You’ve never heard of China’s greatest science fiction novel

A moment came in 2011. On July 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The incident shocked the nation by seeming to reveal the costs of China’s rapid pace of development. A prominent article captured this mood, and its headline became a rallying cry: “China, slow down, wait for your people.” The prose reads almost like a prayer: “China, please stop your flight, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience!”

Ma and other Industrial Party voices responded with a counterattack. They said that the solution did not lie in slowing down, but in redoubling efforts, that is, learning from mistakes and moving forward during the difficult phase when new technologies were still being perfected. It was the key to their campaign Lingao itself. Her writing became a phenomenon across Chinese Internet forums in the 2000s: its open source ethos and collaborative methods were greatly admired by China’s thriving technology community. In addition to regular meetings between key stakeholders, LingaoThe creation of “keyboarding” has fostered the formation of “keyboard politics” in China, online communities where users engage in fierce debates about governance, politics, and national orientation under the protection of pseudonyms. These conversations became a springboard for political arguments that could happen nowhere else, as amateur political experts, military enthusiasts, and armchair strategists honed their worldviews. In 2012, the nationalist commentary site Guansha (think of it as China’s Breitbart) was founded, and its complex intertwining with industrial party thought and civil servant networks demonstrated the extent to which LingaoHis influence extended far beyond mere time travel fiction.

Eventually, the ideology of the Industrial Party became purely Darwinian. What is even more important is the power that flows from industrial capacity. This contributes to what scholars refer to as the party’s “aesthetic.” “These people view industrialization as the highest form of beauty,” Fred Gao, a Beijing-based journalist with the Industrial Party who worked briefly in Guansha, told me. “Building things from nothing — that’s their romanticism.”

Of course, the nationalist technological drive transcends borders. “Elon Musk is the ultimate figure of the industrial party,” Zhao said. Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars, his impatience with regulation, his worship of engineering solutions, and his conviction that making physical things matter more than anything else — “his aesthetic resonates strongly with China’s Industrial Party,” Gao said. What is different is simply the political system that guides it.

Almost no one, including you I can finish all the chapters of the book Lingao (Not to mention over 1,400 derivative works.) It’s not just that it’s too long. It is very painful to read. The novel’s language and narrative structure are strongly anti-literary. To write beautifully would be bourgeoisThe Industrial Party seems to think so. Technical descriptions veer into self-indulgence, an uncomfortable disregard for readers without STEM backgrounds.

The book asks questions such as: How do you solve energy problems when you can’t drill for oil? How to start mechanization without machine tools to make machine tools? How do you produce nitric acid when you’re literally starting from dirt? From Chapter 22, in which 500 time travelers plan their journey to colonize Lingao County in Hainan (the South Island of China):