The Three-Body Problem: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

It’s 1967, the peak of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and two factions of communist revolutionaries are in a standoff. The older revolutionaries look with fear on the younger revolutionaries; the younger group is like a “pack of wolves on hot coals, crazier than crazy.” Besides, while the older fighters only have guns, the young fighters have explosives, which could be detonated at any time. A beautiful teenage girl stands on top of a building and waves a flag. Moments later, she is shot and killed. Yet the girl dies happily, believing that she is “passionately sacrificing herself for an ideal.”  

Around the same time, young revolutionary students at Tsinghua University (in Beijing) are rebelling against their teachers, whom they label as “bourgeois reactionary academic authorities.” Many of the professors have either killed themselves or abandoned their beliefs when faced with this mass humiliation and torture. But Ye Zhetai, a brilliant physics professor, refuses to bend to the demands of the Cultural Revolution. To get him to change his mind, his former students are forcing him into a “struggle session,” in which he is physically tormented while the entire student body watches.

A group of two college-aged men and four high school girls accosts Ye Zhetai with accusations. When he remains silent, the girls bring Ye Zhetai’s wife, Shao Lin, onstage. Shao has turned against her husband, and she berates him for teaching Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity because it is “anti-dialectical” and therefore against communism. While Shao humiliates him, Ye reflects on the fact that his wife has always been “too smart” to work as a theorist. Specifically, she has always been too attuned to the political implications of scientific thought. For example, in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, she began changing the names of theorems to fit the accepted political narrative.

In reality, though, Shao’s father (a wealthy, prominent scholar in pre-revolutionary China) met Einstein in person, a meeting he considered the definitive moment of his life. Rather than discussing physics, the two men talked about the starving child they encountered on their path. Later, Shao’s father would muse that “in China, any idea that dared to take flight would only crash back to the ground. The gravity of reality is too strong.”

The students at Tsinghua begin to beat Ye Zhetai with a copper belt. As they do so, Shao and her husband debate whether philosophy or experiment should guide scientific theory. Ye Zhetai believes that “truth emerges from experiences,” whereas Shao and the students argue that “it should be the correct philosophy of Marxism that guides scientific experiments.”

The girls double down on their interrogation of Ye Zhetai. As they fight over the Big Bang Theory, Ye Zhetai admits that he believes in the possibility of a god. This further inflames the revolutionaries, who believe that religion is antithetical to communism. Pushed into a frenzy, the young girls begin to attack Ye Zhetai. Within minutes, Ye  Zhetai is dead. Shao Lin begins to cackle as if she has lost her mind, while the rest of the students flee the auditorium. Only one person remains—Ye Wenjie, Ye Zhetai’s daughter.

Left alone, Ye Wenjie finds that “the thoughts she could not voice dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life.” She tries to go home, but when she does so, she only hears her mother Shao’s insane laughter. Instead, she goes to the house where her former advisor Professor Ruan lives. Like Ye Zhetai, Ruan has been tortured for her beliefs; the revolutionaries have tormented her for wearing heels and smeared lipstick across her face. When Ye Wenjie arrives at Ruan’s house, she sees that Ruan has taken her own life. She also sees that Ruan chose to wear lipstick and heels when she died.