Character Overview
Manuel Rey Diaz, President of Venezuela and one of the four Wallfacers, stands as perhaps the most controversial figure in the Wallfacer Project. A formidable strongman politician from Latin America, he was chosen for the project precisely because of his willingness to make decisions that would break lesser minds. Yet the plan he concealed behind the mask of his Wallfacer authority proved to be so extreme that it ultimately cost him everything — including his life.
Among the four Wallfacers, Rey Diaz occupied a unique position. While Taylor pursued military tactics, Hines explored mental conditioning, and Luo Ji sought cosmic sociology, Rey Diaz relied on the most primal and extreme force imaginable — pure physical annihilation. His scheme was never about defeating the Trisolaran civilization. It was about ensuring that if humanity fell, the enemy would fall with it.
Political Background: The Latin American Strongman
President of Venezuela
Before becoming a Wallfacer, Rey Diaz was already a fearsome political figure. As President of Venezuela, he embodied the tradition of Latin American strongman politics — decisive, unyielding, and never afraid of controversy. His governing style was characterized by iron-fisted authority, radical domestic reforms, and a confrontational stance against Western hegemony on the international stage.
It was precisely this hardline character and willingness to embrace extreme measures that made him a candidate for the Wallfacer Project. The United Nations and the Planetary Defense Council needed more than brilliant minds — they needed individuals capable of making decisions that ordinary people could not bear. Rey Diaz fit this criterion without question.
A Politician's Way of Thinking
Unlike the other three Wallfacers, Rey Diaz thought fundamentally like a politician. He did not pursue elegant theoretical solutions like Luo Ji, rely on technological innovation like Hines, or seek military tactical breakthroughs like Taylor. His concern was the ultimate trump card — when every other option has failed, what can humanity still do?
This mode of thinking was both his greatest strength and the root of his tragedy. Politicians are accustomed to operating at the extreme edges of power, and Rey Diaz extended that extremity to a cosmic scale.
The Wallfacer Project: Stellar-Grade Hydrogen Bombs
The Surface Plan
As a Wallfacer, Rey Diaz presented the Planetary Defense Council with a seemingly reasonable strategic proposal: develop and stockpile massive quantities of super hydrogen bombs as the core force of humanity's space defense. Using his Wallfacer privileges, he mobilized enormous resources, establishing hydrogen bomb production facilities worldwide and driving the largest nuclear weapons manufacturing program in human history.
What he requested was not ordinary nuclear weapons but "stellar-grade hydrogen bombs" — superweapons modeled on the nuclear fusion reactions inside stars, with explosive yields reaching unprecedented levels. On the surface, these bombs would be deployed at key positions throughout the solar system as the first line of defense against the Trisolaran fleet.
The plan was not entirely implausible from a military standpoint. Facing an alien fleet with technology far surpassing humanity's, constructing a "dense defense network" with massive nuclear weapons was at least an intuitively understandable strategy. Though many doubted its effectiveness, the special status of the Wallfacers discouraged excessive questioning.
The True Madness
However, the stellar-grade hydrogen bombs were never the core of Rey Diaz's actual plan. They were merely a tool — an instrument for executing his real scheme.
Rey Diaz's true plan was this: when humanity's defense line collapsed completely before the Trisolaran fleet, he would use these stellar-grade hydrogen bombs to push Mercury out of its orbit and send it plunging into the Sun.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system. Through precise calculations, Rey Diaz had concluded that if Mercury were pushed into the Sun under specific orbital conditions, the massive injection of matter would trigger a series of runaway nuclear fusion reactions within the Sun, ultimately causing a catastrophic solar eruption. The scale of this eruption would be sufficient to destroy everything within the solar system — including Earth, including human civilization, and including the invading Trisolaran fleet.
The Philosophy of Mutual Destruction
The Ultimate Trump Card
Rey Diaz's plan was essentially a "doomsday card." He was not seeking a way to defeat the Trisolaran civilization but preparing a "fallback option" for the worst outcome — if humanity was destined to perish, then the enemy would perish alongside it.
This line of thinking was not without precedent in human military history. The essence of nuclear deterrence is "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD). During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating each other, and it was precisely this terrifying equilibrium that maintained peace. What Rey Diaz did was simply extend this logic from a terrestrial scale to a solar system scale.
However, a crucial difference existed between the two. Cold War MAD was a form of deterrence — its purpose was to prevent the other side from launching a first strike. Rey Diaz's plan was never intended as deterrence, because he never planned to make it public. His scheme was a unilateral, irreversible act of destruction with no deterrent purpose.
The Outlier Among Wallfacers
The four Wallfacer plans each had different emphases, but could fundamentally be divided into two categories: plans seeking victory and plans accepting defeat. Luo Ji's Dark Forest deterrence and Hines's mental seal, from different angles, provided humanity with possibilities for survival. Taylor's ball lightning plan, though extreme, at least attempted to gain tactical advantages on the battlefield.
Only Rey Diaz's plan completely abandoned the possibility of victory. He accepted from the outset that humanity was doomed to lose, and the only question he pondered was: after defeat, how could the enemy be made to pay the highest possible price? This way of thinking was less a strategy than a form of revenge born from despair.
The Extremes of Human Nature
Rey Diaz's plan reveals an extreme facet of human nature in the face of hopelessness: when survival becomes impossible, destruction becomes a form of "victory." If one cannot live on, one can at least choose how to die — and dragging the enemy along seems to preserve some twisted form of "dignity" compared to unilateral annihilation.
