The Three Body Problem Summary

Today, China is the largest global manufacturing center, as well as the largest exporter of goods. It ranks in second by nominal GDP following the United States, and it was the fastest growing major economy in the world until 2015. Between the rising skyscrapers and gleaming city lights, it is hard to imagine that only fifty-years ago, a social catastrophe led to the death of millions was just about to begin. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as some called China’s “Spiritual Holocaust”, lasted for 10 years and left the entire nation in wound even till toady. The Three-body Problem is a Hugo Award winning science fiction which took place at this special period. In the novel, author Liu Cixin vividly demonstrated the destructiveness

Students around the nation quickly formed units of Red Guards and started to prosecute “authorities” such as their teachers and anyone who has an unclear background. Later, the Red Guards started to fighting against each other for supremacy. In the Three-body Problem, the story began in the second year into the revolution. The author described a brutal battle between two different Red Guard units and the death of a little girl from one side. “Her fifteen-year-old body was so soft that the bullet hardly slowed down as it passed through it and whistled in the air behind her… The Red Guards backed up some distance and began to use the impaled body for target practice.” (Liu 21). In the book, nobody from either side showed the slightest sympathy for the little girl’s death, which is a representation of the insignificance of life during the Culture Revolution. Statistic shows that by the end of the Revolution, up to one and a half million people were executed or driven to suicide, and up to twenty million people had everything they own taken away and got sent to the countryside. It was truly ten-years full of madness and

They were considered the “reactionary bourgeois academic authorities” and they were the enemies of every fraction. During that period, any association with foreign ideology was enough to get one killed. In the Three-body Problem, the main character’s father, professor Ye Zhetai was tortured to death by his students for teaching relativity in his physics intro class. One of the Red Guards said “Einstein is a reactionary academic authority… He even went to the American Imperialists and helped them build the atom bomb! To develop a revolutionary science, we must overthrow the black banner of capitalism represented by the theory of relativity” (Liu 44) during the public prosecution of professor Ye. The author showed how science was demonized and was being forcefully associated with political ideals. As stated in the Economist, “It was a time of ignorance and folly. ‘They beat her to death with their clubs,’ wrote a student about his teacher. ‘It was immensely satisfying’” (The Economist, 6). As a result, most school closed for years and the ones that remained open were only teaching Mao’s political ideals and propagandas for the Cultural