Summary
26. No One Repents
On Red Coast Base, Lei and Yang’s deaths are considered accidents; life returns to normal. After a while, Red Coast Base’s security level is lowered. Children from the area come to Ye to ask physics questions, so they can prepare for the now-reinstated National College Entrance Exam. On the eve of the Chinese New Year, 1980, Ye feels terribly alone; however, the children knock on her door, having traveled through terrible snow to bring her fermented cabbage and pork dumplings.
Ye goes into labor eight months after sending her signal toward the sun. Her labor is complex, and she enters a coma; dozens of peasants from the nearby town (Qijiatun) donate blood to help her, having heard her name from the children she tutors. Because of her health, Ye and her newborn daughter go to live with an old couple in Qijiatun (Hunter Qi and his wife). Ye’s milk doesn’t come in, so Yang Dong is breastfed by many women in the village, including Hunter Qi’s daughter, Feng. As a result, Hunter Qi’s house becomes a gathering place for all the women of the village. The men of the village also respect Ye, bringing gifts for her and Yang Dong. In this time, Ye Wenjie’s heart begins to soften toward humanity.
Ye eventually returns to Red Coast Base with Yang Dong, and after a few years, she’s politically rehabilitated—she’s allowed to teach at Tsinghua University again, and she receives money for back pay owed to her father. Her coworkers can now call her comrade. Though Ye doesn’t really want to, she leaves Red Coast Base so Yang Dong can get a good education.
After she’s been back at Tsinghua for a while, Ye takes Yang Dong to meet Ye’s mother, Shao Lin, who recovered from her mental break and managed to survive the revolution by marrying well and gambling correctly with her alignments. After a pleasant evening, Shao Lin’s new husband warns Ye coldly not to pursue anything about her father. When Ye says that’s between her and her mother, Shao Lin’s husband says this message is from her mother, whom Ye sees watching from a window. Ye takes Yang Dong and leaves, never to return.
Though Ye doesn’t want revenge, she tracks down three of the four Red Guard women who killed her dad, and she invites them to the exercise grounds where the struggle session took place. All three show up, now in their thirties, and they don’t repent. They ask who will repent to them. Their lives were terrible, straight from revolutionary fervor to dangerous, thankless farm work, where they were forgotten. Now, they can’t find jobs and have nothing, abandoned as “history.” They leave, and Ye’s small sliver of hope for humanity’s future evaporates. Her doubts about betraying humanity disappear.
27. Evans
Ye is put in charge of designing a large radio astronomy conservatory. On a potential construction site, she meets Mike Evans, who’s been planting trees in the area to save a specific kind of swallow. He shares his life story as the son of an American oil magnate. He practices Pan-Species Communism (which he invented) and believes that all species on Earth are created equal. Ye muses that if more men were like him, things might have turned out differently (implying she might not have sent the signal).
Three years pass, and Ye gets a postcard from Evans out of the blue: “Come here. Tell me how to go on.” She finds that the locals have cut down almost all of the trees in the area. Evans, meanwhile, is pruning one of the trees still standing. He’s inherited around 4.5 billion dollars after his father’s death, so he can afford to stop this deforestation, but there’s no point—unless humanity changes, species will go extinct no matter what he does. Ye tells Evans that there are powers beyond humanity, describing Trisolaris. Evans responds, “If what you told me is true, let us be comrades”—these words will one day be said by every new member of the ETO.
28. The Second Red Coast Base
After three more years of not hearing from Evans, Ye is invited to be a guest lecturer at a Western European university; however, she’s actually taken to the Second Red Coast Base, which Evans has built on an oil tanker called Judgment Day in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Evans has received a transmission from Trisolaris: They got Ye’s message and have set flight for Earth, arriving in 450 years. Evans has started the ETO to welcome Trisolaran civilization to transform humanity and save Earth. He asks Ye to be the commander-in-chief, and she agrees—the Earth-Trisolaris Movement formally begins.
29. The Earth-Trisolaris Movement
As commander in chief, Ye is a spiritual leader; she doesn’t participate in the organization’s operations or recruitment, though the ETO grows quickly. Almost all of its members are from “highly educated classes” and call themselves “an organization of spiritual nobles.” There are factions, mainly the Adventists (who have given up on human nature) and the Redemptionists (who worship Trisolaran culture and intend to help their Lord, i.e., the Trisolarans).
