Summary
21. Rebels of Earth
There are around 300 people at this Three Body meet-up in the cafeteria of a chemical plant. Pan Han admits to murdering Shen Yufei; it’s revealed he’s the head of the Environmental Branch of the ETO, which creates environmental problems to make the population hate science and modern industry. Pan Han is an Adventist, and he believes “the commander” is as well; he murdered Shen Yufei because she sides with the Redemptionists. The commander enters, and Wang Miao is extremely shocked to discover that the head of the Earth-Trisolaris rebels is Ye Wenjie.
Ye Wenjie questions Pan Han about shooting Shen Yufei (he claims he went to kill Wei Cheng, and Shen shot at him first, so her murder was self-defense), then asks him to repeat the plan of action. At his request, he explains the Adventist plan of action: Welcome “our Lord” to Earth, where Its power will transform humans into a perfect civilization.
Rafael from Israel stands and claims that the Adventists have their own secret agenda: the destruction of all humankind, on the belief that the human race is an unforgivably evil species. Ye Wenjie reveals that the Adventists have used the Second Red Coast Base (which they built and now operate) to communicate with “our Lord” without the ETO’s approval. Mike Evans, the mastermind behind the Adventists, ordered Wei Cheng and Shen Yufei killed, because she knew too much about the Adventists’ secret goals.
Pan Han reaches into his jacket, but a young bodyguard expertly snaps his neck. As his body is dragged away, Ye speaks to Wang Miao, telling him she’ll continue her story of Red Coast Base from last time—in this extraordinary moment, it’s a fine time to review the Organization’s history.
22. Red Coast V
After learning Red Coast Base’s true purpose, Ye Wenjie performs important research that Commander Lei passes off as his own. Solar outages are the main problem with sending/receiving messages, and though Ye tries for six months, she can’t figure out a way to reliably eliminate solar interference. She gives up but nominally continues her research so she can continue accessing resources; she works on refining her mathematical model of the sun.
While reading the Journal of Astrophysics on a break one night, she reads about radio outbursts coming from Jupiter; these outbursts line up with solar interference observed at Red Coast Base. She discovers confirmation of “energy mirrors,” or boundaries between subzones of radiation that reflect/amplify other radiation from space. (This is described in detail beginning on page 260.) Basically, the sun can amplify radio waves that are strong enough—and Red Coast’s maximum transmission power exceeds that threshold. They can use the sun as a superantenna, broadcasting radio waves to the universe.
Ye Wenjie asks Commissar Lei and Chief Yang to fire a radio beam at the sun, which the commissar rejects because of possible political backlash. Instead, Ye does it herself without authorization during a routine test in the autumn of 1971. She runs to Yang Weining’s office, where she confesses—he tells her to never do it again—and they listen for an echo to confirm her theories. Nothing. Ye, disappointed and feeling like she’s just woken up from a dream, walks to the lip of the cliff, where she eats leftovers and feels her life suffused with grayness. She doesn’t know that at that moment, the first cry from Earth is spreading across the universe at the speed of light.
23. Red Coast VI
Over the next eight years, Ye Wenjie’s life becomes peaceful, but she becomes more and more traumatized by her own experiences and by her growing understanding of humanity’s bloody history. She and Yang married four years after she entered Red Coast Base, and he truly loved her; Ye accepted out of gratitude. In the middle of a spiritual crisis, Ye observes a change in the waveform display, and she’s the first human to read a message from another world: “Do not answer!”
The response was sent by an unnamed alien pacifist who urges Earth not to send a message again—Earth's location will be discovered, and their world will be invaded and conquered. No more than nine years passed since her original message, so this civilization must be from Alpha Centauri. Over the next four hours, multiple messages come. Ye learns of Trisolaris and their plan to migrate. She hides this information, leaves her station, and warms up the transmission equipment in the main control room. She doesn’t have the authority to do this, but no one stops her. As soon as the sun rises, she broadcasts without hesitation:
Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.
She leaves the control room, then collapses on the lawn. When she wakes up, the base clinic doctor informs her she’s pregnant.
24. Rebellion
In the present, Ye Wenjie stops her story, asking Wang about his research into nanomaterial instead. The “Lord” wants humans to stop this research because it could allow humans to escape gravity and engage in space construction, making large-scale defenses. Wang asks how Yang Dong died, and Ye doesn’t answer. Soldiers armed with submachine guns enter; Da Shi, leading the armed men, tells the ETO that no law protects them, since they’ve made the entire human race their enemy.
