A Denunciation Rally That Unleashed Cosmic Destruction
The very first scene of The Three-Body Problem is a Cultural Revolution denunciation rally. The physicist Ye Zhetai is dragged onto the stage to face "criticism" from Red Guards. His crime: teaching relativity and quantum mechanics in the classroom — scientific theories deemed "bourgeois idealism" under the Cultural Revolution's extreme ideology.
Ye Zhetai did not yield. "I can only tell you," he said, "that the existence of physics does not require your permission." This sentence became his death warrant. Radical Red Guards — including his own wife, Shao Lin — caught up in the frenzy of the mob, beat him to death on the stage.
In the audience, fourteen-year-old Ye Wenjie watched the entire thing.
This scene is the key to understanding the entire trilogy. It not only explains why Ye Wenjie would later make the decision that changed humanity's fate, but also provides the most visceral, most agonizing illustration of Liu Cixin's central themes — the fragility of civilization and the destructibility of reason.
How the Cultural Revolution Shaped Ye Wenjie
The Complete Collapse of Trust
The deepest wound the Cultural Revolution inflicted on Ye Wenjie was not her father's death itself, but the human nature exposed around it:
Her mother Shao Lin's betrayal. To protect herself and her political future, Shao Lin not only failed to defend her husband but actively denounced him at the rally, publicly drawing a line between them. This was the most complete betrayal by the most intimate person — a mother who sold out a father to survive.
Her sister Ye Wenxue's fanaticism. Ye Wenxue was a fervent Red Guard who sincerely believed in the righteousness of the revolution. In her eyes, their father's "reactionary scholarship" deserved punishment. Blood ties became meaningless before ideology.
The silence of colleagues and students. Ye Zhetai's colleagues and students — people who had once learned the beauty of physics in his classroom — either stayed silent or joined the chorus at the rally. Fear overwhelmed conscience; self-preservation overwhelmed justice.
These experiences led Ye Wenjie to a conclusion: humanity cannot save itself. The goodness in human nature is fragile and unreliable under extreme conditions, while the force of evil can effortlessly consume an entire society.
From the Greater Khingan to Red Coast Base
The Cultural Revolution did not stop persecuting Ye Wenjie after her father's death. As the daughter of a "counter-revolutionary," she was sent down to a Production and Construction Corps in the Greater Khingan Mountains of Inner Mongolia. There, she witnessed the frenzied deforestation of primeval forests — humanity's destruction of nature deepened her despair toward human civilization.
More importantly, during her time in the corps she read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which made her realize that humanity's destruction of its own environment was not a problem of any particular political system, but of human civilization itself.
Later, due to the contradictory combination of her questionable political reliability and her outstanding professional abilities, she was transferred to Red Coast Base. This military facility hidden deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains was originally designed to monitor extraterrestrial signals. It was here that Ye Wenjie carried out the act that changed everything: using the sun's amplification effect, she transmitted Earth's coordinates into the cosmos, and after receiving the Trisolaran warning — "Do not answer" — she replied anyway: "Come. Help us save our civilization. We cannot save ourselves."
From Personal Trauma to Cosmic Decision
Ye Wenjie's decision is the origin point of the entire Three-Body story, and the root of that decision is the Cultural Revolution. Without that denunciation rally, without her mother's betrayal, without her sister's fanaticism, without the madness of an entire society — Ye Wenjie would not have lost faith in humanity, would not have believed that only an alien civilization could save Earth.
This is one of Liu Cixin's most profound narrative designs: a nation's political catastrophe, channeled through one person's psychological trauma, ultimately triggers a civilizational crisis at cosmic scale. Between the microscopic darkness of human nature and the macroscopic darkness of the universe, there exists a direct chain of causation.
The Cultural Revolution as a Human Rehearsal of the Dark Forest
At a deeper level, the Cultural Revolution was itself a rehearsal of the Dark Forest theory within human society.
During the Cultural Revolution, trust between individuals was systematically destroyed. Anyone could be an informer; any relationship could be a trap. To protect themselves, people had to preemptively denounce others. This bears a striking resemblance to relations between civilizations in the Dark Forest — in an environment where trust cannot exist, "eliminating the other" becomes the only safe strategy.
The chain of suspicion manifested in the Cultural Revolution in its cruelest form: you did not know whether your neighbor would report you, you did not know whether your colleague was secretly gathering "evidence" against you, you did not even know whether your family members would stand against you at a critical moment. Shao Lin's denunciation of Ye Zhetai was the chain of suspicion at its most extreme within a family.
The Cultural Revolution's Deep Structural Influence on the Trilogy
The Cultural Revolution is not merely the story's starting point — its shadow runs through the entire trilogy:
Book One, The Three-Body Problem: The Cultural Revolution is directly presented as a narrative mainline. Ye Wenjie's trauma, Red Coast Base's military atmosphere, and the birth of the ETO are all rooted in Cultural Revolution soil.
Book Two, The Dark Forest: The Cultural Revolution's influence transforms into abstract philosophical propositions. The two axioms that Ye Wenjie distilled from personal experience — survival is civilization's primary need, and resources are finite — are essentially the cosmic extrapolation of human behavior witnessed during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution proved that when survival is threatened, all moral norms of human society can be discarded.
Book Three, Death's End: The Cultural Revolution's echo manifests in the character of Cheng Xin. Cheng Xin represents an idealized humanitarianism — she believes that kindness, trust, and love can transcend the cold logic of survival. But the universe repeatedly proves her wrong. This cruelty forms a perfect closed loop with the lesson Ye Wenjie learned during the Cultural Revolution: in the Dark Forest, kindness is not a virtue but a fatal weakness.
Liu Cixin's Literary Courage
Using the Cultural Revolution as the narrative starting point for a science fiction novel was a bold choice by Liu Cixin. In Chinese literature, Cultural Revolution narrative is a sensitive and weighty tradition. Liu Cixin did not shy away from the cruelty of this history — the scene of Ye Zhetai's death is written with extreme restraint yet extreme impact, and Shao Lin's betrayal is presented as a suffocating tragedy rather than a simple moral judgment.
Notably, the English translation (particularly Ken Liu's version) preserves the Cultural Revolution chapters at the beginning of the novel, while the mainland Chinese edition relocated the Cultural Revolution content to later chapters as flashbacks. This structural difference itself speaks to the sensitivity of Cultural Revolution narrative in the Chinese context.
For international readers, understanding the historical background of the Cultural Revolution is essential for understanding The Three-Body Problem. Without this history, Ye Wenjie's decision appears incomprehensible or even absurd. But when you understand the madness of that era — intellectuals persecuted, science denied, family members denouncing each other, an entire society descending into collective insanity — Ye Wenjie's despair becomes entirely understandable, even sympathetic.
A Bridge from History to the Cosmos
The Cultural Revolution's role in The Three-Body Problem far transcends that of "historical background." It is the emotional foundation, philosophical wellspring, and narrative engine of the entire work. Through this darkest chapter of human history, Liu Cixin found the most authentic and powerful anchor for his grandest cosmic narrative.
Just as Ye Wenjie distilled the axioms of cosmic sociology from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Cixin distilled an epic about the fate of the universe from China's historical trauma. This narrative leap from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the individual to the cosmic, is one of the fundamental reasons The Three-Body Problem has become a world-class science fiction classic.