"Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay."
"It's the plot of The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明), a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. It now totals millions of words. It has never been translated into English. Almost no one in the West knows it exists. But I would argue-somewhat less strictly speaking-that the events of the book did happen."
Ma Qianzhu, an engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, and more than 500 peers travel through a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty to spark an industrial revolution and secure China's future. The Morning Star of Lingao is a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel totaling millions of words and circulating on the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. The novel imagines modern knowledge applied to a preindustrial China suffering foreign invasion and internal decay. The Ming Dynasty symbolizes a painful national decline and the 'Great Divergence.' Joseph Needham's question about why modern science developed in Europe but not China has haunted Chinese intellectual life.
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