The young woman who killed Pan Han grabs a sphere from the tri-solar model in the middle of the cafeteria, and she proclaims that it’s a nuclear detonator. Da Shi’s explosives expert confirms this, and Da Shi successfully shoots the bomb, creating an explosion but preventing a nuclear reaction. Wang is stunned; the room is full of smoke and chaos; in the end, over 200 ETO members are arrested, including Ye Wenjie. Wang and Da Shi (injured and irradiated by the explosion) joke about how they were both right—there really was someone behind all of this, but Da Shi never would have guessed aliens were involved.
25. The Deaths of Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining
This chapter is framed by an interrogation transcript between an interrogator and Ye Wenjie. The middle is a first-person story from Ye’s perspective.
Ye Wenjie gives her name, birth date, and profession to the interrogator, then admits to committing two murders on the afternoon of October 21, 1979: her husband, Base Engineer Yang Weining, and Commissar Lei, who had also received the extraterrestrial message.
Her first-person story: The same day Ye sent her message to the rising sun and learned she was pregnant, Lei calls her to his office. He also received the Trisolaran transmission, but he doesn’t know she has already replied. He says he’ll cover this up for Yang’s benefit, not hers. She understands that he's doing this so he can be the first person to discover extraterrestrial intelligence, getting his name in history books; by the time she leaves his office, she’s already decided everything. She creates a common issue that, to be fixed, requires going off the cliff’s edge for repairs; Lei often volunteers for this, and sure enough, he arrives and begins fixing the problem. However, before she can cut the rope and kill him, her husband arrives and insists on going down with Lei. She insists that he use another rope, but while she’s preparing it, Yang goes down on Lei’s rope. She knows she’ll never get another chance to kill Lei; she pulls out her hacksaw and cuts the rope. Both men fall to their deaths.
The interrogator asks, off record (but written as if recorded), how she felt. Ye Wenjie says she felt calm and didn’t feel anything—she’d finally found a goal to which she could devote herself. The interrogator asks her to review the record and sign if there are no errors.
Analysis
Part III starts off with all the physical action delayed by Part II. These first few chapters contain a wealth of information, but narratively the section is quite straightforward: At a Three Body meet-up, Ye Wenjie is revealed to be the spiritual leader of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, and the meeting is interrupted by the police, leading to over 200 arrests and Ye Wenjie's confession of murder. So much of Ye Wenjie is exposed in this section—her role; her crimes against individual humans and against humanity; her psyche and trauma—and almost none of it meshes with Wang Miao's vision of her as the comfortable, calm, caring older woman who gave him ginseng.
In 1979, Ye Wenjie contacts Trisolaris and murders her boss and husband, who she already knows is the father of her unborn child. Either crime on its own would be extreme enough to create an interesting story, but she does both in quick succession. She says she both felt calm and didn't feel anything. This contrasts with her feeling earlier in her story that her life is suffused with grayness, which will later be put into even sharper contrast by her warm time in the village of Qijiatun.
Ye Wenjie's story has a lot of "what if"s: what if she hadn't been sent to the deforestation camp? What if she hadn't bumped into Bai Mulin, or Mike Evans? What if she hadn't been sitting in that particular seat when the Trisolaran message came in? Many critics of literature would say that coincidence is a weak reason for something to happen in a story, but Ye Wenjie's story does seem full of coincidences (and not spooky sophon-created ones; real coincidences). There could be a few justifications for just how "lucky" she seems to be. Maybe Liu Cixin cares more about the story of Trisolaris and Earth than about this character having a "believable" life. Maybe we're meant to think that multiple people could have been in that chair and made the same choice after the Cultural Revolution, and that Ye is not unique; it's not luck but an inevitability that all of this happened. Maybe we're meant to believe she actually is lucky (in an extremely unlucky way).
Other events of the section include solving the mystery of Shen Yufei's murder, and the subsequent murder of Pan Han. There is some parallel here with the start of the novel. The young Red Guard women who beat Ye's father to death, following fanatical beliefs, resonate with the young woman who kills Pan Han at Ye Wenjie's command. Their manner is different, though: where the Red Guard women were taunting and cruel, Ye's young woman kills Pan Han efficiently, before he can even draw his gun.
Wang Miao and Shi Qiang have, in some ways, solved the mystery of the novel: They've found the villains and gotten an answer; they've uncovered an alien invasion, diverted a nuclear reaction, and arrested a huge number of ETO members. This victory is celebrated with a moment of levity between the two men, as they joke together in the aftermath: both of them were right, in the end, about the ways of the world. Their opposing opinions on life can coexist, and even work well together.
