of a capitalist. Wenjie finds that Ruan has committed suicide by swallowing sleeping pills, wearing lipstick and high heels.
Two years later, Ye Wenjie is one of over 100,000 people in the regiments of the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps. They are part of a massive deforestation project in the Greater Khingan Mountains. War with Russia looms. These people are basically in exile, as the first people who will die if Russia does invade.
Bai Mulin, a reporter, watches Ye's company destroy a 300-year-old tree. He gives Ye a copy of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, saying he plans to write to leadership in Beijing about the irresponsible behavior of the Construction Corps, destroying the environment. He warns her to hide the book because it runs counter to the government's beliefs.
More than 40 years later, Ye muses on Silent Spring’s influence on her life, comparing the destructiveness of pesticides to that of the Cultural Revolution, from Nature’s perspective. She decided that humanity achieving a moral awakening would require a force outside the human race, and this thought determined the entire direction of her life.
Four days after receiving Silent Spring, Ye returns the book to Bai Mulin. He’s tired from working with the corps, for whom he is clearing an area around Radar Peak, a mysterious military base in the area. Bai asks her to read his letter to Beijing, and Ye transcribes it for him, avoiding personal conversation. Three weeks later, she’s summoned to company headquarters. Bai Mulin's letter has been poorly received by the Beijing higher-ups, and he blames Ye Wenjie. Bai Mulin claims she wrote the letter herself after stealing Silent Spring from him. Ye Wenjie is accused of using capitalist thought to attack socialism. She doesn't argue, knowing any struggle is useless.
Contrary to historical records publicized later, Bai Mulin didn’t intend to frame Wenjie at first—he sent his letter genuinely, then used Ye as a scapegoat when the backlash was so strong. The rest of his life is a disappointment to historians, who see him as mediocre and can't tell if he repented for framing Ye.
Ye is questioned by a friendly-seeming cadre, Cheng Lihua, who asks her to sign documents about her father’s involvement with (Ye suspects) China’s first nuclear bomb tests. It seems to be written by her sister, Wenxue, who was active in the Red Guard and whose reports contributed to his death; however, the meticulous style doesn’t match Wenxue’s radical nature. The documents would have huge political implications. Ye Wenjie refuses to sign, and Cheng pours cold water over Ye. As Ye freezes, alone in the cold Mongolian cell without a fire, she hallucinates a tall building above her, with a young girl waving a bright red banner. Wenxue (who died two years ago in a fight between Red Guard factions) morphs into Bai Mulin, then Cheng, then her mother and father. Everything blurs, then goes black.
3. Red Coast 1
Ye Wenjie wakes up on a helicopter with a high fever. She’s with two men in PLA uniform, one of whom is Yang Weining, the chief engineer of Red Coast Base—one of Ye Wenjie’s father’s former grad students. The military has taken Ye because of her specialization in theoretical astrophysics, hoping to use her for a special project. She’s taken to Radar Peak, where Yang tries to dissuade her from taking on the mystery project. She refuses to leave, and he explains that this is a large-scale weapons research project, bigger than the atomic bomb. She watches the radar fire a mysterious electric field into the night sky, scaring birds, which are killed if they fly into it. All she can see after “the transmission” is the starry night sky of 1969.
Analysis
Part I: Silent Spring is the shortest section of The Three-Body Problem, and it's grounded in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a sociopolitical movement launched by Mao Zedong. The Cultural Revolution is a real historical event, with incredibly high death tolls, and so were struggle sessions or denunciation rallies. The real Tsinghua University did indeed shut during this period, as many university students walked out of classrooms and joined the Red Guard. Ye Zhetai is fictional; however, before he's introduced, Liu Cixin provides a list of eight real scholars who, among others, chose to end their lives in the context of struggle sessions. Translator Ken Liu provides further information about these scholars in a note in the English edition. By introducing (and, in the English version, elaborating on) real scholars and events before transitioning to Ye Wenjie, Liu Cixin grounds the Ye family and the novel itself in historical realism.
Because Part I: Silent Spring is so short—and is the only part of the book actually set on Earth in a definite, real time period—it can read sort of like a preface to the rest of the text, preparing us for the "main story" centered around Wang Miao. In actuality, Ye Wenjie's time at Red Coast constitutes a large (and arguably the most important) part of the novel. Liu Cixin writes in an online interview (translated by Ken Liu) that "when this book was first published, it was the 30th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. Out of caution, I moved the section...from the beginning to the middle of the book so as to avoid too much attention." It would be a mistake to skim Part I or treat it as a brief outlier—not only is it important for the novel's grounding in reality, it was once in the middle of the text, presumably as part of Ye Wenjie's account of her life.
It can be difficult for Western readers to understand many parts of Liu Cixin's writing and philosophy—a difficulty that is not necessarily deliberately on the author's part, though in interviews he makes it clear that he perceives a large cultural barrier. One obstacle for many Western readers in this section is the assumption of knowledge. While many Western schools teach at least something about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution, many specific references in this section have to be explained in translator's notes by Ken Liu. Unless the reader is a scholar of the Cultural Revolution with a strong understanding of the Chinese sociopolitical climate of the last 20 or so years (and in that case, the reader is probably holding the Chinese version of The Three-Body Problem), their perception of this section will be colored by a Western perspective.
This cultural barrier isn't necessarily bad, as it opens a door to interrogation and discussion. For example: Does Ye Zhetai's resistance to the revolutionaries make him heroic? Almost certainly, from a Western perspective, as Western culture highly prizes resistance—but what about Ruan Wen, who kills herself wearing the symbols used against her? Is Shao Lin's mental break here, and her later behavior to stay safe, pitiable or reasonable? And are these answers supported by the text itself, or do they arise from a cultural bias toward or away from revolution, mental health, surrender, and suicide?
As a narrative, Part I: Silent Spring is essentially a "why I did it" for Ye Wenjie, providing context for her later actions. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution and her subsequent treatment by the Chinese government convince her that humanity is incapable of saving itself—an outside force is required. The catalyst of her radicalization is a real book, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, published in America in the 1960s. There might be some narrative echoes here between Ye's beliefs and the real-world reception of Silent Spring: While many critics of Silent Spring claimed that Carson was calling for the elimination of all pesticides, Carson was actually advocating for careful, responsible, thoughtful management of chemicals, keeping in mind their impact on ecosystems. Similarly, the ETO uses Ye Wenjie's actions as a signal to usher in the elimination of all humanity. However, the end of all humanity isn't Ye Wenjie's goal; she's a Redemptionist. While she has no faith in humanity's ability to save itself, she doesn't think that humanity should be eliminated entirely—just thoughtfully managed within the ecosystem.
