Event Description
Operation Guzheng was the decisive military action against the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO). The ETO's core members and communication equipment were concentrated aboard a large oil tanker named Judgment Day, which regularly transited the Panama Canal. To seize the vessel without destroying the critical intelligence it carried, conventional military strikes were ruled out — missiles or artillery would destroy the invaluable communication data.
Physicist Wang Miao proposed a bold plan: using nanowire filaments made from nanotechnology he helped develop, stretched across the canal, to slice the Judgment Day into multiple complete cross-sections as it passed through. These nanowire filaments had an extremely small diameter, nearly invisible to the naked eye, yet possessed sufficient strength to cut through any known material. The operation was codenamed "Guzheng" (Chinese zither) because the parallel filaments resembled the strings of that instrument.
On the day of the operation, the Judgment Day sailed into the canal along its scheduled route. The nanowire filaments sliced the entire massive vessel and everyone aboard into thin sections in an instant. The ETO's top leadership, including Mike Evans, were all killed in the operation. More critically, although the hard drives and communication equipment aboard were cut through, most of the data remained intact. The recovered Trisolaran communication records became humanity's most important intelligence source for understanding the enemy.