This psychology is not uncommon in human history. From scorched-earth policies in ancient warfare to the kamikaze attacks of World War II, humans have always felt the impulse toward mutual destruction when cornered. Rey Diaz simply pushed this impulse to its ultimate conclusion — not destroying a city or a nation, but an entire solar system.
Exposure and Downfall
The Wall-Breaker's Revelation
Like every Wallfacer, Rey Diaz had his own Wall-Breaker — an agent dispatched by the Trisolaran world. With precise logic and irrefutable evidence, the Wall-Breaker publicly exposed Rey Diaz's true plan.
The exposure was merciless. The Wall-Breaker not only revealed Rey Diaz's computational models and orbital mechanics calculations but also clearly demonstrated the plan's ultimate effect: the complete destruction of the solar system. When the simulation of Mercury plunging into the Sun was played before the United Nations General Assembly, every person present was plunged into shock and horror.
People finally realized that the Wallfacer to whom they had granted supreme authority and entrusted humanity's fate had been secretly planning to annihilate them all.
The World's Fury
The revelation of Rey Diaz's plan triggered global outrage. His scheme meant not only humanity's destruction but also that, in his vision, all of humanity had been nothing more than expendable pieces on a chessboard from the very beginning. He had obtained power in the name of protecting humanity, then used that power to plot humanity's annihilation.
Governments worldwide swiftly revoked his Wallfacer status. Overnight, he transformed from humanity's guardian into humanity's most wanted enemy.
The Judgment of Stones
Stripped of his Wallfacer identity, Rey Diaz returned to Venezuela. But what awaited him was not legal proceedings — it was the most primitive form of mob violence. He was stoned to death by an enraged crowd.
This ending carries profound irony. A man who had commanded the power to destroy an entire solar system, a strategist who had wielded stellar-grade energy, was ultimately killed by the most primitive of weapons — stones. The oldest form of human violence terminated the most extreme plan of cosmic destruction.
Stoning is one of the most ancient methods of execution in human history, and its essence is collective violence — no single individual bears full responsibility for the death, because each stone is only a fraction of the fatal whole. Rey Diaz dying beneath a hail of stones reads like humanity's collective rejection of his insane plan — each stone a furious ballot cast against him.
Comparisons with Other Wallfacers
Four Responses to Despair
The four Wallfacer plans represent four fundamentally different human responses to despair:
- Taylor: Victory through cunning — using ball lightning to quantum-ize a fleet, creating a "ghost army." This is the military mind's approach, believing tactical innovation can compensate for power disparity.
- Rey Diaz: Mutual annihilation — if we cannot win, everyone dies together. This is the response of despair, abandoning all hope of survival and seeking only the satisfaction of revenge.
- Hines: Changing minds — using the mental seal to give human soldiers absolute conviction of victory. This is the idealist's approach, believing that spiritual force can alter reality.
- Luo Ji: Deterrence through existential threat — using the Dark Forest theory to establish a balance of terror. This is the strategist's approach, finding a leverage point that changes the rules of the game entirely.
Tragic Parallels
Among the four Wallfacers, Rey Diaz and Taylor shared the most similar fates — both were destroyed after their plans were exposed. Taylor committed suicide after his scheme was revealed; Rey Diaz was stoned to death by his own people. Their shared tragedy lies in the fact that the Wallfacer's solitude drove them toward extremes, and extreme plans, once exposed to daylight, immediately lose all legitimacy.
In stark contrast stands Luo Ji. Luo Ji's plan was equally extreme — his threat to broadcast Earth's coordinates was, in essence, the same "mutual destruction" logic. But Luo Ji's brilliance lay in transforming the threat of destruction into effective deterrence rather than mere retaliation. Had Rey Diaz made his plan public and wielded it as a deterrent against the Trisolaran civilization, his story might have ended very differently.
Literary Significance
Liu Cixin's Experiment in Human Nature
Rey Diaz is one of Liu Cixin's most extreme experiments in human nature. Through this character, Liu Cixin poses a deeply unsettling question: if a person possesses the power to destroy everything, and everything they are protecting is destined to be lost, what choice will they make?
Rey Diaz's choice is the most instinctive, the most primal — if I must die, you will not survive either. This choice is morally indefensible, yet emotionally it carries a disturbing comprehensibility. When a person is driven to the absolute edge, reason and morality are often the first defenses to crumble.
The Paradox of Power
Rey Diaz's story also exposes a deep paradox within the Wallfacer Project itself: granting virtually unchecked power to individuals in order to counter an external threat is inherently dangerous. The core premise of the Wallfacer system is trust — trust that the chosen individuals will use their power for humanity's greatest good. But Rey Diaz's case proves this trust is fragile. When a Wallfacer's understanding of "humanity's greatest good" diverges radically from that of most people, unchecked power becomes the greatest threat of all.
The Metaphor of His Death
The literary power of Rey Diaz's death derives largely from the enormous contrast between his manner of death and his plan. Stellar-grade hydrogen bombs versus stones. The destruction of a solar system versus street-level mob violence. This contrast creates a piercing irony, suggesting that no matter how advanced human technology becomes, the most primitive aspects of human nature — fear, rage, violence — are always waiting to be unleashed. Civilization is merely a thin shell, and once punctured, stones remain the final arbiter.
This also echoes one of the trilogy's core themes: technology can change the scale of civilization, but it cannot change the essence of human nature.