The game Three Body was made to recruit people for the cause—hopefully from the middle and lower classes, though that wasn’t successful, since the game was too niche. Most Redemptionists developed their appreciation for Trisolaran society through Three Body. A third faction, the Survivors, developed with the goal of human society surviving Trisolaran invasion by serving them now—this faction came from lower classes, compared to the others, and largely from the East, especially from China. The Survivors faction is growing quickly.
Though the Trisolaran Fleet is still over 400 years away, factions are coming to a head in the human world. Bill Mathers’s “contact as a symbol” theory is thus confirmed.
30. Two Protons
This chapter has two sections. In the first, an interrogator speaks to Ye Wenjie, represented as a transcript; in the second, Wang Miao and Ding Yi discuss the interview in third-person past-tense prose as usual.
During the interrogation, Ye admits that Evans lied to her, or at least misled her—she didn’t know his ultimate ideal was the destruction of the human race. She doesn’t know the content of the messages the Adventists received (and hid). She hasn’t attacked Evans or Judgment Day because they could delete those messages, which, to Redemptionists, would be like destroying the Bible. She explains how the Trisolaran Fleet works, and why it will take 400 years instead of 40 years for them to travel (see page 326 for her explanation). She also explains that six years ago, Trisolaris accelerated two hydrogen protons to the speed of light, and they arrived on earth already—they are a "lock" on human science. She doesn’t know how they work, but because of those two protons, humanity will not be able to make any scientific developments in the next 450 years.
Wang Miao and Ding Yi leave the Battle Command Center around midnight after listening to Ye’s interrogation. Using the butt of his cigarette, Ding explains that fundamental particles exist within an eleven-dimensional space-time, and that human progress all exists at a macro level. To a civilization like the Trisolarans, who can manipulate particles at a micro level (i.e., can use the other seven dimensions), a caveman’s fire and a high-tech computer are essentially the same. That’s why humanity might be just bugs to them. Ding encourages Wang to think like Wei Cheng or Shi Qiang—just do the best within your responsibility. “Let’s go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs.”
Analysis
The first chapter in this section is aptly named "No One Repents." Ye almost recovers her faith in humanity while in Qijiatun; the passage about this time ends with the observation that "something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie's heart. In the frozen tundra of her soul, a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared" (page 296). The metaphor of her soul being a frozen tundra that becomes meltwater uses natural imagery beautifully to communicate how her outlook has changed, and the rhetoric speaks to her statement about women—that they should be "like water."
However, the following passages of the chapter destroy that little pool of hope. Her mother, Shao Lin, has remarried, and through her new husband she tells Ye Wenjie that she accepts no responsibility for Ye Zhetai's death. Immediately after, Ye searches for the women who killed her father; they also refuse to repent. These interactions solidify Ye Wenjie's own refusal to repent for her actions—the chapter ends with another bit of water imagery: "The small sliver of hope for society that had emerged in her soul had evaporated like a drop of dew in the sun. Her tiny sense of doubt about her supreme act of betrayal had also disappeared without a trace" (page 302).
Shao Lin, the ex-Red Guard women, and Ye Wenjie all fail to repent in the chapter, though it seems as though all three groups should. Ye Wenjie's purpose is solidified, and any healing done in Qijiatun is undone by her mother and those women—and arguably by herself, who instigated both of those interactions—superficially looking for closure but perhaps also seeking confirmation of her beliefs.
Her next actions include meeting Mike Evans, who is arguably the human villain of the novel. (A compelling case can be made that Ye Wenjie is a larger villain, or Pan Han, but Evans's leadership of the Adventists certainly puts him in the running.) Despite Evans's importance in the story, he's only actually depicted in chapter 27 and 28, decades before the events of the frame story. His present-day actions on the Judgment Day aren't shown at all, and when he dies, we only learn about it in an offhand report. Mike Evans is more of a symbol than a character, perpetuating the plot without occupying much of the novel's attention.
An interesting detail in this section is that Dr. Ding Yi compares humanity to bugs. The Trisolarans will also connect humankind to bugs at the end of the novel, dramatically announcing You're bugs! using sophons. Perhaps Ding Yi is particularly insightful into how humans might be viewed by an advanced race. However, it seems unlikely that Trisolarans have "bugs" on their incomprehensibly different planet; it's a bit strange that they'd independently come up with You're bugs! as an insult. Perhaps the sophons—which Wang Miao and Ding Yi now know are interfering with science worldwide—are listening in this moment, and Ding Yi's comparison here inspires their final message.
